Byron Hurt and Hip-Hop’s Influence on Male and Youth Culture
Source: www.azrapeprevention.org
Topic: Hip Hop
Sort Desciption: Hip-Hop is a form of music that has distinctively American roots, like jazz and ... Its driving rhythms and intricate rhymes have solidified Hip-Hop’s ...
Content Inside: Justin Pilla, [Program], Northland Family Help Center Byron Hurt and Hip-Hop’s Influence on Male and Youth Culture Available at: http://www.azrapeprevention.org/updates/. of 2 1 Byron Hurt and Hip-Hop’s Influence on Male and Youth Culture Justin Pilla Community Educator Community Education Department Northland Family Help Center Hip-Hop is a form of music that has distinctively American roots, like jazz and the blues before it. Its driving rhythms and intricate rhymes have solidified Hip-Hop’s place in the pantheon of music worldwide, so that now "just about every country on the planet seems to have developed its own local [hip-hop] scene." 1 But it is Hip-Hop’s role as ‘modern-urban-folk’ that has solidified it as a vital and influential cultural movement. Forged during the early seventies in the Bronx, New York, Hip-Hop served as a means of urban creative expression, merging various forms of inner-city art into its own distinct flavor. MCs (vocalists) would rap over crafty beats spun by DJs, scatting not only about the revelry that surrounded the burgeoning scene, but about various social issues and the day to day life of their neighborhoods. This helped to create the sense that Hip-Hop was a voice for a culture and a generation that had little other voice in mainstream America. Hip-Hop was about expression. It was about celebration. It was about innovation. However, in the early nineties, the ‘voice-of-the-streets’ began to take on a more nefarious tone. The combination of commercialism and crime-related “gangsta” rap began to congest and control the market. Now MCs, instead of rhyming about social issues and their skills as a lyricist, were boasting about violence, misogyny, drugs, and materialism. This branch of Hip-Hop was not only popular to the African American inner-city youth, it became, ironically enough, wildly popular to middle-class white suburban youth. The popularity of this “gangsta” branch of Hip ...
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