thesis statement about rap music

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Music Argumentative Essay Topics: 25+ Ideas for Inspiration

by  Antony W

June 24, 2024

Music is no doubt the best go-to stress buster for all of us. No wonder if you look around you, you’ll see people listening to music from all kinds of music devices you can name.

From Mp3 players and smartphones to PA systems and car stereos, the world around you is no doubt almost fully musical in form.

With news lyrics, celebrity gossips, artists, and new musical hits appearing on YouTube, Sound Cloud, and Spotify every day, there’s no limit to the number of argumentative essay topics on music.

From Robert Matthew Van Winkle fast rap to Dax hip-hop tunes, finding the right essay topic to explore just got easier. In this post, we give you a list of 30+ argumentative topics from which you can choose an appealing title to give your essay a fresh, breathtaking spin.

Music Argumentative Essay Topics

The following is a list of 30+ music argumentative essay topics that you can consider if you have no idea where to start – or if you need a title to start working on right away:

• Is pop culture an evergreen vogue or a temporary fad?
• Can we term fusion music as actual music?
• White rappers are giving a bad name to the rap music genre
• Pop music is worthy enough for our ears than rap music
• Jazz music is dying out
• Can we use music as treatment for mental health disorder?
• Music influencers are a waste of time
• People should not allow the playing of music in the realm of politics and political campaign
• Digital music formats will completely wipe out physical copies from distribution
• It’s impossible to enjoy music without understanding the lyrics
• Metal music has a very bad influence on people’s behavior
• EMD is pure noise, not music
• One doesn’t need to have musical training to write lyrics and sing as natural talent is enough
• Should School students should study music instead of learning how to dance
• Is music an effective means of drawing in potential customers to a new product?
• Music has the power to increase an individual’s level of productivity
• Music isn’t as addictive as movies and television series
• Children can learn music faster than adults
• Music producers are not doing enough to promote musicians new to the industry
• Are parental warning labels on music videos really necessary?
• Music can’t affect a student’s ability to read and complete their homework
• Social media presence and celebrity stays hugely contributes to the rate of an artist’s success.
• Should companies incorporate music in their marketing campaigns?
• Existing laws cannot stop people from realistically copying music
• Music doesn’t help the world become a better place
• Do music award events influence the type of music that many people listen to?
• Music award shows create hostility among musicians more than they inspire creative art
• Music should be a mandatory subject in literary school
• Music producers are responsible for the moral degradation that stem from the production of explicit music
• Can the entertainment industry prevent
• Do certain genre of music, such as rap and hip-hop, generate violence?
• It’s unethical to copyright traditional music
• Can we borrow music from international artists without necessarily attributing their work?
• Should the social controversies about a musician influence our decision to listen to their music?
• Do musicians choose the genre of music depending on the instruments used?
• Movie and TV production industries pay musician more for continuous use of their work.
• Is music of the future generation will be more annoying than the current
• Music that’s used to present bad and harmful ideologies should be banned
• The advent of internet music has made physical music stores completely irrelevant
• Music can help a person to mediate and find a greater purpose in life
• Is listening to music more entertaining than watching movies or playing the 21st century video games?
• Music genre has a limited number of tune variation
• Is music without lyrics pure?
• Should YouTube ban the publication of X-rated music completely?
• Classical music is better than other music genres.
• Companies such as Spotify and Deezer should stop charging people a monthly subscription to listen to music.
• Offline music apps are a waste of time in the current internet-powered world.
• Are piano music sheets relevant in the production of modern music?
• Politicians use music as propaganda in political races.
• Music has a positive impact on modern society.
• Traditional old school music is better than modern music.
• The production of explicit music videos should banned.
• Is there a connection between different music genres?
• Classical music doesn’t play any significant role in the production of music today
• International music is better than local music
• Does the ability to play piano automatically makes one an expert in writing music sheets?
• There’s no connection between social class and music genre
• Does music have a negative influence on society?
• X-rated music has a negative effect on a listeners brain
• Music is way better than other types of media
• Music has more influence on culture than poetry does
• Is writing music an art?
• Writing music doesn’t reflect the way an artist thinks in their daily life
• Do women play an important role in the production of music?
• Women play a great role in the production of music
• Modern pop music is badly written compared to the pop music of the 60s.
• Celebrities who release music but have no musical talents should not be promoted to be as famous as professional musicians.
• Violent lyrics in music plays a role in building a violent society
• Are parental warning labels on music still relevant today?
• Music band that have been inactive for years should not come back

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Related Reading

• Technology Argumentative Essay Topics
• Argumentative Essay Topics on Racism
• Argumentative Essay Topics on Social Media

About the author 

Antony W is a professional writer and coach at Help for Assessment. He spends countless hours every day researching and writing great content filled with expert advice on how to write engaging essays, research papers, and assignments.

Chapter 5: African American English and the communities it influences

5.4.2 Hip hop’s influence on African American youth (prospectus)

Amiri Austin

English 102, October 2020

For my final research essay, I will be continuing from my topic of essay 2 which was how rap or hip hop has helped influence African American youth. In my essay I will be talking about articles that help support my thesis of “Rap music’s significant impact in various ways in African American communities, whether it be through programs used in schools or independent studies on certain songs.”. Music in general has helped change so many lives for the better and has truly become one of the greatest arts for people to express themselves in. Rap music especially has helped many people in tough situations escape their reality and has helped them progress as a person. Rap or Hip-Hop music has also helped influence generations view on certain topics and has helped create opportunities young black kids otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to experience.

I will now tell you how I plan to layout my research paper. I will start with an introduction that leads into my thesis statement about rap music and I’ll try to tie in connecting themes to relate to my readers, but like it was stated in the YouTube video Prof. Townsend put out I think it would be easier to start off by writing a paragraph on my main topic or answering a research question rather than taking too long trying to think of an introduction. I believe I will try to divide my paper by answering research questions and then perhaps talk about why I believe it is such an important topic for today’s climate in the United States and show my readers just how much of a difference Rap music has made and will continue to make in impacting African-American youth around the country. I will start off by truly going into depth about the articles I researched and explain the facts about music helping African American people. After this I will answer questions like “How can music help African American communities?” and “How can rap lyrics be used to promote understanding of young people in the African American community?”. I will do this by explaining the various lyrics that certain artists have said while also trying to maintain somewhat relevant with my choice of songs so that they aren’t outdated. I will also answer questions like “How can counselors use rap lyrics to better understand their clients’ struggles.” I will do this by explaining the techniques that a study found were helpful to relate to clients of color.

My main point I think will be centered around explaining struggles of young people of color and how music has helped and could help find their identities if they’re struggling in school or at home. After all, music has brought many of the top rappers today from rags to riches and I think just understanding someone’s story and seeing where they came from would be inspiring to a lot of people today. Whether it be the prejudice that some of them have faced or just lack of a feeling of fitting in a school environment. In my second essay I explained a little of the background of rap music as well but I think for this one I’ll just stick to studies involving youth and their experience with rap music whether it be from school and a program like Foundation of Music or an experience in their household. I want to be able to paint a picture in my readers minds of just how powerful a 3 minute song can be in someone’s life, whether it be the meaningful lyrics said in the song or the beat and the chorus making someone feel as if they’re on top of the world. I want people to understand that music really is an escape for some people and that it really helps people get through big events in their life. Hip-hop has encouraged many to increase their efforts and maximize their ability in all aspects of life. I’d also like to answer questions like “How rap has helped built a strong culture around the black community.” In one of my new scholarly articles I get another look at how rap music has been used in schools and it leads me to ask questions like “How effective are these literacy practices involving rap music” and “How do African-Americans benefit as a whole from literacy teaching practices involving rap or hip-hop music.” I’ll do this by explaining the studies used in the article titled  Literacy development among urban youth.  This article will help me provide another example similar to the foundations of music example in which there was a program implemented in a school in an urban community that involved music and bettering kids experience in school. I will than try using one of the paragraph writing techniques like the spatial concept perhaps used to describe an artist tattoos on his body and how they relate to his struggles used in a song. I think the most important part of my research essay will be the explanation of studies used in finding out how rap music is used to help out African American youth and I think I will use paragraph techniques like specific to general or general to specific to answer research questions and just explain the topic to my readers. I will conclude my paper with how I think studies on this topic could be continued and my overall thought on literacy and communication used in rap music and how it impacts African American youth.

Academic fields interested in my topic I think would be primarily those of education, performing arts, and possibly to some extent a healthcare field with the clinical counseling of students of color. Communication and literacy are used in multiple ways in music obviously, but I don’t think people realize how big of an impact they are as to influencing the youth. This year especially there hasn’t been a generation of kids persuaded or convinced more to vote than this group. Voter turnout has long been a bad mark within the African American community whether kids don’t believe that their vote will matter or possibly they just don’t know how to vote. Young adults have been pushed more than ever to make their voice heard this year and to go vote for the change they want to see in the world. I believe that ties in with rap music in African American communities because as you look into studies dissecting lyrics you see artists continually talking about struggles and poverty and these things can change with who’s in office not just as president but especially local elections and I believe the youth in poverty stricken areas don’t know that local elections can really change the way you live and be a huge help to a better upbringing for future youth. Besides voting I believe there are other side topics that could be discussed like how some artists choose to use their platforms to talk about racial injustice or other serious political topics and how some artists just choose to talk about drugs or violence and how different fanbases interact with one another. I’m really interested in finishing out this semester strong with this research paper and I hope my readers will enjoy my topic just as much as I do.

Annotated Bibliography

Brooks, Michael. “Using Rap Music to Better Understand African American Experiences.”  Taylor & Francis , 26 Feb. 2020, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15401383.2020.1732251.

