Mos Def’s “Hip Hop” and Jose B. Gonzalez’s “Elvis in the Inner City” are very similar even though the timeframes are different. It shows that circumstances of life don’t change as much as we think. Each character turned to music to get away from their own lives. Music was an escape.
Mose Def’s “Hip Hop” works as a song and as a poem. He is telling the world through his words what it was like growing up as a black man. “Speech is my hammer, bang the world into shape, now let it fall….(Hungh!!) (5). He talks about being restless, can’t sit still to finish his words. Growing up in Brooklyn, standing on the street corners, he started rapping. He spoke the “King’s English, but caught a rash on my lips” (23). It was easier to express
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himself using slang. The line “We went from picking cotton, to chain-gang line chopping / To be-bopping, to hip-hopping” (30-31), says it all. Black people sang in the cotton fields and on the chain gangs to help pass the time. Which is exactly what he was talking about on the street corner, hip-hop was something to pass the time but in time it became much bigger. “I’m getting big props with this thing called hip hop / Where you can either get paid or get shot” (35-36). After his music started dropping on the charts friends stopped calling. Hard times hit and “Hip hop went from selling crack to smoking it / Medicine for loneliness” (54-55). Out on the streets the “b-boys” (56) were dancing for money and selling crack. Most of them carried guns. He discovers that hip hop can’t save him from being black. “Hip hop will simply amaze you / Praise you, pay you / Do whatever you say do, but Black, it can’t save you” (62-64). Jose B.
Gonzalez’s “Elvis in the Inner City” is about a different time frame. It was during the 70’s and he is probably Latino. The character identified with Elvis Presley. “I was Elvis in the 70’s, / Not swinging hips, not wearing suede shoes, but just the same, / In Canvas Chuck Taylors with my own svelte moves” (1-3). He had his high tops and his own dance moves while listening to some of the first hip-hop and rap artists. “Kurtis Blow, the Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash” (5) and some other rappers. He mentions his parents listening to “Lawrence Welk’s / Instrumentals were stuff of old country boleros” (9-10). On the other side of town white kids were listening to totally different music. “Van Morrison, / Jim Morrison, and Van Halen” (13-14). If the words were not about him and his lifestyle he couldn’t listen to it. He identified with a certain type of lifestyle living in the city. “Boom boxes, size of refrigerators, walked up and / Down projects giving concerts for free” (18-19). He would rap for anyone that would listen. He never got paid to rap, he did it for free, he was into the music and the words. As he was reciting he realized where he was. “A lone white square on a checkerboard. Reciting amidst Blacks of the block”. Suddenly, he couldn’t rap; his mouth didn’t work and he did not want to use any offensive words. He could not say anything, he had nothing. He “stuttered, strutted, struggled, to find someone who would rhyme
with me”. Both characters grew up in the same type of situations, living in a poor area of the city, nothing to look forward to so hip hop was all they had. One was fortunate to make a living at it at least for a while and the other did it for free because he was so in to the music. One character was Black and one was Latino but they had a lot in common. They were similar in how the music made them feel, they could get away from their existence and just feel the music and forget about how things really were.
It was used to express the feelings of a certain group towards another. Hip-Hop is spontaneous in that the music was free style. Artist would take up to the stage and start describing a thing of interest. The thing of interest in most cases was a bad thing being perpetrated by the other gang they are competing. They would use that opportunity to rant against and offer remedial measures. At the end of the day they would decide on who had worn the competition. The Hip-Hop culture also used drawings to spread message that was appropriate to accompany their music. Lastly, Hip-Hop has grown into a multi-billion industry that the black community took with lots of seriousness as a means of
Upon further analysis of both videos, I agree with Riley’s observation. The Beatles were more influenced by Buddy Holly rather than Elvis, based on a comparison of the Beatles overall product (i.e. song, video, and dance motions) and the videos presented of each in the prompt. The two singers differ in appearance, physicality, musicality, source of music, and in how each served as inspiration to the Beatles.
Hip-Hop became characterized by an aggressive tone marked by graphic descriptions of the harshness and diversity of inner-city life. Primarily a medium of popular entertainment, hip-hop also conveys the more serious voices of youth in the black community. Though the approaches of rappers became more varied in the latter half of the 1980s, message hip-hop remained a viable form for addressing the problems faced by the black community and means to solve those problems. The voices of "message" hip...
