Hip-Hop

Cedric Muhammad (2006) thinks rapsters and hip-hoppers ought to stop behaving like strutting juveniles and grow up. He draws an analogy between Puffy and Shyne in the hands of the law they hold in contempt, and argues that the popular phenomenon of hip-hop seems collectively immature. The crisis in hip-hop today, he protests, is that in the past 30 years seems unable to learn, and cannot tell a friend from an enemy. Even the superstars use aggression to mask their anxieties. Muhammad calls it a "maturity reversal." Sudden affluence merely increases the display of self-indulgence, and mocks the hard-won gains of black America. ) Kitwana (2005) suggests that the division between the hip-hop generation and the civil rights generations is as vast as the division within the country in 1960 (p.22).

The example of Puffy and the callow Shyne is apt. Muhammad laments that the old star could not constrain his protTgT and so Shyne heads for jail at age 20 for the kind of aggression hip-hop glorifies. Muhammad frames the persistent ques

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many writers and thinkers mistakenly see a kind of informed political engagement, even a revolutionary potential, in rap and hip-hop. However, by "teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly 'authentic' response to a presumptively racist society, rap militancy retards black success." The venom that suffuses rap had little standing in black popular culture -- indeed, in black attitudes - before the 1960s: The hip-hop ethos can trace its genealogy to the emergence in that decade of a black ideology that equated black strength and authentic black identity with a militantly adversarial stance toward American society. In the angry new mood, captured by Malcolm X's upraised fist, many blacks (and many more white liberals) began to view black crime and violence as perfectly natural, even appropriate, responses to the supposed dehumanization and poverty inflicted by a racist society (2006). But rap took a dark turn in the early 1980s, as this "bubble gum" music gave way to a "gangsta" style that picked up where" blaxploitation" left off. Now top rappers began to write rhymes celebrating street warfare or drugs and promiscuity, as in the ominous 1982 hit, "The Message": "You grow in the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2355
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)