Brooks’ article was used to help counselors better understand their clients of color. He explained various techniques and conclusions after studying the lyrics of 10 popular rap songs. He found that the lyrics expressed microaggressions towards fighting social inequality and overall oppression of people of color. This advancement of  understanding the lyrics and usage of certain verbiage in songs helped counselors become more culturally competent and helped them institute encouraging activities and helped bring out locked up stories from clients of color and helped them understand their social identity more and made them feel more wanted even in a world of privilege and oppression.

D’Amico, Francesca. “Welcome to the Terrordome: Race, Power and the Rise of American Rap Music, 1979-1995.”  YorkSpace Home , 11 May 2020, yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/handle/10315/37409.

This article is more on the progression of rap and how rap is used in multiple settings and how it has changed African American lives, even though it is briefly discussed. The point of this article is to discuss how rap was and is used as a cry out for help among black artists and how they spread their messages and struggles through their music. This article also shows how rap is everchanging with Black Culture and how it rapidly urbanized and became popular with its audience.

Evans, Jabari. “Connecting Black Youth to Critical Media Literacy through Hip Hop Making in the Music Classroom.”  Latest TOC RSS , Intellect, 1 July 2020, www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/jpme/pre-prints/content-intellect_jpme_00020.

This article was about an organization called Foundation of Music. The Foundations of Music non-profit organization goes to low-income communities to teach their curriculum to students in elementary and middle school. Foundation of Music’s program introduces students to both the process of writing lyrics of a rap song and the technology used to produce rap songs in a classroom setting. Evans recorded things such as different concepts the kids learned each day, reactions from student-to-student and student-to-teacher, along with informal conversations between the students.

Morrell, Ernest. “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Culture: Literacy Development among Urban Youth.”  Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy , vol. 46, no. 1, 2002, pp. 72–77.  JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/40017507. Accessed 4 Nov. 2020.

The main point of this article is to explain new approaches and new strategies for teaching literacy to the urban youth. They did this by teaching certain portions of literature by involving the urban culture of hip-hop music and television shows. They also connected some popular artists to important figures in history. This article is relevant to my main point because there were multiple examples in this article about rap and hip-hop helping communities and increasing not only the ability to read and write, but also to assess texts in order to understand the relationships between power and domination that underlie those texts.

Richardson, Elaine. “`She Was Workin like Foreal’: Critical Literacy and Discourse Practices of African American Females in the Age of Hip Hop.” Discourse & Society, vol. 18, no. 6, Nov. 2007, pp. 789–809, doi:10.1177/0957926507082197.

The main point of this article is to discuss what teenage African American male and females think about stereotypical representations of black men and women in rap videos. It’s also to point out literature discourse between black women and demonstrate the complex language that exists among youth hip-hop culture. This is a scholarly article and it is relevant to my argument because it will just help me further my topic of the impact rap or hip-hop has on African American youth and their literacy and discourse.

Powell, Catherine Tabb. “Rap Music: An Education with a Beat from the Street.”  The Journal of Negro Education , vol. 60, no. 3, 1991, pp. 245–259.  JSTOR ,  www.jstor.org/stable/2295480. Accessed 4 Nov. 2020 .

The main point of this article is to explain the uprising of rap and how far it’s come and how it’s changing by the decade along with the issues it combats. This article singles out certain artists and their contributions to rap and also talks about groups of people in rap like women in rap. This is a scholarly article and is relevant to my argument as it discusses the different times of rap and how what it did for certain generations varies, it also brings up a negative side with violence in rap and talks about the different types of rappers.

Wilson, Natalie, “Rap Music as a Positive Influence on Black Youth and American Politics” (2018).  Pop Culture Intersections . 21. https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/engl_176/21

The main point of this article is to examine the impact of rap music on Black American youth as well as American politics with an emphasis on police brutality. This is an article that would probably be considered a scholarly article. This article is relevant to my topic because it brings up a different topic on how police brutality affects the African American youth and how it is spoken about in multiple rap songs.

McWhorter, John H., et al. “How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back.”  City Journal , City Journal, 18 June 2019, www.city-journal.org/html/how-hip-hop-holds-blacks-back-12442.html.

The main point of this article is a counter argument to the good influences rap and hip-hop have had on African American youth and this article does this by writing about an anecdote of a situation that the author witnessed and then relating other points to this anecdote. This is an excerpt from a magazine, and it is by John McWhorter. This article is relevant to my topic because it gives negative side of rap and hip-hop music and how it can influence some teenagers to make bad decisions or have incorrect morals.

Lewis, Steven. “Musical Crossroads: African American Influence on American Music.”  Smithsonian Music , Smithsonian, 15 Dec. 2018, music.si.edu/story/musical-crossroads.

The main point of this article is to give a historical insight on the influence that rap and hip-hop genre has had on African American youth. In this article the Smithsonian does a good job linking sounds and artists to certain times throughout history along with the effect they left on African Americans during this time. This article is relevant to my research paper because it provides another spoke to the wheel in that it will help supplement additional information about rap and hip-hop in my paper.

Crooke Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Music Therapy, Alexander, and Raphael Travis Jr. Associate Professor of Social Work. “The Healing Power of Hip Hop.”  The Conversation , 18 May 2019, theconversation.com/the-healing-power-of-hip-hop-81556.

The main point of this article is to show the many positive impacts rap and hip-hop music have on the African American youth. The true healing powers that music has on a young teen’s mind are described in this article and help with my argument of how rap and hip-hop have positively influenced African American youth. This is just an article found on a website called the conversation, I don’t think I would consider it a scholarly article.

“Positive Impacts.”  Impacts of Rap Music on Youths , impactofrapmusiconyouths.weebly.com/positive-impacts.html.

The main point of this article is to explain how rap music has been somewhat wrongly interpreted by some as negatively influencing and how some artists focus on certain undesirable

Topics like drugs or violence. This article is not a scholarly article but has quite a lot of information on effects or the Rap and Hip-Hop genre. This article is relevant to my topic because it talks about rap music in general and explains why it’s so prominent in African American communities and their youth.

Morgan, Marcyliena, and Dionne Bennett. “Hip-Hop & the Global Imprint of a Black Cultural Form.”  Daedalus , vol. 140, no. 2, 2011, pp. 176–196.  JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/23047460. Accessed 5 Nov. 2020.

The main point of this article is to talk about the global imprint of Hip-Hop which is slightly off topic from my thesis, but I really enjoyed this scholarly article and I do believe it will benefit my research paper. This article states that hip-hop is one of the most popular genres’ in America and that it is really becoming the lingua franca for popular and political youth culture around the world. I’m not sure how much I’ll use this article in my research paper but I do think it has some good information that will help get my point across.

Understanding Literacy in Our Lives by Amiri Austin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Hip-Hop Digital Essay: The Evolution of Hip-Hop into the Modern Era- By Matt Scott

Trinity College

Digital Essay: The Evolution of Hip-Hop into the Modern Era (Essay #2)

Matt Scott FYSM 212: Introduction to Hip-Hop Professor Markle Due: 12/15/19

Looking back at the history of hip-hop, and the rich culture surrounding the art form, it’s clear that the roots of the genre have been stripped down to almost nothing over the years. I believe hip-hop is an art form, a mix of breaking, DJing, and MCing all coming together under one roof with emphasis on the sound and rhythm of the music, created in black communities as an outlet. In its early days, hip-hop lyrics weren’t preaching any particular message, but the movement and its impact on communities sent a powerful message. The movement was about bringing together communities, stopping violence, and inspiring a generation of youth – and its impact on black culture was positive and powerful. Today we see the art form being used to promote violence, the disrespect of women, drug abuse, and other negative messages that are at odds with hip-hop’s origins. It is now about making money, selling records, and gaining popularity at all costs. The popularity of hip-hop opened the door for many talented black artists and created new opportunities for a community of people who have been mistreated at every turn throughout history. I think the new era of hip-hop has had a negative impact on the art form itself, and it puts a bad label on the community. Without its core principles, hip-hop loses what made it special. When all the lyrics are just hollow and meaningless words, it leaves you with something that’s not hip-hop at all, but just a way to make money. In this essay I’m going to be looking at five hit songs from top artists from each decade, starting with Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rappers Delight” and ending with Migos’s “Bad and Boujee”. The purpose of this essay is to show the evolution of hip-hop from its roots in the Bronx through the present day by exploring the lyrics and message behind each song.

Hip-hop without the other forms of creative expression tied to it is a way of mixing lyrics and beats to convey a meaningful message about the culture and community from which it emerged. If you take away the powerful message of justice and equality that many true hip-hop songs convey, you’re left with a money hungry industry doing whatever it takes to sell records. When hip-hop is being fueled by money, and not by meaning, we see the most damage being done to the community of people the art form represents. This era of hip-hop is hurting the image and meaning that hip-hop once stood for, but there’s still hope for hip-hop moving forward. If we can go back its roots, to some of those early songs from the 80s, 90s and into the early 2000s that represent the true ideals behind hip-hop, there is a chance for the industry and genre to regrow with its strong roots back in place.

Work Cited “Song Lyrics & Knowledge.” Genius, https://genius.com/. Chang, Jeff, and DJ Kool Herc. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: a History of the Hip-Hop Generation. St.Martins Press, 2008.

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Hip-Hop Music Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Creations of hip-hop, history of hip-hop, socio-cultural influences of hip-hop music, reference list.

Hip-Hop is perhaps the form of music that has attracted the most controversy. Many people have blamed hip-hop for a number of societal issues like violence, promiscuity, bad language, etc. Whether or not these people are right in blaming hip-hop for these societal problems is still a matter of heated debates among interested parties.

