Essay On Hip Hop

Hip-hop was a cultural movement. It emerged in the early 1970s from the South Bronx. Hip-hop came from the “ghetto” and it became a cultural force of social protest and creativity. But from the 1990s and onward hip-hop changed from a cultural creative production to one of mass consumption. Hip-hop began to grow and through mass marketing targeting larger and whiter audiences hip-hop evolved in to relying on the images of crime and sex. Hip-hop has changed from a tool of social change to cars, women, and drugs. There is a gap between the civil rights movement and the newer hip-hop generation. This is not to say that there are not artists in the hip-hop community that talk about things that need to change such as racism, exploitation of the poor, police brutality, and the lack of education for the black and the poor. But the mainstream music on the radio is mostly about female body parts shaking and grinding, having sex, getting really drunk, high, and/or violent. It is not entirely the fault of hip-hop artists there are people who do not know Malcom X, Susan B. Anthony, or Thurgood Marshall but most people will know overrated artists with trash lyrics such as Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Soulja Boy, and 2 Chainz.What once was a helpful tool for creating social change is now hurtful. Hip-hop has created a lot of powerful African Americans with a lot of money and influence but it has ceased to have its power reflect and reveal social awareness to inspire culture change because not many rap about the need for change. By exploring the change of hip-hop from the civil rights movement to the modern day hip-hop this paper will attempt to show that hip-hop has been grown from a powerful tool of social awareness in to a monster of mass consumpt...

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...behavior and stronger feelings of inequity. This study also looked at the race of the listeners. Black and white subgroups identified with resistance representations while Asians did not. This article shows that rap is popular among diverse groups of young people but still the majority are black students. The thing that the white, black, and Asian students who identified with hip-hop had in common was that felt that they had a lack of cultural capital and were not doing so well in school. They found that whites and Asians who listened to hip-hop were more violent. The black youth did not fit this pattern; liking hip-hop was not a predictive factor for crime. For black youth, the appreciation for rap music are more associated with feelings of social injustice as well as having a lower cultural capital. This study will help to show how hip-hop influences other races.