Music And Its Impact On Black Youth Essay

Funk music as an expression brought with it a newly packaged music that was capable of fully embracing both the performers’ and audiences energies. Funk emphasized dancing and how it further expressed implicit meanings not always explicitly understood through the lyrics. Funk music opened the door for a particular subculture, black youth, to take their form of dance expression and broadcast it across the United States through the culturally important program Soul Train. In particular, the importance of individual, creative dance broke the mold of many of the dancing trends in music that preceded it. This important aspect of musical expression transcended the era of funk and to this day dancing is still just as important in the world of music as it was when funk music was popularizing musical expression through dance. Funk as music became inextricably linked to dance, and this is explicitly evident in the rise and popularity of Soul Train and its impact on black youth, the subculture who continued to promote the strong link between music and dance in later forms of dance oriented music. Before analyzing the differences in dance brought about by funk, it would be useful to examine why dancing is an important aspect of musical expression. Doucleff at NPR reveals some interesting results from a study, done by Maria Witek of Aarhus University, regarding what type of music makes people want to dance the most. “[The musical patterns] that had a sort of a balance between…