Hip-hop refers to a form of music that is a part of popular music, and that is mainly comprised of deejaying and emceeing. It is associated with other aspects and forms of music that some people view as standalone aspects of popular culture, while others view them as integral aspects of hip-hop.

These aspects are discussed in the “creations of hip-hop” section. This paper is a detailed description of hip-hop music that also gives a sociological analysis of the same.

The most important creation of hip-hop music is, perhaps, rap music. Rap music refers to a form of hip-hop music in which artists sing by talking poetically and rhythmically. It has become so common that some people view it as a popular culture genre by itself while in fact it is a creation of hip-hop music. Other creations of hip-hop are the components of the hip-hop lifestyle.

These include the hip-hop lingo, the hip-hop dress code, graffiti, and breakdancing. The lingo has been the main source of public backlash at hip-hop. For instance, in the year 2007, Don Imus, a radio host, referred to a women’s basketball team as “some nappy headed hos” (Sanneh, 2007, p. 1).

This not only led to him losing his job, but it also led to a spirited discussion of the inappropriateness of hip-hop language in public places. The genre of hip-hop has therefore earned an unmatched global reputation for promotion of crime, misdemeanors, and the promotion of the use of bad language. Among the misdemeanors is graffiti, which is illegal in many countries.

Hip-hop started in Bronx, a New York City borough, when a Jamaican DJ started the deejaying and rapping. The DJ’s name was Kool Herc. Rap is actually a product of the integration of different cultures, which got its popularity after the invention of the hip-hop art of deejaying. It is an integral part of the ancient culture and oral tradition of Africans (Adaso, 2012, p. 1).

Kool’s deejaying style was composed of the reciting of rhymes over instrumentals. He was invited in house parties during which he would use in-house references while rapping with the microphone. Artists in Manhattan and Brooklyn copied this style of entertaining people in house parties, and eventually Herc and other DJs spread hip-hop messages in towns and won many followers.

Hip-hop had humble beginnings. At first, as evidenced in the discussion above, hip-hop comprised of live raps accompanied by instrumentals. This implies that hip-hop artists were not recording songs at that time.

However, with time, artists started recording songs, hip-hop became more popular, and its commercial potential was seen. The earliest rap songs that were recorded include “ King Tim III (Personality Jock) by Fatback Band and Rapper’s Delight by the Sugarhill Gang” (Adaso, 2012, p. 1).

Rapper’s Delight reached number 36 on the charts, which was a big achievement in the 1970’s, and therefore it demonstrated the ability of hip-hop music to draw commercial appeal. Up-to-date hip-hop is still evolving. The good thing about hip-hop is that it can be merged with other genres and styles to make it more appealing.

Contemporary hip-hop has largely borrowed from Jazz, soul, live instrumentations, and other music resources to make it more eclectic. Kanye West is currently championing a movement known as the soulful rap movement. This combines aspects of soul music with rap music, which has served to enrich rap music (Adaso, 2012, p. 1).

Hip-hop has had many influences on the society. Most of these influences are on the social aspect of societal life. A number of unacceptable behaviors in the society have been encouraged by hip-hop leading to a conflict between the ambassadors of hip-hop and the ambassadors of good behavior in the society. One aspect of hip-hop that has attracted substantial controversy, and which has led to various social effects is graffiti.

Hip-hop fans tend to adore graffiti, which is a socially unacceptable behavior. This has led to untidy public places and even offensive writings in public places. In fact, there was so much graffiti in the U.S. during the growth of hip-hop that the government had to illegalize the art of graffiti (Codrington, 2006).

Hip-hop has encouraged social activism. After the birth of hip-hop in South Bronx, hip-hop artists targeted the poor and urban youth with their messages. They became the voice of the voiceless by singing about slums (ghettos) and even mentored rappers from the ghettos who ghetto youth greatly appreciated.

One legendary rapper Chuck D, who was a member of a group called Public Enemy once called the hip hop music genre “the CNN of the Ghetto” (Muhammad, 2008, p. 1). This group also started rapping about the history of Afro-Americans and the plight of black people in the U.S., which attracted youth of virtually all races into social activism and consciousness.

Contemporary rappers are borrowing from these hip-hop legends and rapping about the issues that are affecting the youth in the modern society. This has made them darlings to the youth who have become involved in contemporary social activism due to the political and social commentaries that the hip-hop artists sing.

“This is something that you might not know by looking at many of the controlled news channels which are much more likely to report a hip-hop artist’s run in with law enforcement than their philanthropic deeds and service” (Muhammad, 2008, p. 1). In light of this, politicians are increasingly endorsing the hip-hop lifestyle in order to get support from the youth (Forman, 2010).

Hip-hop has been blamed for the use of bad language in the society. The hip-hop lingo has been quite influential affecting people of all age groups. In the discussion above, it has been stated how a radio host lost his job after referring to basketball players as ho’s. Ho’s is a hip-hop lingo for a prostitute. The hip-hop language has adversely affected the youth in particular.

The uses of offensive language like the aforementioned ho, bitch, and the like, is commonplace in the society courtesy of hip-hop influence. The youth associate the use of such language with sophistication, and thus the language has adversely affected the society.

In the contemporary society one can listen to a conversation between two young people and leave thinking that the two are angry at each other yet it is just normal conversation. It has reached a point where other leaders like political leaders who associate with hip-hop artists are also associated with the hip-hop lifestyle (Stelter, 2011, p. 1).

Hip-hop has also been of great influence on the rates of crime in the contemporary society. Rap and hip-hop artists are considered the best if they were once imprisoned. This is the reason behind such labels like Konvict Muzik owned by Akon. It is common to hear the sound of gunshots in rap music.

The lyrics of many rap songs are also full of instances in which the artists praise violence and openly advocate for revenge and vendettas. By so doing, opponents of hip-hop music consider the genre to be recruiting the youth to crime and encouraging criminal behavior in the society.

Hip-hop artists, on several occasions, have been imprisoned for possession of illegal firearms. This information is normally in the public domain and thus youth who adore such artists would be delighted to own illegal firearms like their hip-hop celebrities. This has led to substantial increase in criminal activities.

Initially men dominated hip-hop, which, together with the promotion of violence, irresponsible behavior, and Ebonics made hip-hop a sexist genre. The raps soon became rants about how undeserving women were. Some artists would even rap about their girlfriends calling them unprintable names, and telling of how undeserving they were. In fact, the integration of love expression in hip-hop is a recent phenomenon.

Up to this date, rap artists still sing negatively about members of the opposite sex, with some men even ridiculing their fellow female rappers. In effect, hip-hop has been a sexist genre and it has negatively affected the society since the youth look up to these artists. The youth are therefore likely to be sexists like their celebrities leading to a society that does not appreciate gender diversity.

Hip-hop has also had an effect on the youth’s valuing of materialism. Rap and other hip-hop videos are normally made with flashy cars, jewelry, and even cash money, which the artists brag about in their songs. This is bound to have an effect on how the viewers of such videos value materialism.

Hip-hop has also had an effect on how people dress. It is common to see young people in sagging trousers, which is a trademark for most hip-hop artists. Youngsters are also sporting more jewelry and tattoos courtesy of hip-hop influence (Ogbar, 2009). The dress code of baggy jeans is also common among the youth due to the influence that hip-hop has had on them. This is because many hip-hop artists wear baggy jeans.

Just like any other invention, hip-hop has been innovated with time leading to a more perfected genre. What started out as a combination of instrumentals and rap in Bronx is now a multibillion-dollar industry that has made many youth rich. The creations of hip-hop are also very much alive today with youth in almost all corners of the world engaging in graffiti, practicing breakdancing, and producing rap songs.

The most commendable influence of hip-hop is perhaps its socio-cultural influence, which many have regarded as negative.

Hip-hop has influenced the way a large faction of the youth world-over talk, the way they dress, the way they treat the opposite sex, their involvement in social activism, their behavior in relation to criminality and even the way the youth value wealth. Hip-hop can therefore be regarded as the invention that has had the greatest influence on the youth.

Adaso, H. (2012). A Brief History of Hip-Hop and Rap . Web.

Codrington, R. (2006). In the Beginning: Hip Hop’s Early Influences . OUPBlog. Web.

Forman, M. (2010). Conscious Hip-hop, Change, and the Obama Era. American Studies Journal, 54 (3), 1433-5239.

Muhammad, A. (2008). Hip Hop: The voice of youth and social activism. Web.

Ogbar, J. (2009). Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Sanneh, K. (2007). Don’t Blame Hip-Hop . The New York Times . Web.

Stelter, B. (2011). Fox News Site Calls Obama Party a ‘Hip-Hop BBQ’ . The New York Times . Web.

• Primary Source Reflection - a Steel Pan
• How Does Jazz the Music and Its Story Reflect the American Experience?
• The History of Hip-Hop Culture in the United States
• Hip-Hop Music and the Role of Women in It: Fight for Women’s Rights in Society
• The Beginnings of Hip-Hop
• Sound and Space: Sonic Experience
• Teaching a Musical Instrument in School
• How Music Can Influence Our Behaviour
• Beyonce in Academic Works and News Media
• The Irish Rock Band U2 as a Modern Critique of Religion
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, May 30). Hip-Hop Music. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hip-hop-music/

"Hip-Hop Music." IvyPanda , 30 May 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/hip-hop-music/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Hip-Hop Music'. 30 May.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Hip-Hop Music." May 30, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hip-hop-music/.

1. IvyPanda . "Hip-Hop Music." May 30, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hip-hop-music/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Hip-Hop Music." May 30, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/hip-hop-music/.

