Rap

13 Pages 3162 Words

ny youth in America today are considered part of the rap subculture because they share a common love for a type of music that combines catchy beats with rhythmic music and thoughtful lyrics to create songs with a distinct political stance. Rap lyrics are about the problems rappers have seen, such as poverty, crime, violence, racism, poor living conditions, drugs, alcoholism, corruption, and prostitution. These are serious problems that many within the rap subculture believe are being ignored by mainstream America. Those within the rap subculture recognize and acknowledge that these problems exist. Those within this subculture consider "the other group" to be those people who do not understand rap music and the message rap artists are trying to send. The suppresser, or opposition, is the dominant culture, because it ignores these problems and perhaps even acts as a catalyst for some of them. The beats of rap music has people bopping and the words have them thinking, from the tenement-lined streets of Harlem, New York, to the mansion parties of Beverly Hills, California (Shomari, 1995, 45). Rap music, once only popular with blacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, has grown to become America's freshest form of music, giving off energy found nowhere else. While the vocalist(s) tell a story, the sic jockey provides the rhythm, operating the drum machine and "scratching". Scratching is defined as rapidly moving the record back and forth under the needle to create rap's famous swishing sound (Small, 1992, 12). The beat can be traditional funk or heavy metal, anything goes. The most important part of rap is "rapping," fans want to hear the lyrics. During every generation, some old-fashioned, ill-humored people have become frightened by the sight of kids having a good time and have attacked the source of their pleasure. In the 1950s, the target was rock 'n' roll. Some claimed that the new type of music encouraged wild behavi...