Hip Hop Cultural Influence

By Ronald Roach

As a cultural movement, hip-hop manages to get billed as both a positive and negative influence on young people, especially on Black and Latino youth. On one hand, there are African American activists, artists and entrepreneurs, such as Russell Simmons, who seek to build a progressive political movement among young hip-hop fans and who have had modest success with voter registration efforts. On the other hand, there’s no shortage of critics who denounce the negative portrayals of Black people, especially women, in hip-hop lyrics and videos.
Recently, a few critics in major U.S. newspapers took note of a well-publicized marketing firm study that cited the cultural influence of hip-hop and reported on sexuality among African
Their motto: ‘Use or be used,’ among others. And ‘Get it while you can.’ And consistent with a culture that uses ‘bitches’ and ‘hos’ as labels for every woman but one’s mama, the study reveals ‘Black females are dissed by almost everyone,’ including other Black females,” wrote nationally syndicated columnist Clarence Page.
“The study of the hip-hop generation fails to pin down the big question: Does rap music and other traits of the hip-hop culture influence teens or merely mirror the culture that teens have created? The answer is probably both,” Page noted.
After more than two decades of hip-hop’s growth, an emerging cohort of young scholars may very well provide clear answers to questions of hip-hop’s influence. “At one level, we need to document the genre. On a more sophisticated level, we need to determine how African American and Latino students perceive their social identity with respect to hip-hop’s content, expressions and context. It is also important that we examine the perspectives of both the producers and consumers of hip-hop,” says Dr. Beatrice Bridglall, the assistant director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Columbia
I don’t know if it would be a main focus, but it’s something that will be part of it because it’s part of the people that I’m doing research on,” Rice says.
Dr. Anthony Kwame Harrison, a newly minted Ph.D. in anthropology from Syracuse University who wrote his dissertation on West Coast underground rap music, believes that scholars who assess hip-hop’s impact on youth should be clear to make distinctions among the various genres of rap music, as well as the media and corporate entities that promote hip-hop culture. Harrison, a devotee of progressive hip-hop culture which includes underground rap, says it’s incumbent upon scholars to examine the corporate culture that promotes the hip-hop music most commonly heard on radio and viewed as music videos on television.
Since the early 1990s, the biggest selling hip-hop artists have been the ones most associated with “gangsta” rap; the “bling-bling” rap that celebrates materialism; and the “big pimping” rap that denigrates women, according to Harrison, who teaches in the sociology department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “It’s the partnership of hip-hop and corporate media that’s brought us the negative images and the rap music that people complain most about,” Harrison