A Short Treatise on Hip-hop & Rap

Rap is music. It is entertainment, and with most entertainment, taking it literally is a completely foolish act. I can accept and understand if you don’t like it or you don’t want your children listening to it. Both of those things you can control at least partially. But don’t try ban it or deny others the right to listen to it, or those who create it a way to support themselves. It’s not just 13 year olds that listen to rap; 18 year olds do too, so do 25 and 30 year old adults. You can’t deny people the right to listen to what they want, and since when have bans ever been effective in the United States (alcohol, drugs, illegal immigration)?

Maybe hip-hop shouldn’t be listened to be 11 and 12 year olds, maybe they are too immature, but that responsibility rests with their parents not the government or the rappers. Parents should stand up and make a better effort to do their jobs instead of blaming everyone else and trying to destroy a huge industry because they are too lazy to be good parents and have seemingly found a perfect scapegoat for their bad parenting.

But if the media and the public so strongly desire to push that same tired argument that rap music corrupts the country’s youth and makes them do drugs and kill and steal, we all need to consider the fact that music, television, movies, they all reflecy society, not influence it. They are simply shining a floodlight on what was already there, hidden in the shadows, ignored, too taboo to be acknowledged by the public. But recent events have should have given us something new to think about, and a new point to make for “pro-rap” people like me.

The worst mass shootings in our nation, whether it is Virginia Tech, Columbine, or the Texas, were not influenced by rap music. Hip-hop has made people Jump, Get Jiggy With It, and Lean With It, Rock With It, but it has never made anyone load a gun and go shoot someone. That honor was saved for the President, but that’s another story.

Rap and hip-hop may not exactly be harmless, but the music is not a “make a delinquent drug.” There are much bigger issues to focus on because the hip-hop industry is a giant and it will not lose this fight to a group of suburban moms and overzealous journalists.