Essay On Hip Hop

Music has always been used by the voiceless, especially those in the African American community, as a tool that will pave the way to their representation in a community that is shunning them out and neglecting their issues and concerns. According to Lakeyta Bonnette, a Political Science professor at Georgia State University, if a person is trying to gain an understanding of the struggles and issues that are encountered by the African American community one should study the various forms of music in their community. She specifically indicates that “Culture, especially black music, historically, has been a resistance mechanism that Blacks utilized to assert their visibility in arenas in which majority of the players deemed them invisible.” (Bonnette). …show more content…
Many of Hip Hop critiques tend to believe that people that listen to the genre are more likely to take lyrics literally and pursue being violent. In an investigation conducted by Philip Bump, a political reporter for the Wire, he compares Hip Hop 's popularity in the Billboard Charts to the crime rates at specific times. At the end of his investigation, he discovers that there is in fact no correlation between the amount of crimes committed and the popularity of Hip Hop. He discovered that crime rates were significantly low during the emergence of Hip Hop to the charts compared to the time when it wasn’t as popular. Therefore, one cannot blame Hip Hop for the violence or any other social ills that affect the community that its part of without having valid support. According to Yan Dominic, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, many of Hip Hop critics tend to blame the ills that surround the black community on the shoulders of Hip Hop because they are looking for an easy solution to such a complicated problem, a scapegoat. As critiques focus more on looking for someone to blame they are more likely to ignore statistical data that refutes such claims such as Philip Bumps