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Flow and the Sounds of Hip Hop 
• 3 Hip Hop as a Cultural Phenomenon
• 4 Considerations for Teaching
• 5 Bibliography
• 6 Resources

Introduction

Incorporating the study of hip hop into undergraduate music curricula is fraught because traditional music theory and history sequences are built around the canon of Western art music tradition. It is important to consider issues of tokenism and academic imperialism that can arise when one either appends a lesson on hip hop to the end of a historical survey of Western art music, or when one uses hip hop alongside Western art music as illustrations of a common set of music-theoretical principles. Such maneuvers do not adequately convey the complexities and specificities of the hip hop tradition, nor are they sensitive to the history of hip hop as a tradition developed, performed, and cultivated first by Black artists. As Loren Kajikawa has argued, “hip hop producers have their own aesthetic values and ideas about complexity” independent from those accorded to Western art music. (Kajikawa 2019, 161) Moreover hip hop has developed into a visual culture and an artistic school and style, all of which are integral to this genre of music. It is therefore not sufficient to tack on a lesson about hip hop to canonic courses about Western art music, as doing the artform justice in the classroom would involve analyzing all of these components. Below, we summarize literature on hip hop in the US in order to aid teachers in thinking through these complexities when designing their undergraduate music courses. This literature review draws together two strands in hip hop studies: music-theoretical analyses of “flow,” and cultural studies analyses of identity, reclamation, and individualism. Structuring a study of hip hop around these two strands offers a framework for thinking through important questions about hip hop’s intersections between musical style and histories of racism and identity politics in the US.

Flow and the Sounds of Hip Hop 

Guiding Questions:

• What is flow in hip hop?
• How have music theorists defined flow?
• What are some limitations of notation and transcription for representing hip hop?

The term “flow” in discourse about hip hop often invokes a rather slippery notion of the “feel” of rap music. One of music theory’s contributions to hip hop study has been to provide a more precise definition of flow by pinning down the musical parameters that constitute it. Flow comprises the backdrop of beats in the instrumental track, the rhyme pattern of the rapper’s text, and the rhythmic density of the rapper’s delivery. Another important parameter of flow is accent , which arises through the interaction between these parameters of flow. Music theorists have also studied how rappers manipulate flow in order to achieve different formal or narrative effects, and how these techniques of flow can also be used to situate the rapper historically and generically.[1]

To illustrate this definition of flow, figure 1 adapts Ohriner’s (2019) transcription of the song “Flip Flop Rock” by Outkast feat. Jay-Z and Killer Mike.

Figure 1 . Adaptation of Ohriner’s Transcription of an excerpt from “Flip Flop Rock” by Outkast feat. Jay-Z and Killer Mike.[2]

This song is a useful example of flow because it features a section in which Big Boi raps that he is changing the flow; we can therefore understand the difference in flow before and after the stated change by analyzing parameters of beat, rhyme, rhythm and accent. See figure 1 for the transcription. Each line of the transcription represents one measure of music comprising four beats, and the numbers 0-15 at the top of each line represent time points along a sixteenth-note division of the beat. This example follows a common “Boom-bap” beat pattern in hip hop, where the tactus is oriented by a bass marking beats 1 (time point 0) and 3 (time point 8), and a snare marking beats 2 (time point 4) and 4 (time point 12). The rhythmic density is sparse at the beginning of the excerpt, characterized by predictable half and full beat rests between syllables. But at the moment where Big Boi raps the text “I switch the flow,” the rhythm becomes dense with text delivery on every sixteenth-note subdivision of the beat. This flow change occurs again at the corresponding moment in the following measure, with the text “I take a submarine.” The moment of the flow switch is also marked by a change in the rhyme scheme. Syllables that rhyme share a numeric designation above the text, and lines connecting syllables with a rhyme designation are multi-syllabic rhyme units. The beginning of the excerpt proceeds by two-syllable rhyme groupings, but the rhyme shifts at the text “I take a submarine” to the back-ended rhyming syllables marked with the number 2. Accented syllables are represented by an enlarged circle plotting the syllable on the timeline, and can be understood through the interaction between beat, rhythm, and rhyme. For instance, the text “AN-twan RAPS-on” are lent a beat-derived accent because they occur on the onset of a beat; both have prosodic accent due to their natural word accent, and rhyming syllables are also often accented.

The notation system adopted by Ohriner is commonly accepted among music theorists as a means of studying hip hop music.[3] While this notation system draws out important parameters of flow, one issue is that it normalizes only rhythms falling along a sixteenth-note subdivisions of a four-beat measure, thereby conveying any deviation from this pattern as a structural abnormality. This structure of mapping syllables is problematic considering that it is in fact rather common for rappers to utilize other beat structures and that rappers frequently play with microtiming in their delivery.[4] This is not to suggest that teachers wholly abandon this form of transcription, as it facilitates discussions around a number of important topics: analyzing flow in this way can act as a window into defining characteristics of hip hop subgenres, historical developments of the music, the style of particular artists, and evaluations of discourses on and critiques of rap music. But the exercise in flow transcription also provides a good opportunity to teach students about the deficiencies of any musical notation, and the ways systems of musical notation prescribe and mediate forms of musical knowledge.

Flow is only one element of hip hop sound. Other units in a hip hop curriculum might delve into practices of sampling, elements of timbre in the recording, and the ways each of these sonic parameters interact in producing different kinds of musical meaning. Joseph Schloss offers an in-depth study of sampling as a practice derived from “digging in the crates,” in which hip hop producers locate and listen to LPS for sources of sampling and inspiration. At the heart of this practice is the use of others’ music to express oneself, and the communities that are created as fellow practitioners recognize the sources of sample-based hip hop. Krims analyzes the “layering” of sounds and textures in hip hop as a site for discourses about musical meanings such as “hardness” or “realness.” One could also bring in Kajikawa’s (2015) study to expand on Krims’s notion of layering to consider histories of race and musical meaning as well, analyzing how constructions of sound in hip hop have come to invoke ideas of race and how race became audible through the music in this way.

But this sonic analysis sits in tension with the act of transcription that grounds theories of flow. Joseph Schloss critiques the act of transcribing hip hop in musicological scholarship, arguing that scholars in this field have tended to study hip hop in order to defend its value against those who deem Western art music the only music worthy of academic study. As Schloss writes: “This approach requires that one operate, to some degree, within the conceptual framework of European art music: pitches and rhythms should be transcribed, individual instruments are to be separated in score form, and linear development is implicit, even when explicitly rejected” (Schloss, 14). Schloss offers four arguments against transcription:

• The level of specificity of the transcription. Schloss means that analyzing hip hop on the levels of individual syllables and rhythms is less productive than making claims about broader gestures based in hip hop musicians’ discourse.
• The ethics of the hip hop community, which forbid revealing the sources of a musician’s samples.
• The values adhering to a close reading of a beat, which Schloss argues are derived from studies of Western art music. Schloss finds that hip hop producers do not themselves think of their music at this microscopic level, and it is therefore more important to discuss hip hop in ways that better convey their analytical perspective.
• The deficiencies of musical notation for transcribing hip hop. The notation systems offered thus far do not get across the ways that the recording’s sound is made by sampling different recordings together, and understanding the origins of these samples is critical for understanding the concept behind sampling them together. While the above authors have skirted this problem by only focusing on the rapper’s text in the musical texture, their transcriptions have effaced the importance of sampling in this music.

While Schloss’s critique deters the act of transcribing the sampled elements of hip hop into a musical score, one might complement flow transcriptions with Schloss’s ethnographic methods of analysis to ask questions about the interaction between sonic layers in a hip hop recording. How and why do hip hop producers recontextualize others’ music through sampling? What kinds of meanings emerge when rappers use certain lyric and rhythmic techniques alongside particular beats and samples? What does it mean to formalize gesture or sampling through a musical notation, and how might one do transcription in ways that decenter the values inherent in scores of Western art music?

Hip Hop as a Cultural Phenomenon

• What are some important components of hip hop culture?
• How do identity politics interface with the sonic elements of hip hop?
• Why is it important to represent hip hop as a holistic culture in the classroom?

It is also important to focus transcriptions of flow and analyses of sound with attention to hip hop as a lived culture. Oliver Kautny’s (2015) work on the musical qualities of hip hop’s lyrics, including its rhythm and rhyme, ties the semantic content of these lyrics to its cultural meanings. He recognizes that the lyrics are tied to Black culture in the United States, which strongly influences the formal style of the genre; the sense of competition throughout the genre manifests in the form of verbal dueling or the use of punchlines. Kautny also emphasizes the rhythmic delivery of these lyrics, detailing microtiming, syncopation, and off-beat rhymes as markers for analysis. “We… have to adjust our microconcepts of rhymed and temporally organized syllables with regard to notation, measurement, and articulatory categorization,” he writes in “Lyrics and flow in rap music” in The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop . Kautny’s coupling of flow with rhyme and lyrical delivery can be broken up into three aspects: the rhythm’s production into the flow of sound, its synchronization to a musical arrangement, and then the resulting feel of the music to a listener (Kautny, 103). Flow can serve as an element of a rapper’s individual sonic signature, but flow can also be a marker of the rapper’s identification with communities of race, ethnicity, gender, and place.

