By Jared Ray
As the popularity of rap music has grown significantly over the past twenty years, so has the power of money and fame. With a culture driven heavily by trends and marketing through the media, it is no surprise that there is an incredible leverage that lies at the heart of music. With the speedy and viral ability to transfer multimedia through various technologies, and the growth of mobile technology, distributing a product is lightning fast.
Also, what better way to tell fifty million people how cool something is within a time frame of twenty-four hours? What better way for mainstream rapper Eminem to tell fifty million people to “shoot that bi***!“ Because of this and also its appeal to the senses, music has become increasingly more of a weapon of marketing and thus more of a product to sell, than an expression of art.
This is what we call “pop” music, or music that makes the big bucks for major corporations, and most of the time this music is harmless. It is when record labels begin replacing the usual images and lyrics about high school, dating, and typical teenager experiences with twenty to thirty-year-old guys getting lap dances, smoking pot and drinking alcohol while flashing their “bling bling” that a line needs to be drawn.
Nowhere have morals been more absent than in today's mainstream rap: the rap that can be viewed on television, listened to on the radio, seen in advertising, or enjoyed at NFL half-time shows. Secondly, there is nothing wrong with pop music, that is up until the point at which degrading images of both men and women, drugs, alcohol, excessive sex, and violence are sold to the youth. It is easy to replace the drugs, sex and violence with overdosing, sexually transmitted diseases, and hate. This is what is being sold to our youth and of course, as youths, there is a natural attraction to this behavior because of adolescent desires and curiosity.
Some say that this is the culture of rap, it is more stinking residue of the original rap culture with the money-making aspects preserved. Rap owes itself to many roots, but the foundation of what is heard today took shape mostly in urban ghettos as a pastime and new expression. The advent of gangster rap and in-your-face lyrics stemming from gangster life was controversial in itself, but it truly was an expression for a groups that found an outlet in that lifestyle. I doubt that the original intent of gangster rappers was to spread the ghetto lifestyle to suburban kids that need not ever experience the hardships of that life. Unfortunately what has been preserved by the record labels is the shock value of this art because that is what brings in the money.
Now, instead of this art representing a culture and expression, corporations have capitalized on the consumer's obsession with shock-value and the money behind it. Pair this with the youthful urge to party and the corporate appeasement of degrading morals in the media and there is a thrust into a downward spiral into what popular rap is becoming. The “rap” that is mass produced by the large record labels and often funded by marketing from all sorts of industries, is becoming a wasteland of sex, drugs and violence that is reproduced as long as our youth buys it or, even worse, their parents buy it. They buy it not because this is what is left of the art (true rap culture has been preserved in the “underground” scene), but because adults in corporate America, blinded by money, continue to feed it to the youth like candy.
Where do we draw the line? “The kids love it!”. Yes, cats love catnip too, that is until they die from eating too much of it. The majority of adults do not live, nor approve of the lifestyle portrayed by the rap industry and of course do not want to see their kids live it, but is action being taken to teach the youth? While it is a very good thing that most kids do not go out after school, score some cocaine, pay a prostitute to come to a hotel with them and party the night away, the effect on the youth is much more subtle.
The problems do not start with full-scale, mansion-thumping parties, but from everyday pressures that adolescent kids experience. All the experiences, drugs, alcohol, partying, bodily urges, materialism, etc. that teenagers often try to keep hidden from teachers, parents and adults who care, are being magnified by the mainstream rap industry.
The message they receive conscious or not, tells them that heavy drinking, drugs, casual sex and focusing solely on material possessions is all okay because the mainstream rap industry brings it all out from under the covers and broadcasts it to the world through multiple mediums. Though kids usually have a somewhat developed moral compass, the constant bombarding of the senses with this message makes it much more difficult for the youth to discern between very unhealthy behavior and behavior that will actually benefit them.
This message has been and will continue to bombard the youth in negative ways until adults decide to change it. The record labels naturally have the power to change the message that they convey, but as long as the money is coming in, there is no incentive. Parents, teachers and other adults who actually interact with the youth on a daily basis have more of an incentive and usually more of an influence, to replace these negative messages with beneficial ideas.
The majority of the responsibility does not lie in the youth, but in the influential figures in their life who, when it comes to the rap industry, have not tried to change much. The adults that the youth look up to need to have a firm stance in what they want the youth to be. In the end a teenager can have many influences, should it be the rapper “Fitty Cent” who said “I'm the type to swallow my blood 'fore I swallow my pride” or rapper Eminem who said “my family has never been there for me “? Or should it be someone who actually cares about them and what they will become?
(Back to top)
|
|
|
