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Ghimirey 1 Tika Ghimirey Dr.

Roberto Tinajero English 1301 December 26, 2012 Impact of Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture on Children Hip-hop culture and rap music have an adverse impact on the children who are the future of the society. Firstly, children influenced by rap music and hip-hop culture are more susceptible to criminal and anti-social activities than those who are not. Secondly, the culture provides an easy front for the young children to drug addiction and alcoholism which would damage their health or life altogether. Thirdly, abusive and inappropriate language is very common among in the people of hip-hop society which the children would eventually pick up and start using like an uncivilized people. Finally, most of the rappers and hip-hop fans ignore rules and authorities like police and influence children who are exposed to them to do so. As stated above, children exposed to rap music and hip-hop culture are more likely to pick up bad character and ignorant manners and eventually develop a criminal attitude. Most of the rap lyrics are crime related. One of such rap songs with criminal lyrics is Criminal by Eminem and one of the massages from Criminal is that the rapper or the singer (Eminem) would kill someone in reality if he said so in the lyrics. Not just one, there are a lot of criminal massages in this lyrics. So, exposure of children to such music makes them violent. According to Coalition Against Violence in the article The Media: Impact of Rap Music on Violence, Heavy exposure to negative music and images has a great impact on youth violence in the African American community. In the same way, rappers and hip-hop fans are usually from a criminal background or their entire culture is as a result of criminal people and gangsta society.

Ghimirey 2 Surprisingly enough, most rappers and their fans walk around with guns all the time and robe the people in the street. As a matter of fact, we find criminal massages in their lyrics offending many personalities. So, a child raised in this way in a hip-hop environment definitely develops a criminal attitude of all those kinds and turns into a trash when he grows up. On top of that, rap music promotes sexual violence too. In the same way, when children watch music video, they are very likely to commit sexual crimes. As a result, the child may grow up into a murderer, sex offender and a renowned criminal in the society when he exposes to such a culture. Kids and teen agers growing in hip-hop environment dont only learn crimes but also can get involved in alcoholism and drug addiction. In other words, young people listening to rap and hip-hop music are more likely to have problems with drug addictions and violence compared to those who dont. This is because the rappers and their fans use drugs and alcohols and the children watching them in the music video also try to copy them. On top of that, there are number of alcohol and drugs related rap songs. One of such songs is What You Been Drankin On? by Jim Jones in which they discuss kind and quantity of alcohol they are drinking. In this way, when children listen to such lyrics, they start drinking and become drugs and alcohol addicted at their young age. Rappers even dont forget to mention alcohol or other restricted drugs in their song. According to an author in the article titled Rap Listeners Prone to Alcohol, Drugs and Violence, Recent studies of popular music by other researchers reveal that nearly half of rap/hip and hop songs mentioned alcohol as compared to around 10 percent or less of other popular music genres (Gogek). This is actually because some companies hire rappers to do so in order to promote their liquor sales which end up with more under aged getting addicted to drinking alcohols resulting into their deteriorating health. Similarly, in another the article titled Are rappers advertising alcohols to teen agers in CBC News, Community Team argues that,

Ghimirey 3 companies that sell alcohol don't typically seek out rappers to mention their product. However, distillers and rappers have entered into deals after the song has been released. This means rappers are encouraged by the distillery companies to advertise their product in their song taking no heed on the destruction of the under ages. Moreover, when children get addicted at their young age, it is very likely that they might come across a number of health related complications besides developing criminal behavior. In this way rap music and hip-hop culture may be destroying our society more rapidly than ever ultimately pushing it behind the path of human civilization. The other thing the rap music and hip-hop culture does to spoil children apart from crime and drug addiction is the use of inappropriate and violent language in their lyrics. This is because; a violent music creates a violent behavior in the listeners. More surprisingly, with the development of the rap music and hip hop culture, most people in the modern cities have already started using bad words in their normal conversation taking no care as to who they are talking to. According to Amal Malek in his article Violence in Language: is Rap Music Causing Violence in America?, Rap, hip hop and gangsta rap are kind of music that often use violent lyrics and violent beats to reflect urban life. (107). Doubtlessly, Gangsters and rappers want to destroy the society by glorifying rough and violent language and attitude. For example, in his song Love Sosa, Chief Keef mentions, These bitches have Sosa/ O End or no end/ Fucking with those O boys/ You gon get fucked over. These lyrics means not to mess up with the boys of O-Block or else they get fucked over meaning get beaten up or even killed. Such lyrics, and inappropriate language is not the only thing that hip hop culture fans want to do in the street but also rap in a vulgar way. Such actions and speech easily influence the children in a wrong way. However, there are a handful of rap songs that rappers claim to have focused to the flow of positive

