Rap Music Case

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VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY HANOI

       UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

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FINAL ESSAY

Topic: Rap is full of anger, not just the type of anger boys have over their girls seeing someone else, but for more actual (social) reason. Study angry rap songs (by N.W.A, Public Enemy, Eminem, Kanye West, to name just a few) and explain what they are angry about. What events/ problems trigger such rage?

Name: Nguyen Quynh Anh

Class: QH2012.E9

D.O.B: 16/11/1994

Student number: 12040031

Hanoi, 5/2015

Nowadays, music plays a significant role in our daily life and brings people many benefits. It provides the audiences the relaxation, stress or pain reduction, and more highly effective working way, or just a chance to enjoy and explore the art. To the musicians, composing these pieces of music is not only about to supply such great benefits but also a way to express their deeply inner mind with the hidden messages which they want to send to the listeners. Especially, Rap is one of the types of music which contribute a lot to that aim. It is said that Rap was full of anger, not just the type of anger boys have over their girls seeing someone else, but for more social reasons. That idea impressed me so much that I decided to have a deeply research to find out what some rap songs are really angry about and what lead to that rage.

Rap music is performed in a vocal style that means it is not generally sung and the lyrics are spoken against a backdrop music, like telling a story. Musicians typically remix sounds and rhythms, adding their own innovations, and often synthesized musical elements. (“What is Rap Music?”, n.d, para 1). Rap music, which began in the underground music scene of the 1970s, is believed to reflect its origin in Black culture or African-American culture including Hip hop, DJ, Graffiti and itself. Therefore, African-American people choose this form of music to write about many controversial themes in our daily life, especially related to unequal relationship among different races. Rap songs have a new function as the voice of an underrepresented group.

Without the background knowledge about historical and social context of African-American in the US, it is hard for us to understand these songs. Randomly, I found out some issues that many rap songs share with each other. The anger in these rap songs is often about 3 main issues, namely the ill-fated life of African-American in the racial discrimination, the government against the Black people and the voice of African-American to protect themselves.

The very first issue is about the African-Americans having to suffer the ill-fated life physically and mentally. When hearing the lyrics of the song “Change” by Tupac, we can see these in only a sentence such as the poverty “I'm tired of bein' poor” and the racial issue “even worse I'm black” or “All I see is racist faces/Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races we under”.  Tupac is one of the rappers who were willing to contribute almost of his songs to accuse the society where the urban and working class African-Americans had to suffer the “misplaced hate” from the White people because of the races or the skin color that they have. Moreover, these problems lead to the homeless people, the violence on the street when they tried to get rid of that ill-fated life: “I'm lookin' for a purse to snatch” or “Give 'em guns, step back, and watch 'em kill each other” (Shakur, Change, 1998). There is no peace in this life. When they got stuck in a long time, they were willing to do something madly to save themselves from that. Public Enemy used to sing in their song “Fight the power”: “People, people we are the same' / No, we're not the same / 'Cause we don't know the game". This band pointed out clearly that the black and the white were not “the same”, that means the same rights, the same living condition and the same life. “The game” of faith without any rules didn’t belong to all of people living in the world. It belonged to the white who considered themselves as higher social position compared to the black.

Some people said that the segregation was only minded by people who had low education or limited awareness. However, the reality proved how wrong this idea was. Even the laws passed by the highly educated government, especially the police empowered by the state to enforce the law seemed to be against African-Americans. The band N.W.A expresses their displeasure with the racist polices through the song “F*ck the police”. Because of their race “brown”, they were treated badly like “Searching my car, looking for the product” as if they all were criminal like the prejudice “Thinking every nigga is selling narcotics”. N.W.A shows that the police believed to be in higher social position because of having no “the other color”, so they can “have the authority to kill a minority” (Public Enemy, Fight the power, 1989). Even the workers for the government had the wrong prejudices about the black people who were believed to be in the bottom of the society and do nothing but crimes. These wrong prejudices were deeply rooted in their mind which controls their action. It is hard to change them which have existed for a long time, so the black people have to live in hell without any respects.

Living in that ill-fated life for a long time, it is time for African-American to raise their voice to save their life. At first, they are proud with their race. They are proud of the incredible success that the black made. They are proud of the bravery that the black have. They don’t deny their origin, but declare their own perspective “Got to give us what we want/ gotta give us what we need/ Our Freedom of speech is freedom or death/ We got to fight the powers that be” (Public Enemy, Fight the power, 1989). They know exactly what they want and they determined on fighting for that aim: “What we need is awareness, we can't get careless/…/You gotta go for what you know/Make everybody see, in order to fight the powers that be/ Lemme hear you say/ Fight the power” (Public Enemy, Fight the power, 1989).  It is not like in the rap song “Change” by Tupac, where they tried a lot to change everything but it didn’t work. The Black is not easy to give up. They think of bright future with the skin color ignorance that they are looking forward to like in the song “Erase racism” by Kool G. Rap “ I walk through a color blind corridor/ Seekin, for peace in the people I'm meetin/Black white and Puerto Rican men are greetin each other/ Just like brothers, there's plenty and many of others/You can discover, kids fathers and mother/ A meltin pot, no one felt they got prejudice”. They have the right to dream of peaceful world where people “learn to live equal” and “no need for a man to bleed”, where people do not “ hate and underrate” and where the black can live with truly who they are. They use words, use music to send the message of beautiful life without racism and their determination to take the power back to create the equal life.