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Evolution Of Rap In The 1980's

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Sophia Foy U.S. History Final Paper The Evolution of Rap During the end of the 1980’s and beginning 1990’s, Hip Hop started as a local musical movement to fight the political, social and economic oppression African Americans were experiencing in their inner cities all across the Unites States. Since 2013 this movement has re-emerged on a global level. Rap music was born out of an expression of social injustice, which captured the black urban experience but as it grew in popularity, the music and lyrics changed to commercialize rap and attract a broader audience. However, the black experience and social injustice have hardly changed and with the recent attention to police brutality against the black community and the emergence of groups like …show more content…

The movement brought the old issues of social injustice and racism against African Americans to the general population and caught the attention of popular artists especially in the Hip Hop genre. Rappers were swept up in the powerful messages of the Black Lives Matter movement and began to stand new ground. J. Cole had been wrapped up in the lifestyle of famous rappers but began to change his focus. In 2014 he wrote his song “Be free” as a response to the police brutality in Ferguson. J. Cole was quoted in Rolling Stone: “I’m tired of being desensitized to the murder of black men … I don’t give a f*ck if it’s by police or peers. This shit is not normal”(Grow, 2014). He dedicated the song to every young black man in America with the lyrics: “All we wanna do is break the chains off/ All we wanna do is be free”. The injustice was also noted by other famous rappers like D’Angelo, who came out with a new album after 14 years called Black Messiah in 2014. Later in 2015, the biggest musical impact was made by Kendrick Lamar’s album “To Pimp a Butterfly”, whose track ‘Alright’ was sung by demonstrators at the “Black Lives Matter Conference” in Cleveland (Harris, 2015). The police came after the demonstrators very heavy handed and they began to sing: “We gon’ be alright! We gon’ be alright” in defiance. The lines, “ All my life I has to fight, ni**a/ Alls my life I…/ Hard times like,”God!”/Bad rips like, Yea!”/Nazareth, I’m f*cked up/Homie you fu*ckedup/But if God got us/Then we gon’ be alright” tell the story of painful, hard lives but deliver a message of hope at the same time. People started to call the song the new protest anthem of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Another artist who wrote controversial music is Pop and Hip Hop star, Beyoncé.

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