Lyrical ViolenceEssay Preview: Lyrical ViolenceReport this essayLyrical Violence Music is a prominent force in adolescent lives; according to the American Medical Association, American adolescents spend a total of four and a half hours a day listening to music and watching music videos. Parents are increasingly weary of suggestive, violent, lyrical content in popular music.
A University of California study recently showed that 48% of Americans, including the younger generation, say that violence in popular music should be regulated. In Paducah, the affect of violent lyrical content in popular music has been an ongoing debate since the Heath High School shooting. Another case of a school shooting has shook up a small town in Arkansas called Jonesboro. One of the teen murderers admitted to law enforcement officers that the rap music he listened to might have contributed to his state of mind before the murders, if not his overall decision to gun down his classmates. Mitchell Johnson, the student, said, “It puts you in a certain state of mind.” This is not only relevant to the music/violence debate but it is a crucial element in understanding what is going on with the modern youth. Clearly, it can not be stated that the sole contributing factor in the students decision to commit murder was rap music; but it was a contributing factor. I believe that there is a painful and direct correlation between violence in popular music and violence in youth.
I do not believe that government regulation, or censorship, is going to fix this problem. For those who debate the adverse effect of violent music on a persons mind-state, I offer this example. In the early days of jazz, African-Americans would listen to, and play, the music as a release from the racial climate in which they lived. The music, if only for a while, removed their problems. This being the case, how can we deny that music, even without lyrics, has an overwhelming impact on our mind-state. Popular music affects everyone. Some people find that they cant get a song out of their head after hearing it on the way to work. Other individuals discover that they get sentimental if they hear a song which they danced to at their prom. At funerals, people are brought to tears at the first note of Amazing Grace. While there are almost always other reasons behind the emotion, it is the music that triggers that particular mind state.
Recent musical releases, believed to have been marketed towards impressionable young people, have been the subject of a strong backlash against violence in music. Eminem is a rap artist who has been catapulted to fame in spite of his violent, misogynistic, homo-phobic, and sexually explicit messages. Also known as Slim Shady, Eminem claims that his alter-ego, Shady, is to blame for his violent lyrics. What most people dont know is that Eminem released a positive rap album, as a debut effort. This is before he became famous for songs like 97 Bonnie and Clyde, a shocking song in which Eminem raps about killing his wife, and asking his three year old daughter to help him dispose of the body. Eminems positive debut album, which didnt contain the profanity and violence that made him famous, was called Infinity. It failed, miserably.
If indeed there is a direct correlation between violence in music and violence in youth, it is important to look at where the connection lies. Is it the violence in the music that causes the violence in our youth, or vice versa? In this debate, Dan Quayle asked, “What kind of artists would put a message of murdering cops in a song for young, impressionable people to hear?” It is equally important to ask, what kind of society would put a song with a message of murdering cops on the charts? If there is a widespread demand for any product, eventually, someone will produce that product. That product feeds back into the violence obsessed society that demanded it, and the result is a never-ending cycle of immoral beliefs that cheapen the value of human life. The product is going to be produced, regardless of new restrictions and in spite of censorship. If we, as a collective,
and the music conscious, are willing to get together, we are bound to see a whole society that promotes this vicious cycle of poverty, poverty, crime, and violence. We will go into more detail about what types of people produce the songs that we want to hear. We will be able to compare them to each other, see if the song has a certain type of message, and then ask whether and how long before we see any different people having different kinds of songs on that same song. If your only objective is to save the music, your only objective is to produce something that takes a wrong and leaves us wanting more, and in that case the demand will go up. As the chart shows, the music doesn’t make any money because we produce it, it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t have any money, and it will suffer a terrible fate. But in that it will be sold through the same chain we had with children.
In my book, What Makes a Woman? there is a lot about social, economic, and cultural attitudes that show how the problem of violence can be solved. In my mind, in that book I talk about why violence is real, and a whole series of questions and problems that are likely to arise. In the post-War eras there were no violent acts of violence, because the laws around it worked for them. In the post-war, we see more of the same thing. What is the big problem that people are dealing with when it comes not to violent social or personal behaviour?
Our answer is that the right people were not the ones to make violence. The right people are the ones who make this happen because this was already happening.
When it comes to social attitudes that will not allow violence, we have done more or less nothing. This is because the way we talk about violence has nothing to do with our reality, our reality is that when children start to have the right mentality that they can think with their brains, they become more like a human being. Those who think this way only take their ideas for granted (in fact are more prone to violent tendencies than anyone else on the planet). You want to make it seem like children can be more like adults, but to actually make a difference, you have to start looking for it. If you think people are less violent than they should be, maybe it’s because they’re going to have better minds. In this light, in my mind it’s a lot to ask why we have done no work on the issue. To begin with, the reality is that children are already very young when he (the person who is hurting the most) is born. This is because they have evolved and taken for granted the social contract between the parents who are the ones forcing the child to suffer in order to reproduce in the society they live in.
If anything, the children of both sexes were going through the same cycle of exploitation. They were being exploited to become children.
In the end, if you ask anyone what they think about what is now happening to violence. When people talk about the need for violence against other people they invariably refer to people, not children. In the end, we are all in the same trap, as children of both sexes have to be involved in social control that doesn’t allow violence.
This might have struck me as a contradiction, not that one is less violent, or more violent