Rap: Dominant Forces In Popular Culture

Southern hip hop also referred to as southern rap originated from the southern cities like New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Memphis, and Virginia Beach, just like the names implies. Rap music has transformed modern music greatly during the decade of 1997 and 2007 (Dyson 61). The decade has seen the southern artists rise to both national and international prominence. The southern cities have churned up modern rap artists like Dwayne Michael (Lil Wayne), Clifford Joseph (T.I) and many others .This papers aims to examine various artists, music and scholarly articles in analyzing rap music in southern cities and its effects on modern music industry.

In any group, people either listen to hip hop, and enjoy it for what it is, or people do not and assume negative connotations about it because of the stigma associated with it. This is due to the media’s influence on music as well as the influence of politics on music. It is important to mention that there has also been a divide drawn between different types of hip hop due to these influences. These two types have been labeled as “conscious rap” and “gangster rap”. Conscious rap is said to be more socially conscious and to have addressed issues present today, whereas gangster rap is said to contain themes and lyrics that generally emphasize the "gangsta" lifestyle. For this paper, I will not differentiate between the two because while one type of music may be more influential than another, it would not be fair to assume this based on popular opinions. This influence means that it will hard to gauge the actual influence of hip hop on the academics of a student because there is a bias one way or another when answering the

Eminem also knows as Marshall Mathers III was a young Caucasian boy raised in Kansas City. He was part of a single-parent household which causes instability in his childhood. His mother was a drug addict who gives birth to Marshall Mathers in her teenage years, and his father left him at a very young age. He had to spend time in various locations and then finally he resided in Detroit. Many people in his life said he was a very anti-social person who had immense difficulty making friendship which also leads him to a child who cannot find his way out of trouble. He said he was “not interested in school because all he wanted to do was rap” which goes to show he was not a good role model to immolate, Eminem didn’t start his rap career until he was 14. At the beginning, he wasn’t seen as a rapper that people should be taken seriously, but over time he had to earn the respect of his fans and critics. His rap music is often filled with anger and malicious behaviors which also lead him to become a figure in the rap industry.

Rap music is defined as popular music advanced by disc jockeys and urban blacks in the late 1970s. This kind of music consists of a repeated beat pattern that provides the background for rapid, urban language, accompanied by a vocalist. Hip-Hop music is a genre that originated in the United States by inner-city African Americans in the 1970s which consists of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted. The Difference between rap and hip-hop music defined by EBONY is that hip-hop is a culture while rapping is one of four elements contained therein—the others being breakdancing, DJing and graffiti. The perception of rap music/hip-hop music by academic scholars is often accurate, in the portrayal that types of rap/hip-hop musicians often exhibit violent, misogynistic, antisocial, and materialistic content and behavior. Writer’s Johnetta B. Cole, Tia Tyree, Michelle Jones, Matthew Oware, and have all discussed the topic of rap music, and the ways in which it exhibits violent, misogynistic, antisocial, and materialistic content and behavior.

A constant debate amongst society is whether or not certain genres of music have an impact on the behavior of listeners, whether that impact is positive or negative. Would a person steal because of a song they heard? Would a person murder another human due to the lyrics of their favorite song? Questions like these are often asked and very rarely answered. The main genre of debate: hip hop music. Though the debate continues to go on in today’s society, the answer has never been given. In fact, some research shows that hip -hop music can have a generally positive effect on listeners. Music has always been in the middle of debates, and more specifically, rap music has always been questioned since it became popular back in the 1980’s. When they first entered the scene, all music has gone through a stage of being questioned about it’s content, respectfully. For example, jazz music was said to promote drug use and was called a bad influence on the youth, and Rock and Roll superstars like Elvis were said to be harmful to listeners. Those respected genres have been popular for years now, but hip-hop music is constantly thrown under the rug. The purpose of this paper is to show that, while it is often debated, rap music has a generally positive effect on its listeners.

Rap music has experienced a radical increase in popularity in the last five years. In the year 2000, rap became the second-best-selling genre in music, capturing 12.9 percent of the year's $14.3 billion in total record sales ("Rap/Hip Hop" Sc 1). Though rap is no stranger to criticism, that criticism has increased in both quantity and vociferousness at about the same rate as the number of rap albums climbing the charts. And the growing evidence that, apparently, in order to achieve commercial success, each rap album must be more negative and offensive than the last does not help to address these criticisms.

Although he was a mediocre student he did remarkable in english, he even admitted to reading the dictionary. "I found that no matter how bad I was at school, like, and no matter how low my grades might have been at some times, I always was good at English ... I just felt like I wanna be able to have all of these words at my disposal, in my vocabulary at all times whenever I need to pull 'em out. You know, somewhere, they 'll be stored, like, locked away.”-Eminem. He discovered rap as a teenager, but he was often criticized because it was almost exclusively preformed by African-Americans. Eminem stood out among the crowd, being white, but he did not let that stop him from entering Detroit’s underground rap scene. Even after entering the underground rap scene, he was underestimated for being the white guy.

