this is part of an essay i wrote for english class earlier in the year, tell me what you think


Just look at what happened to one of the most exciting, invigorating socio-cultural movements of our generation: hip hop. From its birth in the 1970s until the early 1990s, hip-hop was the vanguard force of a dramatic transformation in urban African American life. Hip hop was not just one of the most important innovations that pop music had seen in a generation but a whole culture, encompassing new styles of dance and dress and speech and a new form of visual art (graffiti). It promised to reclaim the primacy of black artists in pop music. It was, moreover, an embryonic political movement. When Chuck D of Public Enemy declared rap music “black America’s CNN” in the late 1980s, there seemed to be considerable truth to the claim, and enormous potential to the cause.
Within a few short years, though, hip-hop-at least in its mainstream incarnation-would be horribly disfigured and all but entirely disconnected from its uplifting, block-partying roots. The world’s multinational entertainment conglomerates co-opted its sound and pose, fed on its credibility, discouraged its constructive traits and celebrated its worst impulses. Hip-hop artists were reduced to ultra-violent cartoon characters spinning musical horror flicks for white suburbanites, while the culture was stripped down to its most saleable elements and put to work as a marketing vehicle for sportswear and running shoes (and, in time, for seemingly everything). Rap soon looked more like white America’s Home Shopping Network than black America’s CNN. Hip-hop has been processed into a corporate sub-genre, a brand identity, a tidy package of cool.

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