Exercise One: Defining Culture Through Recent Hip-Hop Controversies?

Exercise One: Defining Culture through Recent Hip-hop Controversies Since I was in middle school and began to form my own taste in music, I fell in love with the world of hip-hop. The quick beats and clever lyrics were addictive and as I started to educate myself more on the artistry and history that came with this genre, I understood how American hip-hop was more than music. This genre has been very closely associated with African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino culture and has been since its rise in the seventies (Colombia 2023). In this sense, culture is the historical makeup of a group of individuals through a common medium like music. However, culture in the modern day is not only seen as the history of a shared community but is used

As seen in the New Yorker article by Joshua Rothman where he articulates how the word had seemed to carry a negative association with it in the year of 2014, simply because of the misconceptions and failed understandings of the phrase. Yet I believe that in the past decade, with the larger exposure society has to other cultures with advancing technology, there has again been a shift in the way we view the word to mean. This shift is being reflected in this lyric and is why it was the first thing that came to my mind when reading about the ever-changing definition of the word “culture”. In this use, Lamar is explaining culture as a united group of people with a shared opinion and—despite its usage to diss Drake—I believe it shows how the American people commonly view the word as a positive and prideful association. This way of defining culture seen today ties in with the anthropological concept of culture as a way of life that was defined by Raymond Williams in “Keywords”. Through this lens, Lamar is saying that these attacks on Drake are something which comes so naturally to the community of hip-hop that anything different would be questioned.