Hip Hop The soundtrack of Social Movements

There is a consideration of social ethnicity and class especially in the aspect of the movement. Hip-hop, for the better part of the 1970s, has been used to examine the minority groups and the issue of poverty by challenging the perceptions held by the society. The paper ends by providing a theoretical framework essential for this literature review. Literature review Hip Hop was born out of black activism Hip-hop was born out of the dispensation of black economic and social justice in Bronx, New York in the 1970s (Washington, 2018, 98; Nocella et al. During the time, New York was caught up in the wave of post-industrial developments that saw many people move into the city. Between 1970 and 1975, 51% of suspects arrested by the police were people of a color majority of them being Blacks and Latinos (Sante, 2016; Mohamed, 2015, 1040).

Amid these economic and social frustrations, blacks and Latinos began to admonish the profiling of their people by the police and the hard economic times that they had been subjected to by segregate employers and “glass ceilings” courtesy of the circumstances that the minority races had been subjected to (Washington, 2018, 1042). One way of expressing the frustrations and expressing their frustrations was through art and music, and the Black Spades an African American band from South Bronx was notorious for that. The team held neighborhood block parties in which black power dominated in the music. 22nd August 1973 was the day Hip-hop was born. Usually, rap songs enumerate life in the street, living in the ghetto, the plight of an immigrant, Religious hypocrisy and political movements that criticize government corruption and using street language and at times words that the audience cannot even conjecture what is being said.

Then the hip-hop dances are made in such frenzy that they are fast breakdown body movements (Nocella, 177). For the reasons, the youth identify more with hip-hop music as the music portray too much of a youth’s disenfranchised life and even feature a youth-friendly setting. No wonder a wobbling 55% of Hip hope music audience is the youth. Empirical evidence has proven that it is not the jigs and the jargon that attract the youth. Now the lavish Afrikaners used the Sun City to entertain delegations of envoys sent by the West by inviting list A entertainers most of whom played hip-hop made in South Africa. Conversely, there were the “Homelands,” where blacks were moved by the British government from their black settled lands to be crowded in the “homelands” resembling what has gone to be likened to the Indian reservations (Becker, 2017, 244).

This class and race separation is what scholars have gone down in history to call South Africa’s Apartheid (Watkins, 2017, 140). As this happened, the other Africans went getting so bitter feeling the toll of segregation expressing their anger through hip-hop and rallying political following to resist the Sun Cities that were zoned as for the rich whites and the cocoons of traitorous Afrikaners. Among the popular anti- Apartheid hip-hop artists were: Steven Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen who rallied the then popular rock musicians like: Bob Dylan, Bono, Peter Gabriel, Bonnie Raitt, Hall & Oates, Jackson Browne, Ringo Starr, Pat Benatar to resist entertaining perpetrators of Apartheid and went hard in their raps against the white government and the Afrikaans (Becker, 2017, 250; Cloonan, 2016; Watkins, 2017; 140).

The political role of hip-hop cannot thus be overemphasized. This again makes hip-hop very critical in as far as the debate about social movements is concerned. Hip Hop and Diseases awareness As a popular and mainstream culture, Hip-hop has been cited by Mandy (2013) as possessing the ability to be used to emancipate the public coming close to the media. Mandy cites a case in an example where Alicia Keys has been at the center of emancipating women, children, blacks, and Hispanics through her pop songs and participating in events as well. Keys is said to have been a focal tool at the 2013 “EMPOWERED” campaign. ” The artists D12, shadow and Kuzzy also composed the hip-hop song, “Ebola in town”. The songs went a long way to combat the epidemic that would later be defeated towards the end of 2014 (Rivera, 2017, 70).

Hip-hop is thus an undeniably powerful tool for diseases awareness. Hip Hop is killing Islamophobia After the events of September 9/11 where the militant Al-Qaeda launched one of the deadliest terror attacks in the American soil, New York, there has been emerging a wrong public mentality where every Muslim is being profiled as a potential terrorist. Angered by the current developments, Muslims have the descent into hip-hop as an avenue good enough to criticize the stereotype and explain to be understood who a Muslim is in reality. Fed up with the corporate and government irresponsibility, on the 17th November of 2011 began to poor in the Zuccotti park of New York, protests that would last for the next seven months. Among the leading celebrities taking the front bench in the “Occupy Wall Street,” were popular hip-hop artists some of whom had also composed music criticizing the irresponsibility of the Wall Street and the government of the United States.

This way, hip-hop portrayed itself as a tool that was inevitable for a progressive social movement. Atak, et al. , (2014) enumerates a number of artists and the roles that they played in the “the Occupy the wall street movement. This research will take the research a notch higher by investigating how Hip-hop has been used during social; movements rather than the roles it has played. The research will unravel the roles played by hip-hop where the positive roles are just but part of the roles that hip-hop has played as far as social movements are concerned. This research will go far to unravel how at times, hip-hop has been used in social movements to show societal rot or has been used in the wrong way surpassing the naïve following by many researchers who only look at the positive side negating the negative roles that Hip-hop has played in social movements.

Theoretical framework This research will be framed within the scope of two Sociological theories: First will be the collective behavior theory then the Symbolic interaction theory. The collective Behavior theory Collective behavior is a term that is believed to have been conceived by an American economist and sociologist Franklin Henry Giddings in 1908. Symbolic interactionism The theory, another key concept in sociology enumerates that people ascribe meanings to events and objects, symbols. People will interpret the behavior of one another and it is this that will form social bonds. This theory was conceived by an American psychologist, sociologist, and philosopher, George Herbert Mead in 1920s. Mead never put his concept in a treatise until he died in 1931. When he died, his students advanced the concept where they compiled Mead’s idea in what they called, Mind, Self, and society.