How Did Rap Culture Affected By Rap Music?

Some questions we kept in mind while researching this topic are as followed:
Our research topic mentions “an urban black identity.” What exactly does this mean?
What is rap? How is this different from/similar to hip hop?
How did rap music come about? When?
How has its influence changed over time?
Why is it a bad/good thing that rap is being adopted by non-black groups?
Why do non-black groups (specifically white people) see rap culture as fashionable, trendy, and cool, all while being racially sensitive?
While reading the articles we chose to include in our references list, we thought of additional questions that we would like to explore the answers to in our next round of research. For example, Ice-T’s lyrics in “Cop Killer” received public

outcry because it advocated killing police (Lucas, et al, 177). When Ice-T talked on The College of New Jersey about his career, he made sure that students knew that he was one of the first people to make the hip hop industry big. An audience member asked him who he thought were some of today’s best rappers, and Ice-T laughed before giving the answers of Eminem and Kendrick Lamar. This reaction of one of the creators of the hip hop genre laughing at the rap industry today makes us question, “What do the rappers that started the hip hop industry think of today’s rappers?” As several of the articles we researched stated, hip hop and how it is perceived by the larger society is constantly changing. It would be interesting to see not only how the industry has changed thus far, but research how people project its influence in the future. Other questions we hope to further research include:
How can we make hip hop more “understood?” (As was suggested from Low’s classroom experiment.) Or, rather, how can we make people more understanding of hip hop?
Does rap have more of a negative/positive effect on people? Are there statistics that prove this?
Who has a say in determining what the effects are? (ex. police, politicians, whites, etc.)
These last two questions were thought of after reading the Lucas, Hough, and Fisher article. While they explain who has an effect on the sales of hip hop, we would like to look further into who actually decides the stereotypes of hip hop -- we are going to guess these beliefs of hip hop being “dangerous” stem from the belief that black people are dangerous.