When looking at the landscape of Hip-Hop among African Americans, from the spawn of gangsta rap in the mid 1980s to current day, masculinity and an idea of hardness is central to their image and performance. Stereotypical to Black masculinity, the idea of a strong Black male - one who keeps it real, and is defiant to the point of violence - is prevalent in the genre. This resistant, or even compensatory masculinity, encompasses: the hyper masculinity rife in the Western world, misogyny, and homophobia, all noticeable in their lyrics, which is in part a result of their containment within the Black community. The link of masculinity and rap music was established due to this containment, early innovators remaking public spaces in their segregated neighbourhoods. A notion of authentic masculinity arose from the resistant nature of the genre, but the move to the mainstream in the 90s created a contradiction to their very image - resistance. Ultimately, this in part led to the construction of the masculinity defined earlier, one that prides itself on its authenticity. I’ll be exploring how gender is constructed and performed in Hip Hop, beginning with a historical framework, with the caveat of showing that differing masculine identities in the genre, including artists
George covers much familiar ground: how B-beats became hip hop; how technology changed popular music, which helped to create new technologies; how professional basketball was influenced by hip hop styles; how gangsta rap emerged out of the crack epidemic of the 1980s; how many elements of hip hop culture managed to celebrate, and/or condemn black-on-black violence; how that black-on-black violence was somewhat encouraged by white people scheming on black males to show their foolishness, which often created a huge mess; and finally, how hip hop used and continues to use its art to express black frustration and ambition to blacks while, at the same time, refering that frustration and ambition to millions of whites.
It was the first time I had ever been to a party. I had just graduated high school, and did not have nor ever did have any sort of interest in going to a party. One of my fellow classmates had invited me to her party on the night of graduation, and I decided why not? I was told growing up that I would never have contact with most of my classmates after graduation ever again, so I wanted to have one last fun moment with the graduating class of 2013. I arrived at my classmate’s house around nine, and immediately was overwhelmed by the makeshift dance floor in the backyard, the loud, unfamiliar music, and the disco lights. Growing up, I had never been introduced to rap music, so I did not enjoy it as much as my fellow classmates did. It did not take long for the party to get started. Boys and girls alike started to make their way to the makeshift dance floor, immediately dancing on one another. I was absolutely taken away as girls that I had known for four years bent over and began to press their backsides up against boys, grinding on the boys as if it were an everyday activity as degrading music blared out of the speakers, as if they were not aware of the actual lyrics of the song. I was not sure what made me feel sicker to my stomach: the way the girls moved their behinds in ways that I found impossible, which I later learned was called ‘twerking’, or the misogynistic rap music that my classmates danced to. I have not been to a party since then, and I do not think I ever will go to one again. It did not take me long to understand why my parents never let me listen to rap music before: it is this misogynistic, or a hatred towards women, type of music. Rap music clearly portrays women in several, negative ways, such as re...
Music is one of the most powerful and influential language which to many people in
Hip hop is both a culture and a lifestyle. As a musical genre it is characterized by its hard hitting beats and rhythms and expressive spoken word lyrics that address topics ranging from economic disparity and inequality, to gun violence and gang affiliated activity. Though the genre emerged with greater popularity in the 1970’s, the musical elements involved and utilized have been around for many years. In this paper, we will cover the history and
Rhodes, Henry A. “The Evolution of Rap Music in the United States.” Yale New Haven
Rap is about giving voice to a black community otherwise underrepresented, if not silent, in the mass media. It has always been and remains … directly connected to the streets from which it came. (144)
Rap is regional, much like dialects. Different parts of the nation live in different manners. Every regional has its own story to tell, so in rap a song should tell the story of its region. Whenever a group of people is locked within the margins of American social discourse, that community may find it necessary to scream or chant or rap to be heard. It should come as no surprise, then, that alienation serves to be the medium for counter-cultural movements. Discontentment is only the beginning. Each region should have its on flare, its on personality.
Hip hop has multiple branches of style and is a culture of these. This essay will examine Hip Hop from the point of view of the following three popular music scholars, Johnson, Jeffries and Smitherman. It will delve deeper into their understanding of what hip hop is and its relation to the different people that identify with its message and contents. It will also identify the history of Hip hop and its transition into popular music. In particular this essay will focus on what hip hop represents in the black community and how it can be used as a social movement against inequalities faced by them. This will then open up the discussion for the how this has influenced society, and the impact it has had in terms of race issues which hip hop itself often represents through music.
Throughout American history there has always been some form of verbal acrobatics or jousting involving rhymes within the Afro-American community. Signifying, testifying, shining of the Titanic, the Dozens, school yard rhymes, prison ?jail house? rhymes and double Dutch jump rope rhymes, are some of the names and ways that various forms of raps have manifested. Modern day rap music finds its immediate roots in the toasting and dub talk over elements of reggae music (George, 1998)....
Hip Hop and Rap music from the latest decades indicated slavery as well as the emancipation with the purpose of making people conscious about the similarities in the American society between the past and the present. Slavery contributed in the creation and the advancement of Rap music.
Hip- hop is a standout amongst the most compelling musical sorts on the globe. There are rappers everywhere that know what amount of an impact their music can have. Some entertainers attempt to utilize that force of impact to do great (Ruiz INT).