Because hip hop originated as a form of Black culture, as Cheryl Keyes argues, the roots of hip hop culture can be traced from West African bardic traditions to southern Black cultural forms and into its most recent transformation in the context of northern urban cities. The roots of hip hop followed a conservative ideology, and it has been embraced and exploited by mainstream entertainment, taking on a mass-marketed quality. As such, it has turned its attention to American ideals of capitalism, materialism, sexism, violence (and especially violence against women), and masculinity, and the artists celebrated in hip hop culture have developed stereotypical archetypes. Yet, it is problematic to wholly collapse hip hop into this mainstream culture. As Kyra Gaunt has noted, histories of black cultures often reduce the untidy diasporic conditions of these musics by presuming “black masculinity as the primary, if not sole, signifier of race in mass popular culture” (Gaunt, 114). It is therefore important when teaching hip hop to avoid rehearsing the mainstream and masculinist narrative of the genre’s history, and to instead guide students to question how gender archetypes figure into the popularity of this music? 

Recent publications in hip hop scholarship have focused on this dichotomy between mainstream culture and counter cultural movements within the hip-hop genre, particularly with efforts to avoid essentializing hip hop culture and Blackness. In particular, feminist and LGBTQ perspectives have weighed in on hip hop culture, although scholars such as Mark D. Wilson and Andreana Clay are careful to avoid prescribing identity labels to the artists themselves. Instead, they argue that these artists’ work lends itself to feminist or queer interpretations and activism, placing these songs in relation to the broader politics. History that doesn’t rehearse the same great man narrative structure that has plagued WAM surveys and that those scholars are now attempting to reckon with. Not only do these interpretations avoid some of the easily prescriptive mainstream ideals of masculinity and violence, but also these interpretations humanize these marginalized artists, as Regina N. Bradley argues by validating their anger.

Christopher Deis understands hip hop as a site to challenge and expand definitions of “politics” and “political behavior.” He sees these understandings of identity in the genre of hip hop as part of a larger understanding towards the “intersection of politics and popular culture as not one set of behaviors or practices, but rather existing along a continuum” (Deis, 195). Using some of the subversive ideology that has permeated the genre, Deis argues that re-framing the understanding of the “political” then foregrounds how “marginalized” publics make meaning for their own personal experiences in the art form. Artists use this music to discuss sociopolitical ideas, while this music simultaneously reflects the views and opinions of their fans and listeners through their responses and the resulting broader culture of hip hop. As Derek Conrad Murray writes, these artists who have been historically marginalized gain legitimacy and seek commercial success by thriving on the alterity of the genre. It enters into the market through “guerrilla capitalism,” by continually attacking the market through unconventional means. As such, hip-hop culture encourages rugged individualism and a subversiveness that thrives on constant innovation. However, it is not a subculture; taking its cue from black radicalism, hip hop takes its alterity and “makes it universal, becoming a transnational phenomenon” (Murray 8). 

While considering the cultural negotiations of hip hop, it is also essential to acknowledge and recognize the interaction of Black and Latino culture that took place in major cities. Rather than studying only Black perspectives in the formation of hip hop culture, we also must be inclusive of the Latino artists that contributed to the dissemination and growth of rap beyond the streets and into the musical industry (Keyes).

Considerations for Teaching

Adam Krims has advocated for broadening the understanding of “music theory and structure” into a more generalized “musical poetics,” a term that directly includes hip hop and its culture. This terminology traces different genres based on music-structural, cultural, and discursive features and their development over time, including African bardic traditions that fed into the rapping style of hip hop. However, although Krims utilizes hip hop artists’ own terminology to systematize meaningful musical gestures comprising this genre, Schloss has critiqued Krims’s study for not significantly expanding “musical poetics” beyond traditional Western musicological thought (Schloss, 14). Reading Krims in dialogue with the above scholarship expands the theoretical possibilities and critiques of this genre. Our compilation of resources has shown what “musical poetics” would need to account for in order to fully understand the sonic and cultural dimensions that have become integral to the genre of hip hop. Teaching hip hop means formalizing a musical genre as a confluence of a rapper’s techniques of flow, sonic layering, parameters for the exchange and discovery of musical ideas between hip hop producers, identity politics in the US, and black visual and aesthetic cultures.

A curriculum around hip hop is rich because it acts as a window into histories of racial identity in the US, and it opens up broader issues about how race can and should be negotiated through music studies. For instance, a strand in hip hop scholarship is a debate about musical essentialism, which is an argument about the extent to which African American music practices do or do not embody an inherent African sensibility. Two scholars who represents the essentialist side of this debate are Johnson and Chernoff, who identify common rhythmic patterns across genres cultivated by African American musicians as a way of arguing for an  “elementary classification of some of the major ways in which an African musical sensibility has been and is being expressed in the Americas” (Johnson, 63). An example of work positioned at the other side of this debate is Alim’s edited collection, which is a study of global hip hop practices that argues that these diverse practices do not embody their Afrodiasporic origins.[5] Paul Gilroy has characterized the essentialist debate as a deadlock between two inadequate and ultimately mutually-dependent positions, and instead provides a useful theorization of Afrodiasporic music as a model for anti-anti-essentialist inquiries into the nature of black identity, whereby “racialised subjectivity [is] the product of the social practices that supposedly derive from it” (Gilroy, 102). By structuring a class discussion around these three readings, teachers might guide students through questions such as: What kinds of relationships exist between musical sound and lived identity? How might one parse the complex histories by which they become intertwined and mutually signifying? How do interactions between different groups of people cultivate musical genres, and how do genres develop and change over time?

[1] See both Adams (2009) and Krims (2000).

[2] The original figure appears as Example 1.5 on page 17 in Ohriner’s book Flow (2019). The example appears early in Ohriner’s study, before he has introduced all of the elements of his notational system. We have therefore adapted the figure by marking accent and rhyme following Ohriner’s conventions.

[3] Adams and Krims also utilize this notations in their studies.

[4] For example, in figure 1, Ohriner’s transcription places the final three syllables squarely on beat markings 14, 15, and 0. However, the listener will note that in the recording, all three of these syllables fall before the downbeat of the following measure, and none of the syllables falls exactly on a sixteenth-note subdivision of the beat.

[5] Alim, H. Samy, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook. Global Linguistic Flows: Hip-Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language.  New York: Routledge, 2008.

Bibliography

Adams, Kyle. “On the Metrical Techniques of Flow in Rap Music.” Music Theory Online 15, no. 5 (October 2009). https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.09.15.5/mto.09.15.5.adams.php .

Alim, H. Samy, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook. Global Linguistic Flows: Hip-Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language . New York: Routledge, 2008.

Bell, Crystal. “From Jay-Z to Dead Prez: Examining Representations of Black Masculinity in Mainstream Versus Underground Hip-Hop Music,” Journal of Black Studies 45/4 (May 2014), 287-300.

Bradley, Adam. Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop . New York: Basic Civitas , 2009.

Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation . New York: Picador, 2005.

Clay, Andreana. “Like an Old Soul Record: Black Feminism, Queer Sexuality, and the Hip-Hop Generation,” Meridians 8/1 (2007): 53-73.

Cohen, Judah. “Hip-Hop Judaica: The Politics of Representin’ Heebster Heritage,” Popular Music (2009): 1-18.

Crossley, Scott. “Metaphorical Conceptions in Hip-Hop Music.” African American Review 39, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 501–512.

Curry, Tommy J. “Pessimistic Themes in Kanye West’s Necrophobic Aesthetic: Moving Beyond Subjects of Perfection to Understand the New Slave as a Paradigm of Anti-Black Violence,” The Pluralist 9/3 (2014), 18-37.

Edwards, Paul. The Concise Guide to Hip-Hop Music: A Fresh Look at the Art of Hip Hop, from Old-School Beats to Freestyle Rap . New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015.

Forman, Murray. The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop . Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Forman, Murray and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. That’s the Joint! The Hip Hop Studies Reader . New York: Routledge, 2004.

Gaunt, Kyra. The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop . New York: New York University Press, 2006.

George, Nelson. Hip Hop America. New York: Viking, 1998.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness . London: Verso, 1993.

Harrison, Anthony Kwame. Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009.

Jeffries, Michael P. Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Johnson, Hafiz Shabazz Farel, and John M. Chernoff. “Basic Conga Drum Rhythms in African-American Musical Styles.” Black Music Research Journal 11, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 55–73.

Kajikawa, Loren. Sounding Race in Rap Songs . Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.

Kajikawa, Loren. “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music.” In Seeing Race Again , edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, 155-174. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019.

Keyes, Cheryl. Rap Music and Street Consciousness . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Krims, Adam. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Ma, David. “Hip Hop 101: A University Level Course Curriculum for Examining Hip Hop in the Modern World.” Master’s thesis, San Jose State University, 2010.

McLeod, Kembrew and Peter DiCola. Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling . Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Murray, Derek Conrad. “Hip-Hop vs. High Art: Notes on Race as Spectacle,” Art Journal 63/2 (Summer 2004): 4-19. 

Neal, Mark Anthony. “Digging in the Crates.” The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, edited by Trevor Schoonmaker, Duke University Press, 2010.

——. “A Way Out of No Way: Jazz, Hip Hop and Black Social Improvisation.” The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, edited by Ajay Heble and Daniel Fischlin. Wesleyan University Press, 2004. 

Ohriner, Mitchell. Flow: The Rhythmic Voice in Rap Music . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Perry, Imani. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Pough, Gwendolyn D. “What It Do, Shorty? Women, Hip-Hop, and a Feminist Agenda,” Black Women, Gender + Families 1/2 (Fall 2007): 78-99.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

——. The Hop Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop–And Why It Matters. New York: BasicCivitas, 2008.

Schloss, Joseph G. Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop . Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

Wang, Jimmy. “Now Hip-Hop, Too, Is Made in China.” New York Times Jan. 23, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/arts/music/24hiphop.html .

Williams, Justin A., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Wilson, D. Mark. “Post-Pomo, Hip-Hop Homos: Hip-Hop Art, Gay Rappers, and Social Change,” Social Justice 34/1 (2007): 117-140.

