The Hip Hop Wars By Tricia Rose

a. Throughout Tricia Rose’s work of the Hip Hop Wars, she goes back and forth between a couple different topics relating to the genre, such as the debate about hip hop causing violence, or reflecting a violent ghetto culture, along with if hip hop is sexist, or if people against the music or just anti-sex. She talks about how hip hop has made a positive impact on society as a whole, by giving people who may feel left out a voice and allowed those in working-class and poor communities a way to express their social and political beliefs. But she also describes the genre as a topic which has created tension among numerous different people, for promoting violence and other anti-feminist ideals. “Members of the hip hop generation are now facing

Very similarly to rhythm and blues, rock and roll and the Civil Rights Movement inspired hip hop in a variety of different ways, as African American artists worked to find a space for themselves in the music industry. Not many people find a correlation between African Americans and Rock and Roll, but there’s surprisingly a deep history, and it’s not just white people who developed this specific genre, but there was African American-centered and ghetto-centered versions of rock and roll. “There are enough similarities between, for instance, rock & roll and commercial rap, especially rock rap, to make a case for critically engaging them as interracial arenas where black and white youths, among others, put forward messages and advanced ideals that have been not only informed by the Civil Rights Movement and the Hip Hop Movement, respectively, but in turn, even if only implicitly, have influenced the rhetoric, politics, and aesthetics of these movements” (Rabaka 99). There was a strong transition from this type of “rock rap” music being labeled as ghetto music, into universal music that people of all races and ethnicities would listen to. Early on, much of America viewed music African Americans were making as negative, and without much meaning coming from the suburb areas. But as time progressed, white Americans became more open to African American music, and this helped to desegregate much of the nation in the industry. “At long last, African American culture, via rock & roll, was being presented to mainstream American society in dignity-endorsing and unambiguously uplifting ways that ran counter to the antiblack racist assumptions that were previously projected onto African American life, culture, and aesthetics” (Rabaka 113). Rock and roll gave a large group of individuals, in a country that had dealt with all sorts of racist stereotypes for centuries, a feeling of freedom, and a chance to develop a serious social dialogue and cultural understanding to