Social Issues In Hip Hop Music

An importance role of hip-hop was to to bring about social change for poor, marginalized people of color through creating national awareness of the oppression they were experiencing at the hands of white America, also known as conscious rap (Orejuela, 2015, pg. 111). Since discussing social issues in hip hop music became a theme with the hope that “it may begin to saturate other arenas,” ultimately the goal then became to, “dominate public, and especially, media discourse” (Forman & Neal, 2012, pg. 696). This is especially important because other sources of public informational gathering like the news media, mostly tends to be biased, stereotypical, and ultimately motivated to purely maintain a white social order. Chuck D demonstrated this
45). Even NWA’s “Fuck the Police” used music to address police brutality and racial harassment in order to expand these messages to a broader audience. The purposes of this music is to create a reaction and force audiences to listen to the real life experiences of these people. Besides the lyrics themselves, hip-hop artists could also demonstrate political resistance through their performance, such as when Public Enemy would carry plastic guns as a blatant sign of power and survival, along with their emphasis on black collectiveness, that sparked national outrage by the white community (Chang, 2005, pg. 253). Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” also informed audiences of “jungle” like inner city living, which eventually became known as Black nationalism (Orejuela, 2015, pg.
Finally, these artists may share a common cultural perspective which suggests that African Americans should unite and unify to form a collective unit, regardless of other political components (Orejuela, 2015, pg. 129). Some of these artists may even choose to be identified as hip hop activists” which incorporate the rhetoric of social conditions within their own inner city neighborhoods” and thus, serve as the “buffer between power and the masses that it represents” (Chang, 2006, pg. 46). They can also be referred to as “raptivists” which are artists that help the black community in America became relevant and respected in the eyes of white institutions, while they also “encourage them to learn their history and acknowledge their past” (Orejuela, 2015, pg.