Gangsta Rap Kills Hip-Hop: A Lost Culture

By Jerome Joyce

Outside of what many people may believe about Hip-Hop it’s not a genre of music, but a culture built around R.A.P. music (Rhythm And Poetry), dance, tagging and DJ’s. After the rap music was broken into different categories, such as gangsta rap, down-south rap, and snap, hip-hop was used to define the original type of rap that the culture itself was built from.

Photo Credit: Black Culture Is Popular

Hip-Hop the cultural movement was crated in the early 70’s in the South Bronx, kids got together to keep away from the gangs to impress themselves in the form of visual arts (graffiti art or tagging), dance (b-boying or break dance), verbal expression (rapping or rap) and an aural expression (DJ’ing).  Kids wanted to get off the street and do something positive through music. When hip-hop first started the rhymes that were told were more story-like than what’s being released today. The basis of these stories was about self-empowerment and had a positive tone.

In the 1980’s the hip-hop culture expanded out of the community and became main-stream and commercialize, breaking into the before mention sub-genres such as gangsta rap. When gangsta rap came to life hip-hop died, the culture was broke. The DJ wasn’t needed because the sound was different, the difference is sound change the dance almost to elimination, the graffiti art didn’t exist no more, but more importantly the positive message to empower a group of people was silenced.

Unfortunately sex, violence and drugs sells faster than a positive message, which made the records companies encourage the artist to write more gangsta rap, which resulted in the death of a lost culture. Surely Hip-Hop still exist, but now it’s considered a genre of music that is mainly conscious rap. The art of DJ’ing has changed to a computer assist form of mixing, which is no longer a craft. Since the song “Lean Back” became popular, songs such as “Watch Me Whip” instruct the dancing done today; dancing is no longer a form of expression.

 Since the fall of the culture there has been many speculations that says gangsta rap is the cause of the heighten violence in the urban communities. Although this statement hasn’t been proven, but if Hip-Hop was created to keep the community away from violence, destroying hip-hop may have introduced them to violence.