Hip Hop Vs Rap Culture

associated with the hip-hop and rap culture; her distortion comes from the fact that she only focuses on one side of it. The content of her songs lacks the same depth and meaning; it shows the subjective perception of what hip-hop and rap is without a history to back up the values. Examining her song “Mo Bounce” in particular, we see that there are several major problems with the image she projects. For one the lyrics are repetitive, the phrase “mo bounce” is constantly repeated and makes up the majority of the song. The beat in the background adopts a hip-hop style, making it seem like a typical hip-hop and rap song. However, the effort put into composing the rhymes are lacking, with most of it being the repetition of the same phrase. Another

Miley Cyrus, unlike Iggy Azalea, was already rich and famous before she went through a phase where she attempted to adopt a hip-hop persona in order to break away from her roots in the Disney industry. While Cyrus did not attempt to rap and make that a part of her music like Azalea, she adopted the stereotypical hip-hop style aesthetically. The music video of “We Can’t Stop” opens with a scene of Cyrus cutting what looks like an ankle monitor of off her. She then turns on a Beats speaker with her hand that was glad in gold rings and bling, puts on gold grills, combs her hair back and bares her teeth at the camera. This image and the accessories that Cyrus uses has similarities to the description of boys who blasted hip-hop from their boom boxes in Coates’ book, “The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world” (14). Cyrus’ extravagance seems to match the boys Coates saw on the streets pretty well, but the problem with this image is the fact that, while it is true that these aspects exists in the hip-hop and black culture, it is not something that is applauded or done for the sake of looking cool. The hip-hop image was created and kept up so that the kids on the streets would be

Miley Cyrus might not have needed nor wanted to use the hip-hop culture to her advantage, but she caused damages nonetheless. Not only did she misrepresent the culture, but Cyrus also becomes known and adored by many people for her style. In the “We Can’t Stop” video, she twerks as her signature move, with black women surrounding her in awe, she parties, and she does what she wants without caring for judgement. Except that this isn’t her explicitly her unique style. This is the style many black female rappers and hip-hop artists that came before Cyrus, but most of them went unrecognized. Cyrus, on the other hand, wins awards and earns recognition, taking the opportunity away from black female artists. Unlike Azalea, Cyrus did not need to use the hip-hop culture to earn fame and money, it is quite apparent that she was merely using it because she wanted change and she claimed to adore the genre. However, she reaped the same benefits Azalea did, she earned recognition for the appropriation of culture that she is not truly a part