Thesis: The popularization of rap music in the 1980s shrunk cultural separations between blacks and whites by exposing white youth to the reality that many black people in America were living in poverty and still experienced social and economic inequality to white people.
Such exposure fostered white people’s interest, empathy, and respect for black Americans and created a more integrated country as a result.
One of the most influential moments in rap music’s popularization was the rise of the song “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, which the first rap song to stray from the rap scheme of self praise and rather focus on issues in the black neighborhoods in New York. The newspaper article "RAP: THE FURIOUS FIVE” by John Rockwell was featured in the New York Times on September 11, 1982 and provides a powerful insight into the increasingly positive white reaction rap songs such as “The Message”. It was written about three months after the
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MTV Raps” that it became a staple of the American youth. The 6-day-a-week show furthered the popularization of rap and, more importantly, made black culture the height of “cool” among white children in America. The article “Yo! MTV discovers rap is hot” was published on February 4, 1990 by Cary Darling in the Orange County Register and details the unprecedented success of MTV’s “Yo! MTV Raps” and how it brought music to the mainstream. The article was written about two years after the show first aired and had since become one of the most popular shows on television. In this article, Darling reports interviews she had with the cast of the show and remarks on how the hosts connect perfectly to rap music’s far more diverse audience. Rap music’s diffusion from the radio to the television firstly displayed its growing popularity, but also brought rap to a larger and more mixed audience than ever