Is there a positive effect of violent rap music to the topic of human aggression?

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTII

DECLARATIONIII

INTRODUCTION1

CRITICAL LITERATURE1

CONCLUSION15

REFERENCES16

Violent rap music and human aggression

Introduction

As the rap music scene has changed during the recent years, the singers and artists have become more careless about messages they send to the people, specially the adolescents and teenagers. Since the censorships laws and regulation have changed, difference in the freedom of speech for media and the public has emerged significantly. With origins in the 1970s hip-hop culture of urban New York, rap music became part of the culture wars after gaining commercial success and reaching audiences beyond America's black ghetto and urban centres. The stereotypical rap song that has caught the attention in the culture wars is storytelling delivered with fast rhyme, alliteration, and an accompanying beat, expressing concerns of the black underclass with lyrics that can be raw, boastful, aggressive, violent, sexist, homophobic, obscene, and mocking (Gallien, 2006). Having emerged from hip-hop culture (along with break dancing, deejaying, and graffiti), contemporary rap music also reflects a cultural dichotomy. On one hand, rap songs are often political, focusing on drugs, gangs, street violence, rape, police brutality, and the like, offering a message of defiance rather than hope. On the other hand, some rap music offers a utopian message of racial unity—though this form is often obscured by the dialogue of the culture wars and by rap music institutions themselves.

Critical literature

As music has become an essential part of everyone's life, specifically the teenage and adolescent group, its impact on human psychology is strongly observed and studies by numerous scholars and researchers. This paper analyses and critics the question: “Is their positive effect of violent rap music to the topic of human aggression?”

It is un-doubtful that rap music has been facing unprecedented success. What is unclear and ambiguous is the impact rap music has had on American society broadly, and on its listeners in particular. In fact, ''the precise meaning of rap's significance as a cultural form produced predominantly by African Americans and consumed by a multi-ethnic and multi-racial audience has been and continues to be a subject of public debate''.

One side of the debate focuses on positive impact of rap music, mainly for African American youth. Bynoe (2004) notes, ''One of greatest contributions of rap music derives from the fact that it has fostered a deep nationalism in the youth of African-American'' while Boyd (2003) argues rap ''serves ...