Rap 2 Essay, Research Paper

I wouldn t talk about it if I ain t live it and I live a thug life baby I m hopeless, smoking on indo trying to keep my focus are just examples of gangsta rap music lyrics that are being blamed and targeted by American society and policy makers for the increase in violence within the American culture. Artist and record labels alike are having fingers pointed at them for our culture lack of parenting, of which, often results in a lack of morals and values in the younger generation. There has been a constant effort buy the American public to scapegoat it s own offense with vulnerable and less powerful portions in society. Though never admitted, the rise in youth crimes is not a result of the violent lyrics of gangsta rap, but a combination of lacking morals and values perpetuated by a lack in parenting and a decrease in the avenues available for youth to learn how to react responsibly in adverse situations.

Unknown to many of the individuals that target gangsta rap music as an enemy of the state, the lyrics and content of the songs are often a direct reflection of the lives that these individuals actually live. To understand this one must take a look at the actually lives of the people who wrote these songs and what they have actually gone through. One of the most targeted gangsta rappers is the previously deceased, Tupac Shakur. Growing up in a single parent home with a mother who was involved in drugs and struggled just to make ends meet, it is not difficult to imagine why the lyrics he wrote focused on this type of life style. The same goes for rapper The Notorious B.I.G., who grew up in the ghetto and experienced a life of poverty that included drugs and violence. To many in the outside world this connection seems to far fetched, only because they have never experienced living life in a way that you have to hustle just to make sure you have money to feed you daughter, as put by The Notoriuos B.I.G. from his song juicy from his 1996 freshman release READY TO DIE. I am not blaming them for not having experience poverty but I am placing a responsibility on these individuals to take a deeper look in to the world of these people and to also look at what it is they talk about. In many interviews it has been expressed by these artist that they are simply talking about the lives which they live, that they are in fact giving the world a detailed description of what many of the people in their communities have to go through on a day to day basis. This is not the working of some ones imagination but the real true life stories of a human being, who like any other decent human being, wants to make things better for himself and his family. In a television interview on BET in December 1999, rapper Ras Kass was asked why he talked about drugs, bitches, guns in his songs , and he replied See this is where the problem lies, if I was talking about the stock market it would be all cool for everyone because that is something that middle America is familiar with, but I talk about my life, something that I had no choice in determining, I did not pick to live in the ghetto, people need to understand that this is what goes on in the ghetto .

And that seems to be the problem that these people are giving the outside world a glimpse of what goes on in the hood. It has been said by some rappers that it was not a problem for hip hop to be violent until it reached middle America.