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Hip Hop Evolution

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As music generally known for referencing violence, rebellion, and disorder, hip hop and rap have rapidly become prominent genres of music in today’s culture. Beginning in the 1970’s at New York City block parties, hip hop became a fan favorite as a radical new mix of upbeat funk and disco music. Mixing and isolating the percussive breaks of funk songs, DJ Kool Herc, the founding father of hip hop, began to use turntables to manipulate songs on records manually. These uptempo, catchy beats became very popular throughout the 1980’s among the younger generation, especially in the United States. The younger generation created their own branch of hip hop known as rap. Rappers speak lyrics in prose, with hip hop beats in the background. The younger …show more content…

Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube and MC Ren formed a group known as NWA. This group came from one of the most dangerous towns in the United States, Compton, California. With gangs and violence around them, they wrote and produced songs that spoke out on the issues that many underprivileged teens faced during this time. With savage and raw lyrics, NWA popularized the ideals and lifestyles of a modern gangster, which included copious drug use, gang activities, and social discord. As their and other rappers’ music began to disseminate throughout the country, teens began to model their lives after those lyrics. Teen crime rose, and the country did not know what to do with this potentially dangerous music. This style of music has flourished and maintained popularity today. Although, in today’s society hip hop and rap have had positive influences on society, such as promoting social and political awareness, providing hope for younger audiences, creating extracurricular opportunities for students, and even creating positive role …show more content…

For an alarming majority of teens, music is a major source of media intake in their daily life. A recent poll from Reuters.com found that while 83.5% of teens pay attention to news and only 35.5% of teens actually watch the news on TV (Herbst-Bayliss). In addition, 65.3% of teens stated that the news actually stressed them out. In a report done by The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 9 out of 10 students own or have an MP3 player. Also, students listen to around 16 hours of music a week on average, a staggering amount when compared to raw news intake (APAM). Therefore, music can be a source of cultural and political education for students and teens. With politics as a big influence on hip hop, hip hop has begun to have positive effects on politics and government as well. Marco Rubio, former presidential candidate and Senator of the United States is a vocal fan of artists such as Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. (Pagliery). Rubio also agrees that rappers have a positive influence on the political education of students when he said “In some ways rappers are like reporters… Gang wars, racial tension, and the government, they were reporting on that (Rubio).” Rap has also paved the way for many civil rights movements. Police brutality has been a subject in rap as long as rap has been around. Tensions between African Americans and police officers

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