The Life Above and Beyond essays

The Life Above and Beyond essays Dont Knock the Rap: A Response to Venise Berrrys Redeeming the Rap Music Experience Rap music has been getting a bad rap from parents, legislators, and other authority figures ever since it first hit the American pop music scene in the early 1980s. Adults tend to see rap as having a harmful effect on its listeners, promoting violence, free sex, a bad image of women, and racist attitudes towards Jews, Koreans, and whites in general. In Redeeming the Rap Music Experience, Venise Berry argues that this rap is not deserved. In her view, rap music is morally pluralistic. By this she means that rap music portrays a wide range of attitudes. Some of those attitudes are very positive. Others are negative. But the negative attitudes let us see the problems and struggles of the community that produces rap music: the young, mostly black, urban community. Berry begins by explaining that rap music is similar to other kinds of African American music in that it captures the feelings and struggles of the community that produces it. Sprituals, blues, and jazz captured the feelings and struggles of the slaves, the early 20th century blacks, and the late 20th century blacks as they moved from bondage to segregation to wanting to state their identities as African Americans. The community that rap music comes out of is struggling with feelings of low self-esteem and powerlessness. These kids have to struggle with poverty, racism, lack of opportunity, and with mainstream America seeing them as deviants (p. 615). So they express their anger and helplessness in angry, sometimes violent songs. ...