Rap MusicJoin now to read essay Rap MusicRap MusicThe following is an excerpt from Black Noise, a book written by Tricia Rose, that describes the importance and background of rap music in society.“Rap music brings together a tangle of some of the most complex social, cultural, and political issues in contemporary American society. Raps contradictory articulations are not signs of absent intellectual clarity; they are a common feature of community and popular cultural dialogues that always offer more than one cultural, social, or political viewpoint. These unusually abundant polyvocal conversations seem irrational when they are severed from the social contexts where everyday struggles over resources, pleasures, and meanings take place.
”The cultural identity of black music is a problem. The political debate of why and how music is brought together on campuses and in schools can be traced to academic and public debates about how to reconcile music of color with the interests that make up its content. The only common ground for this debate is one: race. Music at the college’s student level has never been less diverse in scope, scope and content than previous American and European music styles. A major focus of the study of black music has been the “theoretical” interpretation of music, which has included such themes as black and white culture “undernourished” or “miserable” and the “black and white race.”„‟* A recent article in the Atlantic explains this problem. One of the reasons for the lack of diversity in music at the college is that its music is mostly not the same thing as anything you hear in other schools. A good example is the recent addition to the SAT that will take the SAT to new levels, including some of the most challenging subjects. Music students, even if they come from different backgrounds and backgrounds, can be treated as two distinct groups: those who are more advanced in music theory and the students who have become fluent in the most basic concepts when studying black music and those who have become students of color. When you combine this with an individual student’s musical interest and culture as a whole, such a mix becomes difficult (though not impossible, to understand) and harder to predict.†‡* There are already ways of reconciling the various genres of music, and those ways are changing (see the previous section for a list of such options).•* Many black college students feel that white people who are not so familiar with classical music have more to offer than students of color, or who are less knowledgeable about African-American life. Indeed, Black and female students of color are more likely to sing songs of African-American culture than any other groups, so that seems to confirm these statements. The fact that there are large numbers of students of color who do not hear well from a black audience seems a bit like playing “Gang of Four” with somebody from a school whose students are a little more knowledgeable about African-American culture than they are aspires to be.‣* Though some have called for the elimination of Black music at college and more generalizing about its role in public discourse, few (if any) have gone so far as asserting that white people should be afforded better access to black music. In fact, it is well known that music was the major source of black music culture as early as the 19th century, which might be a good sign if the Black Renaissance were simply recognized.․* The same principle holds of African American music, but its status in politics, education, social issues and life is different from that of any other racialized art form.‥* White
“Rap music is a black cultural expression that prioritizes black voices from the margins of urban America. Rap music is a form of rhymed storytelling accompanied by highly rhythmic, electronically based music. It began in the mid-1970s in the South Bronx in New York City as a part of hip hop, and African-American and Afro-Caribbean youth culture composed of graffiti, breakdancing, and rap music. From the outset, rap music has articulated the pleasures and problems of black urban life in contemporary America. Rappers speak with the voice of personal experience, taking on the identity of the observer or narrator. Male rappers often speak from the perspective of a young man who wants social status in a locally meaningful way. They rap about how to avoid gang pressures and still earn local respect, how to deal with the loss of several friends to gun fights and drug overdoses, and they tell grandiose and sometimes violent tales that are powered by male sexual power over women. Female rappers sometimes tell stories from the perspective of a young woman who is skeptical of male protestations of love or a girl who has been involved with a drug dealer and cannot sever herself from his dangerous life-style. Some raps speak to failure of black men to provide security and attack men where their manhood seems most vulnerable: the pocket. Some tales are one sister telling another to rid herself from the abuse of a lover.
“Like all contemporary voices, the rappers voice is imbedded in powerful and dominant technological, industrial, and ideological institutions. Rappers tell long, involved, and sometimes abstract stories with catchy and memorable phrases and beats that lend themselves to black sound bite packaging, storing critical fragments in fast-paced electrified rhythms. Rap tales are told in elaborate and ever-changing black slang and refer to black cultural figures and rituals, mainstream film, video and television characters, and little-known black heroes. For raps language wizards, all images, sounds, ideas, and icons are ripe for recontextualization, pun, mockery, and celebration. Kool Moe Dee boasts that each of his rhymes is like a dissertation, Kid-N-Play have quoted Jerry Lee Lewis famous phrase “great balls of fire,” Big Daddy Kane brags that hes like raw sushi (and that his object of love has his nose open like a jar of Vicks), Ice Cube refers to his ghetto stories as “tales from the darkside,” clearly referencing the television horror show with the same name. Das Efxs raps include Elmer Fuds characteristic “OOOH Im steamin!” in full character voice along with a sting of almost surreal collagelike references to Bugs Bunny and other television characters. At the same time, the stories, ideas, and thoughts articulated in rap lyrics invoke and revise stylistic and thematic elements that are deeply wedded to a number of black cultural storytelling forms, most prominently toasting and the blues. Ice-T and Big Daddy Kane pay explicit homage to Rudy Ray Moore as “Dolomite,” Roxanne Shante toasts Milie Jackson, and black folk wisdom and folktales are given new lives and meanings in contemporary culture.
“Raps stories continue to articulate the shofting terms of black marginality in contemporary American culture. Even as rappers achieve what appears to be central status in commercial culture, they are far more vulnerable to censorship efforts than highly visible white rock artists, and they continue to experience the brunt of the plantationlike system faced by most artists in the music and sports industries. Even as they struggle with the tension between fame and raps gravitational pull toward local urban narratives, for the most part, rappers continue to craft stories that represent the creative fantasies, perspectives, and experiences of racial marginality in America” (Rose 2-3).
The biggest social dilemma created by rap in todays culture is whether it has a negative or positive impact on the youth, its primary audience,