How Rap Affects Young Culture and Adults
The argument of Rap and how it relates to young people is one of the most impactful and controversial topics in todays society. Many people think that rap projects violence and sexual stereotypes, while others believe it has no effect on young minds and can even have positive effects. on them. These arguments are polar opposites of each other and it is really interesting to see how they compare.
Many people that oppose rap music argue that rap can cause teens to become more violent and not as intelligent. However, according to a study by Florida International University, they found that there was some evidence that students initially showed increase in comprehension when students listened to eight half hour sessions of rap. However the results were very consistent as they only tested 105 students. As to the violence aspect of rap, there has been a study by Western Connecticut State University that showed a connection between violence and rap. They did not take in consideration that rap is affiliated with poor economic communities so it is unclear how it affects these statistics. There are also many faults when it comes to positive thinking of rap.
Some reasons for people thinking that rap is beneficial to teenagers is that some rap songs have a good message and so young people can have role models that are rappers. There are more cases of bad music and bad rappers than there are good so that argument is not as valid as it seems at eye glance. Rap can have positive affects as stated in the previous paragraph but there can be many factors that can disrupt and hinder the data. The question is should you listen to rap music?
Rap music has many different genres that can flood you with different emotions. Slow rap can make you relaxed and other rap can “hype” you up before a game. Mental preparation is key when doing competitive or exciting and rap can benefit at setting the right mindset. Music can also bring or make new memories when listening to it. Many people listen to music back from the 90s or 80s due to nostalgia. People can use that same theory and apply it to rap. Young people may always look back at rap and be happy that they listened to it because how many kids think that they want to do what the rap song says.
When it comes to rap, it is very interesting to see how bipolar it can be while being in the gray at the same time. Rappers like Lil Pump and 6ix9ine are stereotyped as being uneducated and rappers like J Cole are known as lyrical geniuses. While the rappers have very different perspectives, they rap about the struggles and being from the hood. If you listen to rap music and just take it in, you may notice it at some point. Things like this affect people like me and alike, as sometimes you can learn from them as well as being emotional.
Other types of genres have different stereotypes brought on to them. “Country boys” and “basic white people” are some examples. People associate bias because it is the easiest and the first thing people do. It takes 20 impressions to change the first one and many people do not see 20 country or pop people. Generalizing something has always made it easier to clean thing up and have them be a in order. We do not help with this because there is not a lot of individuality in our society. We fear it and only do something that other people are doing. In high school and other schools, you can see this very easily. You can see it at work and business places as well. How can we not stereotype when we get everything handed to us and we do not research? This is the reason that rap has been over generalized and corrupted. This article is just talking about rap because it is not the only thing people stereotype, but it is a very big one.
So what has tainted a genre that was once great and looked up on? Well, rap has started to not filter their songs. If you compare rap from the 90’s and today, they would sound completely different. I for one, have heard my dad scold at me for listening to “crap” and “my music was always better”. Many generations look at things many different ways and we should embrace the differences and not compare them. At some point, people need to realize that not everything is affecting this generation negatively like shooting games or rap, and they need to realize that young people are mostly in control of their minds. There are many different sources and news channels that take bias toward a topic, like politics. This of course, misconstrues our opinion and it leans toward another side. It is ironic how adults think that young people are not smart and easily influenced, when every news channel does the same thing to them. In a utopia, there would not be bias and people would be allowed to generate their own opinions on certain subjects. We would not intervene unless providing facts that are credible and have no faults in them. This could lead to more people agreeing with unlikely opinions, something that our world tends not to do.
In conclusion, there are many opinions on how rap affects the young culture and how it hinders their minds. This however, can be very misleading. Different sources may say very different things and show very different statistics on the same topic. We credit them as being very valuable and unbiased, however this does not exist in our society mostly. People need to look at both sides of the story before writing or talking about something. We need to keep the least amount of bias when writing something that can influence other people. As a teenager, I cannot be biased when talking about a topic that criticizes teenagers. right?
