Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

The Influence of Rap Music Rap music has many negative influences in our culture and society today. Rap music is a “genre of rhythm and blues music that consists of rhythmic vocals declaimed over musical accompaniment. The accompaniment generally consists of electric drum beats combined with digitally isolated sound bites from other musical recordings.”(www.rap.com) Rap music has been categorized as, “A cultural evolution of the Black oral tradition and contemporary resistance rhetoric.” (Smitherman,1997,p.21) Over time rap music has developed a lot of controversy in many ways, especially amongst parental units and their teenagers. One controversy is woman and how they are degraded in the lyrics. Another reason that Rap music causes problems today is by the way that they portray drugs, alcohol and money to be something they are not. In Rap music violence is talked about frequently to be a normal part of life. The criterion to bad rap music is explicit lyrics and negative influences on the youth today. They talk about murder, rape, and assault as though they were okay. Almost everybody and everything that has to do with rap music is associated with drugs and alcohol. The ways that rappers address woman in their l