How Does The Media Represent Rap/Hip-Hop?

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HIN07397652        Research Assignment        MC41X

        How Does The Media Represent Rap/Hip-Hop?

Rap music and hip-hop (a cultural formation of which rap music is only one component) have slowly found their way to the top of mainstream popular music culture over the past twenty to thirty years. Hip-hop is now the most important musical style. What jazz was from the 1920’s to the 40’s, or rock and roll was from the 50’s to the 70’s, hip-hop has been from the 80’s onwards. Like most genres of music that have had mainstream popularity, hip-hop tends to have a bad reputation with mainstream media outlets, thus impacting on the public perception of the music and the culture itself. Throughout this research assignment we will be looking at the theoretical framework surrounding the negative representations of hip-hop in the media and carrying out a discourse analysis on a newspaper article.

Before we go any further, let’s briefly take a look at the history of rap music and the hip-hop culture in general. This will give us the basic understanding of where, when and why rap music and hip hop culture formed thus helping us to understand the representations of hip-hop. ‘There is a general consensus among both academic and non-academic accounts of hip-hop that the style originated in the South Bronx area of New York during the early 1970’s’ (Bennett, 2000, p. 134). Rap music is something that’s being done, where as hip hop is something that is being lived, therefore to understand the birth of rap we need to take a look at the South Bronx. The South Bronx was part of a notorious borough of New York City, marked by some of the worst levels of unemployment, dereliction and violent crime in America. The generation growing up in the Bronx in the 70’s, found that music like disco was widely out of step with the realities of their lives. It was something that seemed very far away from what ‘ghetto’ kids on the street could realistically hope to attain or be a

part of. The whole idea of the flashy, rich, high lifestyle was what hip-hop reacted against. The hip-hop culture was a way for the black community to express the lives that they were living, and this culture became recognised by mainstream media in the form of rap. One of the key figures in the creation of the hip-hop scene was ex-street gang member known as Afrika Bambaata.

“Aware of the inner-city tensions that were being created as a consequence of urban renewal programmes and economic recession, Bambaata formed ‘The Zulu Nation’ in an attempt to channel the anger of young people in the South Bronx away from gang fighting and into music, dance, and graffiti” (Lipsitz 1994, p. 26).

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From this we can clearly see that the hip-hop culture and rap music itself were not created to add to tensions in inner-city areas through gang violence, but instead to take them away from such negative distractions in life and help the black community to channel their aggression and express their lives through various forms of hip-hop.

Theoretical Framework surrounding Mainstream Media and Rap/Hip-Hop.

Messages in rap music have also incorporated positive ideals promoting topics such as self-improvement. However, the media selectively exclude news frames that are truly positive when reporting on rap music. The prejudice reporting of ...

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