Response 16: "Voices From The Margins"

Rap culture and rap music has undoubtedly changed since its emergence, but one of the great things about it is that it has now become its own voice and heavily influences other aspects of mass media and popular culture (although there are some drawbacks to the new promotion of a lavish lifestyle).

“news media attention on rap seems fixated on instances of violence at rap concerts, rap producers’ illegal use of musical samples, gangsta raps’ lurid fantasies of cop killing and female dismemberment, and black nationalist rappers’ suggestion that white people are the devil’s disciples” (179). This statement kind of gets one to think about the media’s tendency to not perhaps always go with the best story, but rather stories that would gain the most public attention/outrage/surprise etcetera. It is no secret that minority actors usually get typecast into stereotypical roles associated with that race or ethnicity. On the Steve Harvey Show, Steve brought on some people that work in Hollywood to ask whether roles are still typecast into stereotypes and one African American actress talked about how sometimes there would be stories/scripts of a black character but the story didn’t fit the traditional stereotypes of black culture/community and so those scripts would be given to white actors instead.

I do agree with Rose’s statement that “Rap music is a black cultural expression that prioritizes black voices from the margins of urban America” (179). Although “Even as rappers achieve what appears to be central status in commercial culture, they are far more vulnerable to censorship efforts that highly visible white rock artists in the music and sports industries”, rap music today is still more expressive of African American culture and subcultures than African American characters that are portrayed in a majority of films and television shows.