Rap Music
Essay Preview: Rap Music
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I can recall the cold weekend in November after I got my drivers license and my strong urge to go to a dance club on a venture to bond with new faces. The only information I knew about this small, local boom-room was the age limit, dress code and the cover price. When I arrived at the club with my 3 high school friends, we were more than astonished by the overly crowded parking lot that looked similar to tailgate parties at a National Football Game. After paying at the door and getting carded for an ID, we passed through the doors that would lead me to a shocking personal experience. The nightclub was composed of 2 luxurious floors, 1 wooden deck, and 1 laser-lighted VIP room. From the very moment I stepped through the entrance, I could feel the bass from the sub woofers punching at my eardrum. Due to the floods of teens on the dance floor, I felt that my mobility was limited and I knew that this could be a serious fire hazard. It felt like the hip-hop DJ never stopped spinning the new hit singles he would pull from his large selection in a nearby cardboard box. As the music blared, the crowds of people on the dance floor continued to form into huddle-like groups on different sides and corners of the room. I figured that these clusters were nothing but circles of close friends but would soon realize that these groups were actually local street gangs from the poor neighborhoods in my town. As the night came to a close, the DJ threw on a couple more hit records to the likes of the audience. One of these records by Lil Jon and the Eastside Boys, however, fell under the category of “Gangsta Rap”. “Put your Hood Up”, a mere 4 minutes of vulgarity and severe profanity is a song that parents and guardians need to know about. The song starts off with Lil Jon howling “Aye, check this out I need all my real niggas and bitches to look around the muthafuckin club. If you see a nigga and he throwin up a set and it aint yo set or it aint yo click, I want yall niggas to tell them niggas like this. I want you to get up in that muthafuckas face and do this shit Here we go…” This verse created agitation by directly telling people to fully represent their neighborhood, gang, or clique in a negative violent manner. The chorus of the song, which is repeated about 8 times blares “Say nigga fuck you! Nigga fuck you. Cuz you dont want to
fuck wit me cuz my niggas in the club will heat cuz them eastside niggas dont give a fuck them westside niggas is quick to buck. Them northside niggas will cut you up And them southside niggas will put you in a trunk.” The lyrics blasted out the tweeters and the different gangs chanted along, pushing and shoving erupted over near the DJ table. From afar, it looked like nothing more than a mosh pit at a heavy metal concert. As I approached the commotion, I was struck with sharp fright as a haze of heat crossed my cheeks like a hot blow dryer. I suddenly panicked when I saw one man getting brutally clobbered by seven or eight other teenaged boys. The poor young man was lying on his stomach surrounded by blood and a few teeth as the gang that attacked him began sprinting towards a nearby exit. By the time security could maneuver through the dense crowd, the boy was already unconscious. From my point of view, it was the violent, provoking lyrics that caused this brutal brawl and that because of the peaceful atmosphere earlier in the night, it can be concluded that this gruesome incident would have never happened if Lil Jon was never played. A couple weeks later, the disgusting single, “Put your Hood Up” by Lil Jon and the Eastside Boys climbed within the top 10 songs on the Billboard charts for the month of December.
For upcoming artists in the early 20s, music was nothing but form of art. Music was often played at theatres and enjoyed in a peaceful, vivacious manner. As generations passed, pastimes began to dissolve into the theatre walls and music changed form. By the late 1970s, the smooth calm jazz had disappeared while heavy rock and rap music emerged from the minds of young artists. Rap originated in the mid-1970s in the South Bronx area of New York City. This “Rap” music, popular in African American culture, consisted of rhyming sentences and words over a composed up-tempo beat. The songs often reflected the personal experiences and struggles of the artist in their black urban community. This new genre in music began to hit the radio airwaves and was soon broadcasted through the production of music videos. Rap music as a whole began to grow drastically throughout the entire nation. One of the first breakthrough rap groups was a white group from New York named the Beastie Boys. The release of their album in 1984 was one of the first rap records to reach the billboard top-ten list of popular hits (Erlrewine 2003). The Beastie Boys cultivated the urban community through their rap, with a hit single that contained a catchy chorus, “we got to fight for our rights, to party”. Unlike most present day rappers, The Beastie Boys were rather beneficial for the community, providing music to aid troubled youth by relating their personal experiences to society as a whole. Other songs by Public Enemy, such as “Stop the Violence”, promoted good messages to society. As the barrier for diversity in musical genres was broken, more writers were being signed to record labels as more fans supported them. In no time, Rap started to reach sound scan levels comparable to top rock groups. Presently, rap music is broken up into different sub-genres such as R&B (Rhythm and Blues), Underground (unsigned artists) and the well acclaimed but truly appalling “Gangsta Rap”. “Gangsta Rap” in the American Heritage Dictionary is defined as “a style of rap music associated with urban street gangs and characterized by violent, tough-talking, often misogynistic lyrics”. While not all rap music promotes violence, the style known as Gangsta Rap contains lyrics that celebrate and blatantly encourage aggressiveness. Gangsta Rap may be seen at the top of the famous Billboard Charts, but many parents and baby-boomers are probably un-aware of the shocking and distasteful lyrics that are part of these multi-million dollar hit singles. It is clear that this so-called art form has real-world consequences. In about 90% of the Gangsta Rap songs I have listened to, I have heard a reference to drugs, guns, homicide, robbery, prostitution, gangs, crack, cocaine, PCP, marijuana, 40 ounce malt liquor, strippers, domestic abuse, stabbings, ecstasy or any other immoral or illegal concept you can think of. Gangsta Rap music, if you want to call it music, not only promotes violence, drug and alcohol abuse, but it also