Comparing Miley Cyrus's And Iggy Azalea

The Hip-Hop and Rap industry has, for many years, been the pride of the black community. It was curated by them and rooted in their culture, with the history of its origins dating back to the days of slavery, the lyrical rhymes and the metaphors being a part of the secret language they constructed in order to protect themselves from the white masters. Eventually, the genre expanded to encompass a whole culture filled with songs about the hardship of black bodies, a unique sense of fashion, a different manner of speaking and acting, etc. In recent years, the genre has been rapidly rising to popularity. You can now hear rap and hip-hop songs emanating from bars to people’s cars. However, with its increasing popularity comes the increasing number

Moreover, this ends up giving the privileged white people the power to redefine the meanings of a genre that is a part of the black culture, and the two signers as examples, misrepresents it. Miley Cyrus’s and Iggy Azalea’s hip-hop/rap persona is a form of cultural appropriation because their hip-hop/rap personas take a key aspect of the black culture, butchers it, and redefines it as their own. The genre of hip-hop and rap is often stereotyped to be about money, women, and materialism, but it is, in fact built upon the oppression of the black race. Hip-hop’s messages were often perceived as vulgar and thus it was not considered as respectable of a genre as perhaps country and pop. However, many of the songs in fact reflect the suppression of black bodies and their rebellion

Lyrics of the hip-hop song “Never Let Me Down” by Kanye West says, “I get down for my grandfather who took my mama / made her sit in that seat where white folks ain’t want us to eat / at the tender age of 6 she was arrested for the sit-ins / and with that in my blood I was born to be different.” Here, West is detailing the injustice committed against his mother for being in a place where she wasn’t allowed merely due to her skin color. There are many other hip-hop and rap songs by contemporary artists that holds similar meanings. The stereotype that sex, materialism, and drugs defines the entirety of the hip-hop and rap genre is far from true. That being said, there are songs that do focus around the appeal of having money, materials, and women. I would argue, however, that the reason behind it stems from the history of suppression of the black race. People who were born black are not privileged; they are not born with the security and the multiple windows of opportunity that white people are born with. Many of them struggle every day to even survive in the battlefield of their own community. In his book Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates spends a great deal of time detailing the nature of black bodies in