English coursework: Modern music society

proportion, many people believe that rap is mostly for black people and the people that listen to/perform it are either drug dealers, criminals or in general bad people. This is very far from the truth, many of the people that buy it are from middle class white families living in the suburbs, which are far from the “mean streets” where this music was started. As for being made by black artists this isn’t entirely true, while a majority of them are black there are a few “skilled” rappers that are white… the term skilled being used very loosely there… such as Eminem. But at the same time when rock and roll was first started it was mainly black artists that were making it, but rock isn’t stereotyped as “black music’ so in my opinion rap shouldn’t be either.Rock and metal (r&m) in recent years has been overshadowed by rap music but it still has a very large following, especially underground metal but despite a vast following it still doesn’t get mainstream attention and there are many people that hate it. R&M is similar to rap in that it gets stereotyped by people that don’t know or understand it, especially parents. Metal started getting a reputation for being loud and obnoxious music that only drunks and Satanist’s listened to, the reasons for this being the way that the media and artists portrayed it. It was started by KISS… which many people claimed stood for Kids In Satan’s Service, which wasn’t true, just something made up by the media. But this scared parents and they wouldn’t let their children listen to it. Then artists such as Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper took things further by bringing even crazier stage shows and demonic lyrics, this didn’t help the stereotyping at all. But as most of the listeners knew it was all for show but none of the parents or critics knew this. Back then (early 80’s) it was popular to listen to rock and metal but in recent years fans have become outcasts because of certain stereotypes, a lot of people will say that people that listen to metal, especially death metal, are “gothic” or “emo”, which isn’t true at all, most of the people they think are Goth are genuinely nice people and just like black. Because of this some of these people grow up with low self esteem, I’ve personally seen friends that this has happened to, and people have said stuff to me about it as well because I play heavy metal music. The majority of these people are just afraid of what they don’t know and if they gave things a chance would realize its not that scary or weird.The attitude of punk music was started back in the 60’s during the Vietnam war, artists such as Bob Dylan were fed up with the way the government was running things and this was the first sign of music that promoted anti-government. The reason that this type of music had such a following back then was because the majority of America believed in what these artists were saying and used them as a voice to speak for them, many people believe this was one of the main things that caused the U.S to pull out of Vietnam. Things continued on into the 70’s with bands like “the clash” and “the Ramones” which changed music indefinitely because of their message and the fact they had a completely different sound. But going into the late 70’s – early 80’s there wasn’t a need for this type of music anymore, now it was all about party music and having a good time, and because this punk lost a majority of it’s following, but still held on to a die hard group of fans that now instead of being a majority with a voice were outcasts that no one wanted to hear from. This is where the stereotyping began, people now believed that anyone that listened to punk music instead of the popular disco music of the time were anti-government and rebellious, which wasn’t always the case. Going into the 90’s the majority of people that listened to it were young teenagers that just listened to it to piss off their parents, so the thought of them being “anti-government” was outrageous because most of them didn’t understand anything about government. But yet again in the early 90’s punk re emerged as grunge music, which had the same attitude as punk but not as strong a message, they were just artists that were fed up with all the hair metal and glam music of the 80’s and wanted to hear something different. Most grunge artists wore dirty clothes and plaid shirts, just to contrast the view of 80’ music. This in turn started another stereotype, one that saw anyone that listened to grunge being stereotyped as a “dirt bag”. This movement didn’t last long though, with the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994 ultimately came the death of grunge. But in recent years punk has carved a niche in mainstream music, with the creation of pop-punk bands such as Green Day and Good Charlotte gave people an alternative to underground punk but still there were many fans of “true” punk that were against pop-punk, which stereotyped people that listen to it as “goody goodies’ and things of that nature, it seems as if punk music will always just go on in a continuous circle.As you can tell, there is no way that all of these stereotypes can be either true or have a positive effect on people, they can emotionally damage a person to the point where it dramatically effects their life. I believe that people should have a more open mind and the next time you see one of these people instead of stereotyping them just give them a chance and talk to them and you will soon realize that most of the things you believed about these stereotypes are false.