On the topic of understanding and appreciating rap music within academic circles, a significant void between “rhyme and reason” exists because more attention is given to gratuitous violence than is given to ways in which members of these under-privileged communities respond to and utilize violence. Violence within the black urban community is a combined effect of poverty and marginality anchored by a system of institutional racism and oppression (Dyson, 1991; West, 2001). As this is the case, an over-emphasis on violence and an under-emphasis on the ways in which the oppressed populations operate within these violent subcultures create a lacuna of knowledge involving communication and culture. This study fills a gap in communication and culture by advancing a thesis that oppressed populations find collective agency through the use of violent rhetoric. Rap music, being the product of the African rhetorical resistance tradition, is inherently devoted to the task of confronting hegemony. Because rap music is originally derived from society’s most oppressed populations, and as a result, linked to the violent street code (Kubrin, 2005), a rhetoric of violence allows for the unification of rappers and audience based on a common violent ethos and a common goal of resistance and liberation (Fanon, 1963).
With a special emphasis on the culture of academics, currently this urban youth violence is routinely viewed and discussed through sanitized lenses. If examined at all, it is usually inspected by a two-dimensional approach that lacks critical depth but reminds us that violence is a consistent issue within Hip-Hop culture. There is a paucity of research that aims to understand violence. There is little research that aims to observe violence as a communication tool, and not necessarily a socio-cultural phenomenon that requires research that seeks to apply preventive or corrective measures. In a more objective and organic vein, if you will, Jeffrey Fagan and Deanna Wilkinson (1998) have reported a resurgence of identity, culture, and violence in inner-city black communities. With these factors intermingling in typically combustible ways, it has been “understood that using a gun to harm his opponent was the best way to handle a situation both in terms of what was expected on the street and what an individual had to do to maintain a respected identity” (p. 139).
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1 comment:
Rap is not music it may be poetry may be not. The Black man needs a voice his struggle is one of liberty and he finds it in going from the streets to the poet. But if that is all he is going to then his freedom is an illusion. He is not oppressed he may have been but who is oppressing the Black man, Whites what are they doing. Rap is a cry for help for it keeps black men in the ghetto of their minds. So be a geek not a ghetto, rap that.
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