The Social Emergence of Rap - Essay Example

Popular Music Order No. 197502 No of pages: 6 Premium 6530 Qs Historical, Political and Social Background: The social emergence of Rap beganslowly in 1978 with the Sugar Hill Gang’s first rap song titled “Rapper’s Delight” which was just happy party music where everyone just sang along. Shortly after its release somewhere in the late 1980’s rap music evolved and emerged as a way of life in urban America. But it was during the presidential election campaign in 1988 that Rap had a great influence on the republicans and spread like wild fire across the length and breadth of New York who soon came to regard it as their exclusive turf. In LA there was a sort of widespread lingering anti-bias just because the hip hop media was East -Coast based. In fact the general feeling was that it was a passing phase. But this was not to be because Rap took a very serious turn in the late 1980’s when the “bubble gum” kind of rap evolved into the more serious kind of “Gangsta Rap”. From very humble beginnings, Gangsta rap made a huge name for itself and flooded the mainstream markets that generated not only huge profits but widespread popularity to the rapping artists as well as the labels that sold them. Popular rappers started writing harsh and edgy lyrics that celebrated street warfare, the use of drugs and also glorified promiscuity. They experienced place-based identity with LA deeming itself to be “fresh territory” with a high “novelty value and stories of gang conflict and police confrontations. The identity of the rapper was his hood which he used most of the time. Eithne Quinn, takes a long hard look at the genre of Gangsta rap and gives us a rich and insightful analysis in relation to contemporary culture. Quinn finds contradictory statements as she explores the ideologies, the intricacies and the culture of the Black working class. Nuthin But a "G" Thang shows how Gansta rap is not simply a pop culture fad but instead embodies profound shifts in American culture and everyday life." (S. Craig Watkins, author of Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema) Quinn enumerates that the social group involved in Gangsta Rap were the people who were considered to be in crisis and these included the black youth from poor homes who were all out to make money. On the other hand, a major part of the society in general and other public figures and proponents of respectable “family values” did not take well to the fast life-styles and blatantly charged lyrics which incited a lot of distaste and anger in them. Yet nothing much could be done about it and hence for the last thirty years, Gangsta rap has had great influence on Pop culture in America by infusing statements on black identity, poverty, wealth and ideas on race relations. Quinn vehemently states in “Nuthin but a “G” Thang, that the existing Gangsta rap not only reflected but also reinforced the decline of protests in black culture and which gave rise to an individualist as well as an entrepreneurial thinking that spread across the U.S. Quinn not only analyzes and gives deep insight into the Gangsta rap’s deep roots in black working-class expressive culture, during the period of 1970s. but she also expresses that the complexities as well as the music’s aesthetic pleasures have been largely ignored. Qs 2. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and The Long Tail Taking into consideration the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that replaced the Communications Act of 1934, there are both positive and negative sides to it. In the beginning, the Act limited the number of radio stations that could be owned, but now it is a thoroughfare which allows any number of channels to be owned by a single company. Secondly, Society is benefited by the freedom that is allowed between buyers and sellers; but on the flip side –“In reality, this freedom of the marketplace is the breaking and making of legislation for the purpose of expanding big investment opportunities”. (Seth Sandrosky, The Telecommunications Act Of 1996, June, 2006) In the 1995 Act that was passed in the House and Senate during Clinton’s time, they claimed that That healthy competition would improve in the media market place. Clear Channel had owned fewer than 50 radio stations but soon expanded nationwide by opening around 1200 stations. “The richer Clear Channel gets, the poorer is US democracy. This situation also harms market competition in telecommunications, not to be confused with democracy. Capitalism is not democracy, not in radio nor other areas of modern life”. (Sacramento News & Review, 5-15-03). Chris Anderson’s writing on the issue of the “Long tail” gives us a deep insight into the way production, distribution and sales takes place. In Chris own words, “Forget squeezing millions from a few mega-hits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bit-stream”. (Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, 2006) We live in a physical world and even till recently our entertainment also belonged to the physical world where we believed in hits to fill the void. But not anymore. People want much more than just hits and it’s the economics that has made us make a shift in our perspectives. In the physical world, CD’d and DVD’s had to be sold in order to be given space on the shelf. We lived in a world of scarcity- not enough screes to show all the movies, not enough shelf space for storing music and games etc. and not enough channels for broadcasting. However, the 21st century has brought about a revolution in the way we access our entertainment. The world of scarcity has become a world of abundance because online distribution and retail have ushered in a new era for entertainment. This is where Long Tail plays a major role in our lives because it treats its customers as individuals with unique tastes. It offers customized products to its customers instead of the regular market fare and that too at rock bottom subsidized