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Hip-Hop Culture In Kendrick Lamar's Funk Music As Genre

1097 Words5 Pages

Genre is used throughout music to define and categorize a “type” of music depending on its shared musical characteristics. However, genre is often translated into difficult and precarious judgements (Frow 13) that limit the music within the genre. Hip-hop has become an example of a genre that is seen in a way quite opposite to how it emerged. In Funk Music as Genre, Matthew Brown says that the traditional definitions of genre “are dubious in contemporary cultural criticism, where bounding expression and claiming purity are rightfully scrutinized” (486). In other words, Brown is saying that the general assumptions surrounding the hip-hop social identity do not adequately integrate the history of the diversity of black arts activity (Brown, 486). …show more content…

The cultural practices including; graffiti art, graffiti writing, DJs, breakdancing and a unique fashion sense, evolved around the struggling community and the racial inequalities that were present at the time. Today, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly has become a defiant yet proud source of black culture in the face of those who don’t see hip-hop as anything more than a “race-baiter” or “thug” genre (Harris 2). The album successfully incorporates the struggles of oppression and racial injustice that caused hip-hop to emerge as a genre. This essay will work to analyze Kendrick Lamar’s cover artwork for To Pimp a Butterfly as well as his music video “Alright” in order to justify how, unlike the majority of hip-hop genre classifications today, Lamar genuinely fosters the afro-diasporic origins and institutionalized racism and oppression from which hip-hop became a

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