The release of The Slim Shady LP was the beginning of Eminem’s ride to the hip-hop hall of fame and it was with this album that Eminem was truly

In both the mainstream press (i.e., The New York Times) and publications targeting a predominately black readership (i.e., Ebony and Jet), she finds rap lauded for the salutary lessons that it imparts to black youth regarding the realities of urban living; likewise, rap artists are applauded for their importance as role models and mentors to inner-city black youth. Thus, while rap has been framed negatively, as a contributor to an array of social problems, crime and delinquency in particular, it has also been celebrated and championed as an authentic expression of cultural resistance by underdogs against racial exploitation and disadvantage. How these differing representations of rap might resonate with audience members was not part of Binder’s research mandate.2 Furthermore, while she does acknowledge that journalistic perceptions of the racial composition of the rap audience are not necessarily accurate – that more white suburban youth, even in the 1980s and 1990s, might have been consuming the music than black inner-city youth – this acknowledgment does not alter her enterprise or her argument. At this point in time, when the listening audience for rap music has both expanded and become increasingly diverse, our research concerns how young black, white and Asian rap fans in Toronto, Canada relate to a musical form still viewed primarily in terms

To understand this you must understand a fundamental shift in rap culture that helps highlight how beats by dre's advertising scheme works. The message that rap used to carry was once filled with hope/dreams for a better future for the rapper and maybe his people/family/community. This paper will look how this culture will be twisted and changed to become more profitable and cater to a bigger audience. To understand this change we must observe how rap was, when it first begun and how it’s changed over the years as well as how the audience have changed over the

Eminem grew up in a very hostile environment. From having no father and a drug addicted mother, he would be seem as a weak link. As a “white” rapper, he would be criticized because of it. Because of him being who he is, he would get beat up all the time. At one point, he was beaten up badly that he went into a comma. Throughout everything, he continued to be himself, and became a really successful rapper., To this day, people still criticize his music and raps about what he wants to, not what others want.

Their core tactic was to incorporate Hip-Hop into the mainstream, believing that it was the authenticity of Hip-Hop which made it popular. This commercialisation of Hip-Hop lies at the root of many changes to the culture from the early 1990s, primarily the uplifting of Hip-Hop from its communities and artistic agenda to be used as an apparatus for capitalism. Commercial hip-hop has deteriorated what so many MC’s in the 80’s tried to create; a culture of music, dance, creativity, and artistry that would give people not only something to listen to, but also liberty to express themselves and deliver a positive message to their audiences. The majority of famous Hip-Hop artists adhere to the commercialisation of the culture by creating music that caters for mainstream consumers, they rap about sex, drugs, violence and racism, calling themselves ‘Gangsta Rappers’, they sell an image of toughness but their lyrics lack authenticity and meaning. The sudden sensation of white rappers is solid evidence that Hip-Hop continues to be a rapidly exploding culture, integrating people of all races. Since releasing his debut album Infinite in 1996, Martial Mathers, aka. Eminem has flooded the Hip-Hop scene with respect from his listeners and music contemporaries, but an amazing amount of negative response from society and the mass

We all know who Eminem is whether it be because we listen to his music or because of the huge controversy that seems to fallow his next billboard hit. Ever sense the release of his first album The Slim Shady LP in 1999 or the more predominate album under fire The Marshall Mathers LP released in 2000, and Encore in 2005 Eminem has been fighting off critics and gay and lesbian right activists because of his "lyrical content." People say that he is a homophobic gay basher with no respect for women. Encore is another brilliant work from eninem but the album that started the most controversy was The Marshall Mather LP. Eminem gave his foes plenty of ammunition. In "Criminal," he declared: "My words are like a dagger with a jagged

Quebec’s hip-hop community of rapper’s rap in French “Bill 101” is the bedrock primary responsible for French as the preferred language spoken (Sarkar, Allen, 119). However, Haitians forming Quebec’s largest black community and a rap group Muzion doesn’t rap in French, but prefers to rap the way they speak Haitian Creole “keeping it real” (Sarkar, Allen, 123) and rather mix in some other semantics meanwhile they’re enlightening the listener on their culture and inviting them to partake in learning about it as well. The success of the groups two albums have been a breakthrough in Quebec. Allowing the people to become aware of the diverse cultures that surround them daily and creating a crack in Quebec’s unilingual system is positioning hybridity

Eminem primary genre is rap and he writes his songs based on his life. Many of his songs seem to have a strong attitude towards life. His music touched many audiences because they were able to somehow relate his stories to theirs. His talent is primarily based on mixing the words in an intricate way and his ability in competing with non-white rappers. If these factors were to be assessed several decades after his death, we cannot accurately predict his talent, since rap may or may not be a primary genre at the time and a many non-white rappers may be present at that