B-boy the Local Scene - Essay Example

B-boy the Local Scene Hip Hop is more of a culture than it is a music genre. This is a claim coming from the observation that it tends to influence people’s lives. It determines how its listeners dress, talk, interact, and generally live their lives. Culture is best defined as the customs; ideas and social behavior of a particular people or group. This definition makes reference to the very integral parts of a person’s life that love for the music genre will try and influence. This thus generously makes hip hop a culture. The culture is also further subdivided on the locality; this is so because music and arts in general is normally a reflection of a society. The lyrics in a song or the type of facts that a movie refers to are normally borrowed from the occurrences in the society. Given the differences in the societal structure, the activities in one society may vary slightly with those of another. This is later reflected in the composition of the music in the locality (Kitwana 87). The town of Bloomington, Indiana, also has its own local hip hop culture. The culture, just like in American hip hop, is influenced by the national hip hop to a greater extent. Hip hop was a music mentality brought into existence by Americans of African descent. These people loved rapping; a type of narration in which an artist simply counts his wordings accompanied by a beat to make music. To make them stand out from any other music genre, artists of this type of music adorned unique type of attires. For instance, they dressed in baggy and very fashionable dresses which constituted baggy trousers, most preferably jeans, baggy T-shirts, and very expensive jewelry. Besides, the culture involves a show of liking for the basketball sport. This was a culture that was specifically coined out of the preferences portrayed by the African American population in America. Given theikr big bodies, these people loved and played basketball very well. They thus incorporated the love for the sport in the music thereby succeeding in making the sport a black phenomenon. The city of Bloomington, just like many other cities in America, has a cosmopolitan population. It has both blacks and whites living together. However, African Americans tend to dominate in matters of entertainment. This thus implies that hip hop culture is a little bit more predominant in the entertainment scenes in the demography. A bigger portion of youths of the city appreciate the culture. This is a factor they portray in their mode of dressing, their hair styles and their speech patterns. Just like addressed earlier, the hip hop showcased in this city borrows much from the national and international hip hop scene. However, given the unique way of life in this city, the trend in music and movie creation has a variance of its own (Watkins 78). Arts and culture is strongly appreciated in the city. Bloomington is a home to a number of cultural centers which have been attributed to the growth of the hip hop culture in the region. There are a number of both professional and armature theater companies including the Indiana university department of theatre and drama. The other is the Bloomington Playwrights Project as well as the Cardinal Stage Company and even Theatre of the People. Besides, the streets of the city are dotted with clubs, cinemas and discos. This points to the fact that arts and culture are a vibrant social aspects of the people in the city. This is also a factor that has led to the development of the hip hop culture since very many artists in the city own their own in house production studios. Producing media content is therefore cheap and virtually anyone having interest has the ability to put his interest into practice and turn their talents into sources of livelihoods. There are a number of national arts festivals held in the city that further support the growth of arts and culture in the city. These are platforms that have been used to help promote the hip hop culture since very many artists are showcased from these events. These events have influenced a number of artists, songs, and playwrights to come up with products that point specifically to the society. Some of these events include the African American music and culture showcase held annually. This is the single most popular state sponsored cultural event in the city. These events attract a number of artists from within the city. It is one that offers an opportunity for talents to compete and be rewarded for the uniqueness of creation that they posses. The African American hip hop culture is promoted through this platform; very many established artists come and join their budding counterparts. They critique one another and in the process develop the skills and talents thus improving the popular culture. To prove that in deed hip hop is quite a force in the state, the definition of culture as discussed above provides for a unique feature of culture; it is never static and no single society or group of individuals can bear claim that it is theirs or not. As interactions between people intensify, more people share behavior. In the process of living together, people realize what cultural practice is admirable from the other group of people and imitating the practice is never prohibited. This is a feature of culture that has resulted in more of the formerly reserved white population in the city embrace the music genre. At present, many white hip hop artists exist and perform in night clubs in the city. They perform equally to their black counterparts and they willingly interact thereby developing the culture even further. The culture has been attributed to the wide spread cases of crime and social ills in other states. This is s fact which has not even spared the city of Bloomington. The culture has been previously been identified as instilling negative morality thereby fostering moral decay among the African American society. This is because the origin of the music is