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Example research essay topic: Gangsta Rap Rap Artists - 2,093 words

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... wd rise to the challenge with more cheers and screams. Thus the tone of the album is established. She Watch Channel Zero? ! begins with Flavor Flav shouting: Youre blind, baby, youre blind from the facts of who you are cause youre watching that garbage. Flavor is not usually a rapper outright, instead restricting his contributions to short, sneering, seemingly improvised rants like the one that introduces this song.

As Tricia Rose says, he is effectively a news activist, his role is to tell you the news and what to do about it all in the same breath. So, the fact that youre blind cause youre watching that garbage can be considered the news. Elsewhere in the song he shouts: Read a book or something! Read about yourself, learn your culture.

This is the thing to do about it. While it later becomes clear that Public Enemy are primarily concerned with the deadening effects of television on black people, Flavors words can easily be transposed onto a white audience. His loose and spontaneous style of delivery contrasts well with Chuck Ds precise, ordered rapping she watched she said/All added up to zero/And nothing in her head. The contrasting sound of the two voices is important too: Chuck Ds being low and booming and providing an aura of seriousness and authority; Flavor Flav's adding a shrill, humorous edge, like an excitable but knowledgeable child. He seems to get progressively more agitated as the song progresses, though, until he is saying: Yo, baby, you think Im join? Do I look Im join?

I aint join. The central metaphor of She Watch is this fictional Channel Zero, which represents the emptiness of those many channels on offer. Chuck D continues: Her brains being washed by an actor/And every real man that tries to approach/Come the closer he comes/He gets dissed like a roach. Sut Jhally states the obvious when she says: "The more TV you watch, the more you think the world is like TV. 12 The female subject of Chuck Ds narrative spends her time watching actors and therefore expects real men to be like the actors. Flavor Flav drives the point home: People dont look like that, people dont even live like that! Youre watching garbage.

bell hooks says that black children are sent out into a world that does not value them, that does not value blackness, and cites the desire of many black girls to straighten and dye their hair to appear more white as a significant example. The media plays its part in this denial of blackness by presenting the white, blonde woman as the epitome of feminine beauty. 13 In Spike Lees film Malcolm X we observe a young and naive Malcolm scraping his hair into a parting, again in an attempt to appear whiter. These are the kinds of negative effects of the media, and particularly television, that Public Enemy wish to reverse. In his third ad lib of the song, Flavor seems to position himself as a television watcher in the next room to the woman, only he isnt watching the soaps: I got the Tyson fight on in here, you know what Im sayin? Watch the superbowl, we got a black quarterback, so step back.

Despite the image that this conjures of a frantic Black Nationalist couch potato pestering everyone else in the house, the serious message is that black people are asserting their presence at the top of the sporting world. When Flavor tells us to step back - as if to say, step back out of the limelight - it may be to suggest that African Americans will not be marginalized for much longer. This positive attitude is what gangsta rap too often lacks. Chuck D addresses this issue in interview: this is a society that is always treading on black people, who are being thrown negativity and are adopting the negativity.

Being positive is like going up a mountain. Being negative is like sliding down a hill. A lot of times, people want to take the easy way out, because it's basically what they " ve understood throughout their lives. 14 So far I have dealt mainly with the gangsta rap of NWA and the politically conscious rap of Public Enemy. Cypress Hill, from Los Angeles, take a much more laid-back approach to their music - indeed, their chief subject matter is the calming influence of marijuana, as shown in tracks like Stoned is the Way of the Walk, I Wanna Get High and Hits From the Bong.

They spread their thematic wings occasionally with some songs about guns and women dotted about their albums, but they will always be known for their preoccupation with the drug. Lyrically, therefore, Cypress Hill have little to offer in the way of political liberation, except their advocacy of NORML (National Organisation For The Reform Of Marijuana Laws) and of the general notion of marijuana as a cultural replacement for alcohol - none of which applies specifically to African Americans. Their power lies in what Brian Cross calls the reawakening of people to the fact that what was special about [hiphop] culture was its ability to laugh in the face of adversity. 15 The song Pigs - a subversion of the childrens rhyme This Little Piggy - is a good example. With simple and catchy musical backing (bass, drums, sampled guitar line), lead rapper B-Real takes us through a series of fictional policemen, each displaying varying degrees of stupidity, incompetence, or corruption. Well this pig he's really cool/So in this class we know he rides all alone/Well this pig's standin' eatin' donuts/While some motherfuckers out robbin' your home.

B-Real hints that the cool policeman may soon be crying weezer-weezer-weezer all the way home, while evoking the humorous clich of the American police officer with donut in hand. The actual music of the band is slow and calming - it is essentially party music, as liberating as the concept of bringing people together. Apart from singing too many songs, Malcolm X was vehement in accusing his people of not having sense enough to take control of their money. We have to educate our people into the importance of knowing that when you spend your dollar out of the community in which you live, the community in which you spend your money becomes richer and richer. The community out of which you take your money becomes poorer and poorer. 16 This is precisely the problem that faces the majority of rap artists - the fact that the music industry is dominated by an oligopoly of white-owned corporations and, therefore, too much of the money hiphop generates goes to another community.