– Hip Hop Archive & Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University

– Cornell Hip Hop Collection

Collins Memorial Library

Music 222: music of the world's peoples.

• Getting Started
• Research Questions
• Developing a Thesis
• Writing & Citing

Argumentative Paper Thesis

• Proposed answer to a research question
• Should make a claim and argue it
• Thesis = Topic + a claim (attitude or opinion) + major points (specifics about the points you will use to explain your claim)
• A good thesis has a definable, debatable claim
• Your thesis statement should be specific—it should cover only what you will discuss in your paper and should be supported with specific evidence.
• Your topic may change as you write, so you may need to revise your thesis statement to reflect exactly what you have discussed in the paper.

How to Write a Thesis Statement

A thesis statement is not a statement of fact. It is an assertive statement that states your claims and that you can prove with evidence. It should be the product of research and your own critical thinking. There are different ways and different approaches to write a thesis statement. Here are some steps you can try to create a thesis statement:

1. Start out with the main topic and focus of your essay.

Example:  youth gangs + prevention and intervention programs

2. Make a claim or argument in one sentence.

Example:  Prevention and intervention programs can stop youth gang activities.

3. Revise the sentence by using specific terms.

Example:  Early prevention programs in schools are the most effective way to prevent youth gang involvement.

4. Further revise the sentence to cover the scope of your essay and make a strong statement.

Example:  Among various prevention and intervention efforts that have been made to deal with the rapid growth of youth gangs, early school-based prevention programs are the most effective way to prevent youth gang involvement.

Thesis Examples from Published Research

Take a look at the following articles and identify the thesis statement. Why is it an effective or not effective thesis?

1. White, Theresa Renee. “Missy ‘Misdemeanor’ Elliott and Nicki Minaj: Fashionistin' Black Female Sexuality in Hip-Hop Culture—Girl Power or Overpowered?”  Journal of Black Studies , vol. 44, no. 6, 2013, pp. 607–626.  JSTOR ,  http://ezproxy.ups.edu/login?url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24572858 . Accessed 30 Nov. 2020.

2.  McNally, James. "Azealia Banks's "212": Black Female Identity and the White Gaze in Contemporary Hip-Hop."  Journal of the Society for American Music  10.1 (2016): 54-81.  ProQuest,  http://ezproxy.ups.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.ups.edu:2443/docview/1882381971?accountid=1627 . Accessed 30 Nov. 2020.

Thesis Statement Tutorial

Good Thesis Tips

• Ensure your thesis is provable.  Do not come up with your thesis and then look it up later. The thesis is the end point of your research, not the beginning. You need to use a thesis you can actually back up with evidence.
• First, analyze your primary sources . Look for tension, interest, ambiguity, controversy, and/or complication. Ask questions about the sources.
• Anticipate the counterarguments.  Every argument has a counterargument; if yours doesn't, it's not an argument (may be a fact or an opinion). If there are too many arguments against it, find another thesis.
• Communicate a  single, overarching point  rather than multiple points that may be too difficult or broad to support

Examples of Non-Debatable and Debatable Thesis Statements

Example of a non-debatable thesis statement:

Pollution is bad for the environment.

Example of a debatable thesis statement:

At least 25 percent of the federal budget should be spent on limiting pollution.

The North and South fought the Civil War for many reasons, some of which were the same and some different.

While both Northerners and Southerners believed they fought against tyranny and oppression, Northerners focused on the oppression of slaves while Southerners defended their own right to self-government.

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A place to post an opinion you accept may be flawed, in an effort to understand other perspectives on the issue. Enter with a mindset for conversation, not debate.

CMV: misogynistic rap music fuels rape culture & is incompatible with feminism.

As the Wikipedia article, " Misogyny in rap music ," demonstrates in gross detail, misogyny is a prominent and prevalent feature of rap music — especially in its most popular expressions. There are several reasons why this has weighed heavily on my mind recently:

The continued dominance of rap music — including its misogynistic expressions — on the Billboard charts and among young people (even up into the 40s) suggests that American society still has a long way to go in terms of respecting women as human beings equal and not subservient to men.

Women I know and care for enjoy this music, singing/rapping right along to lyrics that degrade them and other women. This sickens me to think about.

Society is quick, on the one hand, to condemn and punish certain men who behave inappropriately toward women (as they should); yet we continue, on the other hand, to reward the powerful entertainers and media moguls who normalize misogyny, sexual assault, and rape on a mass scale.

This disconnect between the explicit cultural norms of respect/equality and the implicit norms of objectification/exploitation hinders genuine progress toward harmonious male-female relationships.

I suspect there are also significant economic consequences of this sort of male-female relational dysfunction, especially when illegitimate/unwanted pregnancies result from rampant promiscuity and rape. (The statistical links between poverty and single parenthood are well-attested.)

Consequently, I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that popular (misogynistic) hip-hop music plays a role in the denigration, oppression, rape and even murder of women, and in the economic depression of impoverished families and communities.

I see this as very different from the critiques of "edgy" (i.e., youth-driven) music of previous decades/generations. The onset of gangsta rap (followed by club rap) introduced a whole new ballgame. It's time we stop rewarding misogynistic entertainers and media enterprises. How?

Raise awareness of the misogyny in rap music by sharing info with your personal networks.

Stop consuming this media.

In sum: You cannot be a feminist or an advocate for women while consuming anti-female media.

Change my view.

UPDATE : Since I've gotten several requests for evidence that rap music per se deserves singling out, here are two academic studies that perform a quantitative analysis of misogynistic lyrical content among the top U.S. genres:

https://uca.edu/cahss/files/2020/07/Gray-CLA-2019.pdf

https://mediawatchjournal.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Undressing-the-Words-Prevalence-of-Profanity.pdf (See esp. p. 15, Table 4)

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Unveiling the Nuances: A Comparative Analysis of Rap and R&B Music

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Introduction

R&B Music

Controversies and issues, author's perspective.

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JPEGMAFIA, rap's most tireless agitator, looks inward

In January, the rapper and producer JPEGMAFIA ignited some frustrated chatter online when a photo of him and Kanye West , hinting at a collaboration, appeared on his Instagram. JPEG had long been vocal about how much he revered Kanye, and the role that the G.O.O.D. Music architect had played in his musical education. But given the widespread dismay at his hero’s anti-semitic antics (“ Kanye’s a Nazi now ,” JPEG himself lamented in an interview just last year), the backlash was predictable and immediate. The artist fired back, justifying his participation in what would become Vultures 1 , Ye’s first tag-team album with Ty Dolla $ign , as apolitical: a long-awaited call up to the majors by his favorite rapper ever, their connection nothing more than a fated bucket list moment. “its offensive to me that some people on here took a moment i had been waiting on my whole life and twisted into some weird ass oppression olympics,” he wrote in an Instagram story . “I make goals and i achieve them. you make mean reddit threads. We will never be alike no matter how much u want it be.”

It should be no surprise, then, that JPEG’s own new solo album uses the slight as fuel. “When they can’t read you like a book / They gon’ try to attack what you stand on,” he raps a few minutes into I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU (released Aug. 2), before resetting his terms: “I’ma take off even if I land wrong / And take everything I can get my hands on.” Later on, he sounds nearly giddy poking fun at the online firestorm, rapping “The lies don’t stick, narratives ain’t fittin’ / Now they gotta pivot, the goalpost shifts” near the end of “ Exmilitary ,” a song that fires from the hip in all directions — at family, at exes, at bros with no Black friends, at nepo babies, at opps who move too much like “Harvey, Jeffrey, R. Kelly,” the unholy trinity of celebrity sex offenders. In place of what he deems fake news about his character, he presents a rousing, dogmatic set of songs hell bent on not just name-clearing but identity-protecting, over production that erupts with the frenzy of hardcore punk. And yet, beneath the mayhem, there is also a bit of second-guessing, a startling development for one of hip-hop’s most relentless wise guys.

A collage artist working somewhere between noise rap and sound design, JPEGMAFIA has for years stood at the forefront of an edgy cohort of hip-hop doomscrollers tapped into the culture wars. He emerged as a Bandcamp success story in 2018 with his second album, Veteran , which was refreshing for all of its glitchy dissonance, channeling the harshness of Throbbing Gristle, the off-balance hardcore nerddom of MF DOOM and the madcap mania of Ol’ Dirty Bastard for pointedly unresolved songs about gentrification in Williamsburg, hipsters infiltrating rap culture and the limits of liberalism. Subsequent albums increased the muchness of his sound by several degrees: 2019's All My Heroes Are Cornballs was tectonic in structure, constantly shifting and embracing melody with a proudly nonsensical execution, while establishing the open dialogue with his audience that would linger throughout his rise. “Young Peggy, I'm a false prophet / Bringin' white folks this new religion / My fans need new addictions,” he declared. “Rap been so good to me, I hope it get me canceled.” 2021's LP! , released in online and offline versions for sample clearance reasons, swung toward a clipping, synthy avant-garde sound and an intense preoccupation with beef. All along, he has matched trolling with trolling, creating a confrontational relationship with his public. Many see him as terminally online and sometimes paradoxical; he sees those who @ him as representative of a widespread scourge he must rail against, once calling himself a villain to basement dwellers. He has never been shy about his own history, as a Black Southern transplant and Air Force veteran turned rap beatmaker by way of sheer overexposure to the internet. But after four albums of kick-in-your-teeth rap making memes out of politicos and sycophants, ILDMLFY is his first to point toward something beyond snark and fury: an untangling of his contradictions, weighing online discourse’s idea of who he is against who he knows himself to be.