traceable to unschooled individuals who took pride in the fact that they never went to schooled but still made it in life. The history of America is one marred with claims of racism. The African Americans for a longer period of time were never considered equal to the whites. Their white counterparts discriminated against them and the successive governments never catered fairly for their rights. This type of treatment resulted in the African Americans retaliating and they loathed whites. The two races existed in constant state of animosity where the arrest of a black criminal by a white police officer would be heavily politicized with the black culprit claiming that his crime was being black. As a matter of fact, the black community fostered the discrimination further. While the white Americans held prestigious jobs in the corporate society, the blacks were left living in the sprawling neighborhoods. It is from such predicaments that the music genre emerged. With this music was the feeling that the society had alienated the African American for quite sometime. The very original hip hop music currently referred to as old school therefore promoted violence provided it earned money. “The spirit of a hustler” is a cliche used by the culture to imply the undying urge to gain financial independence despite the very many hurdles that an uneducated individual living in a civilized society faces. Such claims resulted in the African American youths reining terror on their white counterparts. This is a factor that spread very negative reputation about the culture, music genre, and the African American society in general. Despite all these, hip hop artists lived to foster the culture to what it is today. In most contemporary settings in the U.S as well as in other parts of the world, hip hop commands a significant following. Today, there are white hip hop artists and the culture has become a globally accepted phenomenon. The entertainment industry in the country earns more than tourism. Iconic celebrities of the music genre are among some of the richest men and women in the country. This success brought civilization to the culture and instilled discipline on the African American society and the hip hop culture in its entirety. Black pride film festival is a cultural event that develops acting geniuses in the state. The event that attracts mostly the adherents of the hip hop culture has succeeded in developing a link between the music genre and the film industry. Today, there are Hip hop films. These play talents dressed as the culture dictates and the issues such movies address are those that the culture had been known for. These include crime, struggle for economic success, and poor education among others. The background music and sound tracks in these movies are also hip hop. This unison in the entertainment sector has opened more possibilities thereby making more people become financially stable. Those who could not necessarily be talented in singing find their way in the film industry which is equally prestigious and financially rewarding. The Bloomington hip hop flavor is developed by a number of very distinctive features of the national hip hop. The city has developed a number of dance styles that have later been adopted in the national hip hop fraternity. Unlike the phenomenon largely propagated by the national hip hop dances in which women dance semi nude while their male counterparts are expensively dressed in very expensive paraphernalia, the local dance style used in the video clips is more decent. This is because such public display of perverseness have aided in the development of a very negative mindset against the hip hop culture in the country. Break dance was largely appreciated in the city. This is a dance style in which a dancer moves his body limbs as though they exist independently. It was an exciting dance move that had a lot of following from the lovers of the music and is still held dear despite having been regarded as old school. The city’s hip hop also has unique verbal patterning; the music genre is determined by one’s ability to coin words and lyrics out of the environment. This is a test that every single artist has to pass before qualifying to be an icon. The artists develop rhymes and rhythms from the commonly existing words and blend these to come up with unique songs that portray exactly what is witnessed in the society. In free speech, the artists and adherents of the culture use a distinct speech pattern. In a preferably deep husky voice, they talk in slang that is unique to the culture. This is one in which a sentence rarely makes grammatical sense and entails occasional foul language. They, on the other hand, understand one another and communicate very effectively in these unique languages that have been largely criticized as infleuncing the quality of English spoken in the American society (Hess 152). Language is an art; an important feature about arts is that they are never static. Provided a group of people communicate effectively, then the language used is as effective as any other that one may refer to as being pure. It is therefore wrong to claim that the hip hop culture is contributing to the degeneration of the English language into what it was never meant to be. Language aids communication and coexistence. With this “poor language”, these people interact with one another and every single aspect of their lives go on just as anybody else. They have families, businesses and are comfortable and okay with it. Languages and the difference in them can coexist. Therefore, language should not be taken as a definitive feature of classifying what should be considered as a legitimate culture. Works cited Hess, Mickey. Hip Hop in America: A Regional Guide. Santa Barbara, Calif: Greenwood Press, 2009. Print. Kitwana, Bakari. The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2008. Print. Watkins, S C. Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. Internet resource. Read More