Lauryn Hill

“The poverty line, we not above /So out come the mask and glove cause we ain’t feelin’ the love/ We ain’t doing crime for the sake of doing crime/ We movin’ dimes cause we ain’t doin’ fine” - Jay Z, Say Hello. These four lines are the embodiment of the relationship between hip hop and what happens in the less glamorous parts of the nation’s star city, New York. For decades New York has been the hip hop headquarters, to a point where the goal was and is still to be named “King of New York.” Hip…

John Legend, singer, songwriter, pianist, is a 36 year old extremely talented man who has succeeded in far more than just reaching fame in music. He comes from an interesting historical background; his 4th and 5th grandfathers were born slaves and died freed men. Being that John Legend was always into Classical soul, hip-hop and gospel music since early childhood, he carried that interest into the music he composes today, which makes him one of the few artists in the r&b/hip-hop music industry…

Stereotypes are fixed and oversimplified images and ideas of particular people or things. Being a black woman, we tend to encounter the most sexual and racial stereotypes. The remarks that are commonly heard are black women emasculate our men and we are sexually inhibited. Media and society have installed these stereotypes in a majority of our minds. We hear stereotypes so much, that we begin to believe in them. I encountered a great amount of stereotypes, but they were only misjudgments because…

no motivation to change the way things are at that point in time. For there to be a social change, one must be uncomfortable and replace complacency with action. There are some major gadflies of the 21th century, such as, Tupac, Kanye, and even Lauryn Hill. However, even though Kanye West isn’t my favorite artist and I don’t agree with everything he says, he is one of the most important gadflies of the 21st century. Kanye’s father was a black panther, photojournalist,…

“The New Negro” is a self-expression that speaks for itself meaning “a new type of negro” or black person. In the north during the Harlem Renaissance, black people were becoming independent. They started branching off making their own art, music, and poetry, and opening their own businesses and forming their own new communities. Now there was a “New Negro” as opposed to the “Old Negro”; a black man with a slave mentality. The “Old Negro” was a black man who viewed himself as inferior, the black…

This paper is going to explore the hypersexualization of black in hiphop culture ,the stereotypes and also using beyonce and Nick Minaj as examples of this issue. Hiphop is a music genre that I founfd to be very much male dominated and with females in this industry there are a number of issues that arise. For a very long time, the perception and portatyal of women have been manupilated by the men as well the media. Women have generally between texploited in the process but in this particular in…

music, and how she even received the time of day to make her music public in the first place. For instance, the main driving force for then-tween Caillat to get into the music business was, interestingly enough, the film Sister Act 2, in which Lauryn Hill sings in a powerful rendition of “Joyful, Joyful” (Lymangrover,…

such as the reasons that explain her desire to get into the music business in the first place. For instance, the main driving force for then-tween Caillat to get into the music business was, interestingly enough, the film Sister Act 2, in which Lauryn Hill sings in a powerful rendition of “Joyful, Joyful” (Lymangrover, 2016; Orr, 2009). I use the adverb, ‘interestingly’…

The heavenly sound of guitars and pianos complement the angelic voice of Lori Lieberman as she sings, “Strumming my pain with his fingers.” The breakaway of the piano serenades the listener into a ballad of love. Generation by generation, the stylistics of “Killing Me Softly” has evolved to conform to a variety of genres and audiences. It has made its way through airways with notable artists taking a change of channeling the essence of the song. Although the song originated from a young vocalist…

Such as Ice cube began to tell the story of the ghetto through films. Also, Lauryn Hill was preaching about gender equality in her famous song “everything is everything”. As such, this finding demonstrates that the world began to use artist such as Tupac, Queen Latifah and Nas to uplift and educate young people from the projects. But…