That starts, apparently, with setting the record straight. Seemingly answering for something at every moment, JPEG targets his trolls here as if taking up arms to defend his honor. These raps are some of his most biting and snappy; he sounds amped up delivering them, at times agitated but never inconvenienced, and maybe even taking a little joy in what he clearly sees as punching down. “Hating for free but you can’t pay your rent / If you’re gonna d***-ride, make it make cents,” he raps on “ it’s dark and hell is hot .” A lot of rap is preoccupied with hate — resentment and envy, specifically — but JPEG has a way of approximating the snowballing whataboutism of the social web, making it seem like he is penetrating its surreal, suffocating clutch even as the echo chamber bears down on him. On “ New Black History ,” he raps, “Y’all wish I kept on eatin’ prison lunch ‘cause I’m tweetin’ too much,” sounding emboldened to keep posting around a shadow-ban. It isn’t just that he sees his own continued success as a panacea; for him, his music stands as the only real and true thing about him online, an answer for those looking to puzzle him out.

He has spent a lot of his catalog sniping at rap rivals, waving off burner-account critiques and picking actual fights (“All of my songs a diss,” he admitted on 2021’s “ Nemo ”), and this album is as defined by bird-flipping vitriol as any other. But the thrashing energy found at its start dissipates as it goes on, revealing a self-conscious mind, if not apologetic then at least troubled. “I can’t defend this b**** up in the mirror / I’d rather ask forgiveness than permission,” he raps on “ Don’t Put Anything on the Bible .” Later on, he adds, “My b**** never got taken from me, I lost her myself / My b**** never got comfort from me, I needed too much help.” He doesn’t seem much interested in that help now, and it would be imprecise to say he expresses anything like contrition. But he is drawn into a brooding space — thinking about substance abuse and sobriety, his relationship to class, his military background and the music machine, assessing the damage caused by his disposition within his very niche, very online sphere of influence.

This self-assessment — a tenacious agitator questioning how those urges affect how he operates, and affect those around him — is guided by dynamic, detailed production that can be as exquisite as it is face-melting. Many of the beats open up to reveal a second beat inside them, as if experiencing a zoological metamorphosis. They swing both ways: from quiet to busy, or from intense to subdued. Sometimes they go from loud to louder. “ JIHAD JOE ” explodes from breakbeat bliss into a ripping metal mash. After a celestial overture from Buzzy Lee on “Don’t Put Anything on the Bible,” a switch flips from saintly splendor to more grounded guitar riffs. The collagist's instincts are still in overdrive here, piecing together everything from Logan Roy sound bites to NBA footage, flipping ‘70s Japanese jazz and contemporary baile funk, repurposing classic soul drums from Sly & the Family Stone . But it all is done with such a steady hand as to feel not just like a densely sampled, brazenly engineered world in miniature, which is true of both LP! and the Danny Brown collab Scaring the Hoes , but like it has turned the sum of its oddball parts into the fabric of a unified aesthetic. He goes about things much differently, but in effect, he starts to take after the old Kanye, making maximalism feel integrated and harmonious.

Speaking of which, the distance at this moment between JPEGMAFIA and Kanye West couldn’t be any more apparent after the Saturday release of Ye’s second album with Ty Dolla $ign, Vultures 2 , another kitchen-sink effort showcasing the worst impulses of a capricious egomaniac. Kanye is at the other end of the firestarter life cycle, and his music is increasingly about provocation without end. You can hear in his recent songs an attempt to channel the ambition and intention of his classic, transformative run, but behaviorally, he’s become a damaged nerve ending, unable to relay external stimuli to the hive-mind entity he inhabits — which itself has come to feel less like a cohort of experts under the orchestration of an Oppenheimer-like maestro, and more like a cult committed to a ringleader’s suicide pact. Shortly before JPEG got the call to work on Vultures 1 , he had publicly voiced his exasperation at the state of the Kanye machine — “U got 27 n****s tweaking hi hats just to make some mid,” he wrote on X — and hinted at himself as the caliber of beatmaker whose tinkering might actually do some good. In the end, his contributions were among that album’s most distinct and fully realized. And listening to both artists’ new records side by side, the difference in their current methods feels overwhelmingly clear.

There is, after all, a purposefulness missing from Ye’s stunts. His persistent tardiness (both Vultures albums followed weeks of unclear teases and blew their release dates by a day) reads as the sign of an artist who doesn’t know when to stop, and that endless tampering seems to mostly serve a vision of his own genius. He can feel, at times, like a trespasser in his own control room, actively sabotaging songs. Like his new producing partner, he is motivated above all by outside hate and perceived snubs (“You tried to bring me to my lowest, I still brought the vision / I see through the blinds,” he raps on Vultures 2 ’s “ Time Moving Slow ”), but that admonishment no longer focuses him, as it once did on the career-resetting My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy . JPEG favors Ye in many ways, good and bad, but I hear in the younger artist’s latest work not only a flowering master craftsmanship, but a willingness to confront the idea of what his music is for.

When I interviewed JPEG a few years ago in the lead-up to All My Heroes Are Cornballs , he cited Kanye as the thesis of the title’s message — that listeners should not put their faith in artists, simply because they do not know them. Yet even then he would not judge his idol, already deep in the palm of Trumpism, because he believed anyone, himself included, could end up there. I’ve thought about that stance a lot while listening to these albums. JPEG could very well end up just like Kanye one day, but the foresight in that comment suggests, to me, an artist seeking awareness rather than faith. That’s what I read in his album’s supplicating title, I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU — a recognition, even between barbs, that provocation is often merely a cover for a desperate desire to be seen and understood.

Copyright 2024 NPR

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JPEGMAFIA, rap's most tireless agitator, looks inward

In January, the rapper and producer JPEGMAFIA ignited some frustrated chatter online when a photo of him and Kanye West , hinting at a collaboration, appeared on his Instagram. JPEG had long been vocal about how much he revered Kanye, and the role that the G.O.O.D. Music architect had played in his musical education. But given the widespread dismay at his hero’s anti-semitic antics (“ Kanye’s a Nazi now ,” JPEG himself lamented in an interview just last year), the backlash was predictable and immediate. The artist fired back, justifying his participation in what would become Vultures 1 , Ye’s first tag-team album with Ty Dolla $ign , as apolitical: a long-awaited call up to the majors by his favorite rapper ever, their connection nothing more than a fated bucket list moment. “its offensive to me that some people on here took a moment i had been waiting on my whole life and twisted into some weird ass oppression olympics,” he wrote in an Instagram story . “I make goals and i achieve them. you make mean reddit threads. We will never be alike no matter how much u want it be.”

It should be no surprise, then, that JPEG’s own new solo album uses the slight as fuel. “When they can’t read you like a book / They gon’ try to attack what you stand on,” he raps a few minutes into I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU (released Aug. 2), before resetting his terms: “I’ma take off even if I land wrong / And take everything I can get my hands on.” Later on, he sounds nearly giddy poking fun at the online firestorm, rapping “The lies don’t stick, narratives ain’t fittin’ / Now they gotta pivot, the goalpost shifts” near the end of “ Exmilitary ,” a song that fires from the hip in all directions — at family, at exes, at bros with no Black friends, at nepo babies, at opps who move too much like “Harvey, Jeffrey, R. Kelly,” the unholy trinity of celebrity sex offenders. In place of what he deems fake news about his character, he presents a rousing, dogmatic set of songs hell bent on not just name-clearing but identity-protecting, over production that erupts with the frenzy of hardcore punk. And yet, beneath the mayhem, there is also a bit of second-guessing, a startling development for one of hip-hop’s most relentless wise guys.

A collage artist working somewhere between noise rap and sound design, JPEGMAFIA has for years stood at the forefront of an edgy cohort of hip-hop doomscrollers tapped into the culture wars. He emerged as a Bandcamp success story in 2018 with his second album, Veteran , which was refreshing for all of its glitchy dissonance, channeling the harshness of Throbbing Gristle, the off-balance hardcore nerddom of MF DOOM and the madcap mania of Ol’ Dirty Bastard for pointedly unresolved songs about gentrification in Williamsburg, hipsters infiltrating rap culture and the limits of liberalism. Subsequent albums increased the muchness of his sound by several degrees: 2019's All My Heroes Are Cornballs was tectonic in structure, constantly shifting and embracing melody with a proudly nonsensical execution, while establishing the open dialogue with his audience that would linger throughout his rise. “Young Peggy, I'm a false prophet / Bringin' white folks this new religion / My fans need new addictions,” he declared. “Rap been so good to me, I hope it get me canceled.” 2021's LP! , released in online and offline versions for sample clearance reasons, swung toward a clipping, synthy avant-garde sound and an intense preoccupation with beef. All along, he has matched trolling with trolling, creating a confrontational relationship with his public. Many see him as terminally online and sometimes paradoxical; he sees those who @ him as representative of a widespread scourge he must rail against, once calling himself a villain to basement dwellers. He has never been shy about his own history, as a Black Southern transplant and Air Force veteran turned rap beatmaker by way of sheer overexposure to the internet. But after four albums of kick-in-your-teeth rap making memes out of politicos and sycophants, ILDMLFY is his first to point toward something beyond snark and fury: an untangling of his contradictions, weighing online discourse’s idea of who he is against who he knows himself to be.

