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Hip Hop and American Values: Accusations Against and Refute

In her book The Hip Hop Wars, author Tricia Rose discusses accusations that Hip Hop is destroying America's values and how it demeans women. She provides quotations from prominent individuals on the subject and then counters these viewpoints by placing them in a different context. This paper will discuss both the accusations against Hip Hop and how Rose refutes them.

Chapter 4 of Rose's book deals with accusations that Hip Hop is destroying America's values. The first quote that Rose presents in the chapter is that of former secretary of education and former director of the Office of National Drug Council Policy William Bennett, who said, "I think that nothing less is at stake than preservation of civilization. This stuff by itself won't bring down civilization but it doesn't help" (Rose, 2008, p. 95). This quote is followed with one by Bob Dole, who warns that "popular culture threatens to undermine our character as a nation," and then one by Reverend Calvin O. Butts III, who declares, "Unless we speak against this [rap music] it will creep continually into our society and destroy the morals of our young people" (Rose, 2008, p. 95). Rose deems it "hyperbolic" that Hip Hop is being blamed for the decline in America's values, and she attributes this to mental associations of black people with violence, fears related to the vast cultural change that has been taking place over the past few years, the impact of social movements from the 1960s and 1970s, and the change from an industrial to a post-industrial economy (Rose, 2008, p. 87). She notes that people tend to experience a sense of "cultural outrage" when paradigm shifts occur in the culture or the economy, and this is due to a feeling "that things are out of control" (Rose, 2008, p. 104).

Rose counters these arguments by pointing out that in fact, Hip Hop reflects both conservative and liberal values, not just liberal values, and that "violent b

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Hip Hop and American Values: Accusations Against and Refute. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:49, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2001456.html