Ghimirey 4 massage to general people and children but the way the language they use is always in a violent one. In this way, as children learn most of the things from media, they can be easy victims of bad and inappropriate languages used in the rape and hip-hop music and eventually develop a violent behavior. It is because, when it comes to children, they can easily grab the massages in the rap music they are listening to. Another such bad lyric is How Many Licks by Lil Kim and in this song a women is talking about sex in a dirty way. What we have to understand at this point is that, what a person becomes in future is mainly based on the way he or she speaks. Almost all the hip-hop music now uses foul language and children can easily pick it up. Such music can make young children and teenagers susceptible to spoiling their language and eventually turn them to be an uncivilized person in the society. In this way, rap music and hip hop culture plays an adverse role in educating children their language. The other bad thing rappers do, besides all those mentioned above, is not obeying authorities, especially the police personals. To begin with, rappers and hip-hop fans generally dont obey laws and authorities because police are often after them for doing something offending the general people or the law. Likewise, doing drugs and alcohol, inappropriate language and street crime are some of the things that some rappers are arrested for. For this reason most rappers do not like police and begin to yell at them. Not just yelling in person, they also compose lyrics a lot of time that is intended to curse at police. For example in the lyrics of Fuck the Police, Niggaz Wit Attitudes remarks Fuck the police coming straight from the underground/ A young nigga got it bad cause Im brown/ And not the other color so police think/They have the authority to kill the minority/Fuck that shit, cause I aint the one. This little portion of the lyric means Fuck the Police movement has now gone global from the Occupy Oakland Moment, police discriminate black people from other and sadly, police often do have

Ghimirey 5 the authority to kill the minority so they dont care killing rappers. Clearly, children exposed to such music and culture is badly affected. It is because children also develop a negative feeling and attitude about police and other authority after they listen to those yelling music from the rappers. Usually, this is the reason why there is an increasing crime in United States and around the world. Since children learn to disobey the authority, the law and order situation can eventually deteriorate and the result is violence everywhere. So, rap music do have the potentiality of creating a negative impact on the children and, indeed, to the society against the police personals trying to offer us a sense of security. Basically, not all but must rap lyrics seem to have emerged from criminal gang stars. Obviously, their composition is often from a violent background. Since children pick up things from media more quickly than from anywhere, they can be easy victims of rap music. Moreover, childrens exposure to rap music brings about drug addiction and negative attitude to the police authorities which further destroy their life. More importantly, we cannot use rap music to educate children affirmatively because inappropriate languages children pick up from rap music is really helping them make their life inappropriate on the practical ground when they grow-up. In this way, rap and hip-hop culture can destroy the all-round development of the personality of children. Therefore, there is hardly anything that we are trying to look at which is non-criminal and non-deteriorating elements for the children in the rap and hip-hop culture. It is very important that, rap stars and other renowned personals in the rap and hip hop society should also take things in a responsible way, like other music, so that our children are harmed the least and benefited the most. And, last but not the least, it is always necessary to keep our children safe from rap music with a good parenting as long as it is possible in order to make them useful citizens.

Ghimirey 6 Work Cited Coalition Against Violence , . "The Media: Impact of Rap Music on Violence." Web. 8 Dec. 2012. <http://www.metrostudies.pitt.edu>. Community Team, . "Are Rappers Advertising Alcohols to Teenagers?." CBC News. Web. 10 Dec. 2012.<http://www.cbc.ca>. Gogek, Jim. "Rap Listeners Prone to Alcohol, Drugs, Violence." Web. 8 Dec. 2012. <http://resources.prev.org>. Keef, Chief. Love Sosa <http://rapgenius.com>. Malek, Amel Saleeby. "Violence in Language: Is Rap Music Causing Violence in America?" Violence, Realities and Concerns.107. Web. 10 Dec. 2012. <http://www.ndu.edu.lb >. Niggaz Wit Attitudes. Fuck The Police<http://rapgenius.com>.

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Coalition Against Violence Article name The Media: Impact of Rap Music on Violence http://www.metrostudies.pitt.edu 12/05/2012 2. Jim Gogek Title: Rap Listeners Prone to Alcohol, Drugs, Violence http://resources.prev.org 3. Author: Community Team CBC News http://www.cbc.ca 12/06/2012 4. Author: Amal Saleeby Malek, Ph.D Article: Violence in Language: Is Rap Music Causing Violence in America? http://www.ndu.edu.lb 12/06/2012 12/05/2012

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