rates that are very much affordable to the customer. The cultural benefit of such a scheme is that it has put an end to the tyranny of hits and the bad effects of the scarcity of distribution. The other benefits of Long Tail are that they don’t have to pay for shelf space because it is mostly digitally stored, they hardly have to pay any fees for distribution, and there is an equal economic footing for the hit and the miss. Moreover in the physical world, people don’t know what they want because of their poor sense of judgment and so Long Tail takes care of this by allowing the customer to listen and just choose the tracks they like. Steve Albini an independent producer for corporate rock records and who is most famously popular for having produced Nirvanas "In Utero" has looked deeply into the music industry to give us his views. According to Steve Albini, every major label has an “A&R (Artist and Repertoire) to choose talented or prospective bands to do albums, but huge amounts of money has to be spent before the label sees the light of day. Considering this fact and many others, he feels that the Long Tail kind of distribution would create a radical change in the way we listen and distribute our music. Qs.3 According to Craig Watkins, much of Hip Hop’s history has defied or surpassed all boundaries of racial as well as class. It is pretty much evident as the white super star figure of Eminem symbolizes this fact. America’s cultural and racial history was rewritten all over again with the advent of changes brought about by the hip hop culture. The social makeover of American pop culture was greatly influenced by these changes which adversely affected the life-style of the youth of America. In the allegations made against Eminem on homophobia and misogyny on his denigrating black women, he was supposed to have retaliated saying that he did it in anger and stupidity when his girl friend who was an African- American broke up with him. The New York Times expressed themselves saying, “They’re selling box-loads of records – many of them to thrill- seeking white teenagers – by reducing themselves to self-parody and playing up the stereo-types of rappers as sex- starved buffoons”. (Craig Watkins, Fear of a White Planet”.)But on the flip side, Watkins says that though Pop music did influence society especially the youth’s life-style, language and attitudes, yet the emergence and fascination they had towards Rap surpassed everything and was also paving the way towards the “erasure of longstanding racial repulsions”. (Craig Watkins, Fear of a White Planet”.) The roaring popularity of rap was largely due to the fact that women were depicted as sex symbols, who were not only cheap but consumable and disposable. (TA- Nehisi Coates. We Love Hip Hop, But Does Hip Hop Love Us?) According to Quinn regarding the political, social and economic trends, that relate to the degradation of women in the Gangsta scene, she says that a woman’s “power” comes from her physical beauty which threatens the masculinity of the rapper and therefore “the brutality of the lyrics implicitly construes women as more powerful”. Therefore to remove this power from women, they use such lyrics because it threatens their masculinity. This was the situation because black masculinity prevailed extensively in our society and raised the issue of “gangster misogyny”. According to Watkin’s representations of women, he feels that no prominence is given to them as they are used as mere props in an album. The women he says are used as mere “eye candy” and as such don’t command any respect for themselves. In his own words, “…the female body became a mere prop used mainly to create the players and pimps that populated the music clips, which, for better or worse, stood out as hip hop’s grandest and most accessible visual art form.” (Watkins, p.216). Another important point expressed by Watkin’s is that since the men in the video act as kings, the women have to content themselves by trying to please and serve the king, which he finds very demeaning for women. Social Effect: Such female behavior in the media environment as exposing too much of their body or displaying themselves as sex symbols has an adverse effect on people in the society especially the youth who feel the need to do the same thing in order to be accepted by society. As the author states, “black girls are immersed in a pop-culture world that is bombarded with sexual themes and imagery.” (p. 225). This is a very disturbing factor because the trend gets worse each day and this would lead our society into disreputable chaos. Cultural Effect: The poor representation of women that is gradually built into our culture is sure to have repercussions in a society. For example when Nelly’s music video (Tip Drill) came out, the female students said it was not Nelly’s problem, but it’s about our culture which we’ve kept intact by buying the music. Therefore, whether we like it or not, the bad representation of women has an adverse effect on our culture. Therefore, the analysis drawn up by Quinn gives an insightful picture of Gangsta Rap and its influence between the Black and Whites cultures, yet it is not concerned with how acceptable it is to society and neither how rational it is in its outlook. According to me, I feel that it has had adverse and a negative influence of society and the freedom that goes with it has to have a stop somewhere other wise the society as a whole is moving into a more dangerous phase where rationality and respect would be things of the past, leading us into a society which is less safe and very much less respectable. References: Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang; The Culture and Commerce Gangsta Rap Author: Eithne Quinn www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023112/0231124082.HTM We Love Hip Hop, But Does Hip Hop Love Us? Author TA- Nehisi Coates. The Long Tail Author: Chris Anderson (2006) Book: The Long Tail Author: Chris Anderson Read More