Hip Hops Ascension over the Last Thirty Years - Essay Example

The commercial media that is dominated by corporations serve a bardic function as structural messages put out by the media have to be decoded and interpreted by the audience in a specific way that requires the understanding of hip-hop culture. To decode, audience members resort to values, norms, and beliefs – root metaphors – that they, the audience, hold to make sense of the information communicated, and their response is not only based on the intent of the communicator but also on the values in which the audience have also been socialized, (Hill, Simona, and Ramsaran, 2009, p. 17)

The notion of bardic television is adapted and applied to the entire media hence the framing of the natural order of things in the world by providing a set of images so the audience members can locate themselves in the social stratification system. This is made so by providing justifications for the system of inequality, and by perpetuating images that reinforce the dominant culture/ideology while the exploration of the issues of race, class, and gender is rooted in the historical development of the society. It considers the values and images that are important for contemporary social stratification. Hip-hop as well as the media play a role in the reinforcement of these images that result in the perpetuation of the power of the privileged. Many of the images that have been brought into the mainstream reinforce the old controlling images of minorities, women, and the poor thus serving to perpetuate the system of domination and it fits well into the overall color-blind ideology promoted to justify contemporary notions such as discrimination and inequality.
In the 1980s, cultural and commercial forces united to forge an enduring place for hip-hop within African American popular culture Tricia Rose (1994) argues that this point is effective as she observes that at the beginning of urban hip-hop, rap stories continue to articulate the shifting terms of the black marginality in the contemporary American culture. On the one hand, some aspects of hip-hop culture can challenge some marginalized ideologies such as racism and sexist stereotypes; however, those images sold by corporate America in hip-hop culture increasingly reinforce many of the fundamental factors that further the entrenchment of marginality in America.

The contradictory nature of the black male image that is brought into the mainstream culture by the highly commercialized hip-hop culture challenges the system of traditions that were associated with racism, police brutality, and poverty while at the same time articulating the contemporary hegemonic values of the oversexed, violent black male. The very images that are now brought into the mainstream about black men can be traced to the ancient forged realities of the North American slavery periods. Black males are portrayed as violent, a threat to society, and having an uncontrolled appetite for sex particularly with white women as the gangster and thug life perpetuated by the hip-hop culture serves to portray those negative stereotypes of black males and despite the negative social impact, contemporary capitalism, with the use of the media, can market dimensions of thug life associated with the gear and mannerisms to suburban white youth for profit so that the youth can experience the other digitally. The performance of the rap artists becomes a vicarious and demonstrative event that captures supposed reality and reinforces implacable fantasies that are brought into light by the evolving hip-hop culture articulated in the contemporary world.

There is the archetype of the female that is brought into the mainstream of hip hop culture and the images marketed, which perpetuate the stereotype of the female whore but which can also be seen as female empowerment and in some instances when the female artists are presented as feminists – and when women feel some certain roles in the videos of male hip hop artists – in the postmodern sense, they are Wankstas as they display intense contradiction. In one sense they seem to voice the ideal that women now have a voice and are queen bees whilst on the other hand they perpetuate the negative stereotypes of black women as sexually loose, just as in slavery times. Read More