That starts, apparently, with setting the record straight. Seemingly answering for something at every moment, JPEG targets his trolls here as if taking up arms to defend his honor. These raps are some of his most biting and snappy; he sounds amped up delivering them, at times agitated but never inconvenienced, and maybe even taking a little joy in what he clearly sees as punching down. “Hating for free but you can’t pay your rent / If you’re gonna d***-ride, make it make cents,” he raps on “ it’s dark and hell is hot .” A lot of rap is preoccupied with hate — resentment and envy, specifically — but JPEG has a way of approximating the snowballing whataboutism of the social web, making it seem like he is penetrating its surreal, suffocating clutch even as the echo chamber bears down on him. On “ New Black History ,” he raps, “Y’all wish I kept on eatin’ prison lunch ‘cause I’m tweetin’ too much,” sounding emboldened to keep posting around a shadow-ban. It isn’t just that he sees his own continued success as a panacea; for him, his music stands as the only real and true thing about him online, an answer for those looking to puzzle him out.

He has spent a lot of his catalog sniping at rap rivals, waving off burner-account critiques and picking actual fights (“All of my songs a diss,” he admitted on 2021’s “ Nemo ”), and this album is as defined by bird-flipping vitriol as any other. But the thrashing energy found at its start dissipates as it goes on, revealing a self-conscious mind, if not apologetic then at least troubled. “I can’t defend this b**** up in the mirror / I’d rather ask forgiveness than permission,” he raps on “ Don’t Put Anything on the Bible .” Later on, he adds, “My b**** never got taken from me, I lost her myself / My b**** never got comfort from me, I needed too much help.” He doesn’t seem much interested in that help now, and it would be imprecise to say he expresses anything like contrition. But he is drawn into a brooding space — thinking about substance abuse and sobriety, his relationship to class, his military background and the music machine, assessing the damage caused by his disposition within his very niche, very online sphere of influence.

This self-assessment — a tenacious agitator questioning how those urges affect how he operates, and affect those around him — is guided by dynamic, detailed production that can be as exquisite as it is face-melting. Many of the beats open up to reveal a second beat inside them, as if experiencing a zoological metamorphosis. They swing both ways: from quiet to busy, or from intense to subdued. Sometimes they go from loud to louder. “ JIHAD JOE ” explodes from breakbeat bliss into a ripping metal mash. After a celestial overture from Buzzy Lee on “Don’t Put Anything on the Bible,” a switch flips from saintly splendor to more grounded guitar riffs. The collagist's instincts are still in overdrive here, piecing together everything from Logan Roy sound bites to NBA footage, flipping ‘70s Japanese jazz and contemporary baile funk, repurposing classic soul drums from Sly & the Family Stone . But it all is done with such a steady hand as to feel not just like a densely sampled, brazenly engineered world in miniature, which is true of both LP! and the Danny Brown collab Scaring the Hoes , but like it has turned the sum of its oddball parts into the fabric of a unified aesthetic. He goes about things much differently, but in effect, he starts to take after the old Kanye, making maximalism feel integrated and harmonious.

Speaking of which, the distance at this moment between JPEGMAFIA and Kanye West couldn’t be any more apparent after the Saturday release of Ye’s second album with Ty Dolla $ign, Vultures 2 , another kitchen-sink effort showcasing the worst impulses of a capricious egomaniac. Kanye is at the other end of the firestarter life cycle, and his music is increasingly about provocation without end. You can hear in his recent songs an attempt to channel the ambition and intention of his classic, transformative run, but behaviorally, he’s become a damaged nerve ending, unable to relay external stimuli to the hive-mind entity he inhabits — which itself has come to feel less like a cohort of experts under the orchestration of an Oppenheimer-like maestro, and more like a cult committed to a ringleader’s suicide pact. Shortly before JPEG got the call to work on Vultures 1 , he had publicly voiced his exasperation at the state of the Kanye machine — “U got 27 n****s tweaking hi hats just to make some mid,” he wrote on X — and hinted at himself as the caliber of beatmaker whose tinkering might actually do some good. In the end, his contributions were among that album’s most distinct and fully realized. And listening to both artists’ new records side by side, the difference in their current methods feels overwhelmingly clear.

There is, after all, a purposefulness missing from Ye’s stunts. His persistent tardiness (both Vultures albums followed weeks of unclear teases and blew their release dates by a day) reads as the sign of an artist who doesn’t know when to stop, and that endless tampering seems to mostly serve a vision of his own genius. He can feel, at times, like a trespasser in his own control room, actively sabotaging songs. Like his new producing partner, he is motivated above all by outside hate and perceived snubs (“You tried to bring me to my lowest, I still brought the vision / I see through the blinds,” he raps on Vultures 2 ’s “ Time Moving Slow ”), but that admonishment no longer focuses him, as it once did on the career-resetting My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy . JPEG favors Ye in many ways, good and bad, but I hear in the younger artist’s latest work not only a flowering master craftsmanship, but a willingness to confront the idea of what his music is for.

When I interviewed JPEG a few years ago in the lead-up to All My Heroes Are Cornballs , he cited Kanye as the thesis of the title’s message — that listeners should not put their faith in artists, simply because they do not know them. Yet even then he would not judge his idol, already deep in the palm of Trumpism, because he believed anyone, himself included, could end up there. I’ve thought about that stance a lot while listening to these albums. JPEG could very well end up just like Kanye one day, but the foresight in that comment suggests, to me, an artist seeking awareness rather than faith. That’s what I read in his album’s supplicating title, I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU — a recognition, even between barbs, that provocation is often merely a cover for a desperate desire to be seen and understood.

Copyright 2024 NPR

Paris Olympics: The Games' newest sport, breaking, debuts tonight. Here's what you need to know

Sport Paris Olympics: The Games' newest sport, breaking, debuts tonight. Here's what you need to know

Australia's first Olympic breaker is a PhD-qualified university lecturer whose male counterpart is a high school student 20 years her junior.

You can store that one away, I'm sure it'll be an answer to a trivia question somewhere along the line. 

Rachael "B-girl Raygun" Gunn, 36, and Jeff 'J-Attack' Dunne, 16, are Australia's representatives in the Olympics' newest sport: breaking 

The pair is among 33 breakers from 15 countries and the Refugee Olympic Team that will take to the dance floor from tonight, vying for gold for the first time in Olympic history.

ABC Sport is live blogging every day of the Paris Olympics

The stage resembles a giant record and the backdrop is a massive replica of a boom box. 

It’s a nod to the musical root of breaking — the breakbeat itself — the moment when a song’s vocals drop and the DJ loops the beat over and over, to allow B-boys and B-girls to make their mark on the dance floor.

How will it work?

For first-time watchers, there’s a lot to understand about the elements of breaking, let alone the competition.

Breakers are separated into groups of four for a round-robin style phase where competitors face-off in one-on-one battles. 

The two breakers from each group with the most wins from two battles proceed to the quarterfinals. 

It then goes ahead to knock-out rounds for the quarterfinals, semifinals and eventually the gold medal match. 

The breakers won’t know what songs or music they’ll compete to — the element of surprise is just as much a part of their experience as the audience’s. 

Breaking has its own judging structure — the Trivium judging system — which will allow judges to evaluate breakers on their technique, vocabulary or variety, execution, musicality and originality.

What am I looking for?

Alright, let's break it down. And don't pardon the pun, it was absolutely intended. 

There are four elements to look for in the breaking competition:

How a breaker starts their dance, while still standing, before going to the floor. 

It’s an introduction to the dancer and their style, before they launch onto the floor into their footwork and other moves.

Also known as “downrock”, these are moves done on the ground, with support from hands, as the breaker moves their legs through a variety of steps.

Dynamic moves that highlight acrobatics and strength, using repetitive, circular movements, including head spins, air flares and windmills.

A static position when a breaker hits and holds a move for a few seconds. 

It’s most appreciated when it’s synced up with a particular beat or sound in the music.

Could we actually win a medal?

Given it's the first time this event's been held at the Olympics — the biggest stage ever for the new sport — it's really hard to say. 

You can't knock Gunn's credentials. She literally lectures in the history of her chosen field. 

Gunn did not take up breaking until her mid-20s and stands out among the teenagers qualified to date, who include Lithuanian world champion Dominika Banevic, a 16-year-old who competes as "B-girl Nicka".

Yet Gunn is far from an anomaly, with American rival Sunny Choi also set to fly the flag for mid-thirties breakers at Paris after giving up a corporate career.

Younger bodies have it easier learning and perfecting "power moves", the more acrobatic elements of breaking that often demand speed, strength and momentum, Gunn concedes.

However, Gunn is still trying out — and nailing — new elements with the help of her husband and coach Samuel Free, a competitive breaker under the name "Sammy The Free".

"It's a different experience. I obviously spend more time warming up, more time in recovery and just make sure I look after my body," Gunn said in an interview with Reuters before travelling to Paris.

"I don't think a 20-year-old needs to worry as much about those things."

Should it even be there?

This is where things get messy. 

Breaking was popular at the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires in 2018 and drew enthusiastic crowds at its Asian Games debut in China last year.

However, its addition to the Olympic program has had its detractors, with cynics dismissing it as a desperate ploy by the International Olympic Committee to attract a younger audience.

Some dancers are also sceptical how breaking's underground roots and street culture fit the commercialised Olympic movement.

The organisers of the Los Angeles games in 2028 decided against keeping breaking, so all eyes after tonight shift to the potential of Brisbane in 2032. 

Though "Raygun" can see both sides of the debate, she raves about a highly accessible sport that has become a lot more inclusive and respectful of women since she penned her thesis.

"They get fit, they get a creative outlet and become part of this community," Gunn said.

"The platform that the Olympics gives us to inspire new generations of people is positive."

• The b-girls breaking round robin is scheduled to start just after midnight tonight (AEST) with the men's division scheduled for the same time tomorrow night. ABC Sport is live blogging every moment from the Paris Olympics. 

The ABC of SPORT

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