rap Essays -- essays research papers

Rap Music The following(a) is an excerpt from Black Noise, a book written by Tricia Rose, that describes the wideness and background of rap music in society. "Rap music brings unitedly a tangle of some of the most complex kind, cultural, and policy-making issues in contemporary American society. Raps contradictory articulations be not signs of absent sharp clarity they are a common feature of community and ordinary cultural dialogues that always offer more than one cultural, social, or political viewpoint. These unusually abundant polyvocal conversations seem irrational when they are severed from the social contexts where everyday struggles over resources, pleasures, and meanings take place. "Rap music is a scurrilous cultural expression that prioritizes black voices from the margins of urban America. Rap music is a form of rhymed story furcateing accompanied by highly rhythmic, electronically establish music. It began in the mid-1970s in the South Bronx in New York City as a part of hip hop, and African-American and Afro-Caribbean youth gloss peaceful of graffiti, breakdancing, and rap music. From the outset, rap music has articulated the pleasures and problems of black urban spirit in contemporary America. Rappers speak with the voice of personal experience, taking on the identity of the observer or narrator. Male rappers often speak from the scene of a young man who wants social status in a locally meaningful way. They rap about how to avoid gang pressures and silence earn local respect, how to deal with the loss of several friends to gun fights and dose overdoses, and they tell grandiose and sometimes violent tales that are powered by male sexual power over wo men. Female rappers sometimes tell stories from the perspective of a young woman who is skeptical of male protestations of sexual love or a girl who has been involved with a drug school principal and cannot sever herself from his dangerous life-style. Some raps speak to failu re of black men to provide security and attack men where their manhood seems most compromising the pocket. Some tales are one sister telling another to loose herself from the abuse of a lover. "Like all contemporary voices, the rappers voice is imbedded in powerful and dominant technological, industrial, and ideological institutions. Rappers tell long, involved, and sometimes abstract stories with difficult and memorable phrases ... ...e future of black culture in the postindustrial urban center and American culture in general. Its musical voice is achieved via the constant enjoyment of high-tech equipment that will continue to have a profound outcome on speech, writing, music, communication, and social relations as we approach the twenty-first century. "As Greg Tate warned, "hip hop might be bought and sold like gold, save the miners of its rich ore still represent a sleeping-giant constituency." Rappers and their young black constituency are the miners, the y are the cultivators of communal artifacts, refining and developing the frameworks of alternative identities that draw on Afrodiasporic approaches to sound organization, rhyth, pleasures, style, and community. These cultivation processes are formally wedded to digital comeback and life in an increasingly information-management-drivem society. Rap is a technologically educate project in African-American recuperation and revision. African-American music and culture, inextricably tied to concrete historical and technological developments, have found unless another way to unnerve and simultaneously revitalize American culture" (183-185).