The dilemma, as the MC Boots Riley from the Coup says, is if you don't go through the major corporation, very few people hear what you have to say. Also, it might cost $ 300, 000 for a video, and $ 3 million to promote a hit record through the mainstream. Therefore, it [the record label] can actually dictate the whole direction of where hip hop should go. 17 Tricia Rose points out that the problem extends beyond money - that as most popular culture is electronically mass-mediated, hidden or resistant popular transcripts are readily absorbed into the public domain and subject to incorporation and invalidation. 18 This often leads to a curious blend of revolutionary politics and blatant subservience to record companies - as is the case with the rap-rock band Rage Against the Machine. They are what Chuck D terms the epitome of an anti-establishment within the establishment, rapping disobedient slogans like Fuck you I wont do what you tell me and We gotta take the power back - all the while answering to Epic Associated Records Ltd. This is precisely why rap artists like Eazy E and Chuck D sought other means of getting their records to their audiences.

Impressively, Eazy E managed to turn a cottage industry [Ruthless Records] into a multi-million-dollar business overnight, while still maintaining control. He refused to deal with major record labels because they took too long to put the records out, but aside from that we also got the creative freedom and solid distribution too. 19 This independent route has proved itself effective in dodging the grasp of the white-owned majors, and the final insult in Eazy Es case was that his recording career was kick-started with money gathered from drug dealing and prostitution. Boots Riley still isnt satisfied though, and points out that the money these rappers make from no sell out independent labels is rarely used for constructive causes such as education, food, shelter and clothing for the impoverished people they are often supposed to represent. He adds that many times indie labels are just aspiring to be major labels and they don't necessarily give a damn what they " re putting out and putting forth as long as it sells, so being part of an indie label is not in and of itself some sort of revolutionary act. 20 Rap is a forum born out of call-and-response, and therefore at its core has always encouraged healthy, artistic competition, and also a sense of togetherness and participation.

Unlike the majority of popular music, there are often multiple voices in rap songs, as heard in Cypress Hill, Public Enemy and Nwa's work. In the absence of a lone front man for people to idols the emphasis is on the group as a whole - and even solo rappers like Ice Cube usually have a substantial crew of other rappers to back them up. The DJ is often as likely to be singled out for praise as the vocalists (Grandmaster Flash and Dr. Dre being two notable examples). The use of two turntables is one of the lasting legacies of hiphop, allowing the DJ to meld different records into each other to create a spontaneous collage of sounds. This homemade approach resembles the strategy of punk music at the time; breaking down the huge production aesthetic of theatre rock of the seventies, reducing rock music to its fundamentals.

The art of scratching, pioneered by Grandwizard Theodore, is a highly creative and simultaneously destructive way to use turntable equipment, because in the process of creating the unique rhythmic sound, records inevitably get destroyed. Less self-indulgent than the propensity of many rock stars for smashing up equipment at the end of a show, nevertheless Grandwizard Theodore taught us to abuse our most highly prized possessions, which has a clear anti-materialist message. 20 Rap has some of its roots in old African American traditions of toasting - the speaking of vernacular poetry made from street language. Toasting itself is linked to what Cross calls the African art of rhyming over beats, which is clearly raps birthplace. 21 Ultimately, hiphop is a community of bedrooms In homes all over the city people gather around turntables different perspectives are shared, microphone techniques are invented and beat brokers collage new soundtracks for urban survival. 22 Bringing people together, encouraging creativity, celebrating blackness - this is raps true legacy. Notes

    Rose, p. 100 Norton, p. 60 web > Filthy Music: It Is Time For the Public to Speak Out By Thomas L. Jipping, J. D. , Director, Free Congress Center for Law & Democracy web > Q Magazine, June 1994 web > web > Cross, p. 36 hooks, p. 118 hooks, p. 143 web > The Use of the N-Word: Were Talking Out Both Sides of Our Mouth, by Yvonne Bone Norton, p. 93 web > hooks, p. 110 web > Cross, p. 59 Norton, p. 95 web > Rose, p. 102 Cross, p. 36 Cross, p. 10 Cross, p. 65 Cross, p. 63
Bibliography Henry Louis Gates Jr. ed, Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Norton 1997 Cross, Brian, Its Not About a Salary, Oxford, 1989 Rose, Tricia, Black Noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary America, London: University Press of New England, 1994 The Listening: Lil Kim guesting on Mases album, Harlem World, Bad Boy Entertainment, 1997 Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Def Jam, 1988 NWA, Straight Outta Compton, Priority Records, 1988 Cypress Hill, Black Sunday, Columbia, 1993


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rap artists, chuck d, public enemy, gangsta rap, african americans

Research essay sample on Gangsta Rap Rap Artists

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