If you want to soothe a savage beast, play a sweet melodic song. It demonstrates the hidden social and positioning power of the music. However, if the beast were selective on the type of music, would you play a hip-hop, rhythm and blues, or reggae? Humans are selective when listening to songs. Music is a creation of human beings and their creativity is informed by the social, cultural, political, and environmental factors they face. In American society, especially the African American community, hip-hop is the type of musical genre that the majority of the members of the community identify with. In fact, it originated in the community and the majority prominent hip-hop artists are African Americans such as, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and Jay-Z among others. Historically, the community has faced social, political, and cultural marginalization. To express their frustrations, African Americans created hip-hop as a mode of resistance, to highlight socially unacceptable issues placed on them, and to seek identity, and in the process, soothing the community members.
Mode of Resistance
Music is a tool to resist unwanted issues. Hip-hop has diverse logical appeals (logos) to varied audiences. For African American hip-hop artists, their intended audience is the greater society to gain interest from the media. Beighey and Unnithan (2006) contend that music has a social power and positioning for people to bargain or justify their existence. Due to lack of recourse in the social justice system, hip-hop artists have relied on the hip-hop songs to argue logically and communicate the oppression they receive racially to the American community. In this regard, the music carries social and political messages calling the masses to resist police brutality, and the government tendency to neglect them, which are all created by racism. Mccoy (2017) reports the musical artist, Eminem protests about police brutality, attacks white nationalist ideas, and calls for the whites to appreciate rap music due to the explicit portrayal of real life problems.
On the other hand, even though the music has the power to demonstrate resistance to the perceived and known social injustices, the set up of the song raises moral and ethical issues. It is granted that hip-hop is unique regarding the lyrical composition, and tone. However, when it is associated with obscenity, and abusive languages, it raises logical-ethical questions. For this reason, the intended oppositional audience will be perceiving the music wrongly. Caldwell (2008) debates the political and gangster nature of hip-hop concludes that despite being the voice of the socially marginalized, the obscenity, and abusive language make it gangster in nature. Which results in attracting negative reactions from the white audience.
Social Issues
Music highlights social problems in the community. Pathos is a powerful rhetorical analytical tool because the rhetor uses it to appeal to the audience’s sense of reasoning, identity, emotions, and self-interests. The rhetors, here being the hip-hop artists, rely on hip-hop music to highlight the socially and politically unacceptable issues African Americans face. Arguably, the popular method to detail the emotional and painful experiences in both implicit and explicit styles is through music. In this regard, African American hip-hop artists capitalize on their musical artistic ability to outline horrendous experiences in the community both in the emotional and physical situations. For example, the hip-hop artists painfully talk about the ordeals their forbearers went through as slaves, how racism has been used as a tool to deny them opportunities, and also leads to issues such police brutality.
These fundamental issues appeal to the emotions of the audience. Beighey and Unnithan (2006) present that African Americans, being an inferior group, have created hip-hop as a subculture to let the world know about their loneliness, injustices endured, and the exclusion they face. Similarly, Caldwell (2006) asserts that rap is a formidable indictment tool of oppression and racism. It appeals to the government, as a body with the social contract with the citizens to be familiar to the cries of the inner cities, ghetto residents, and address the fate of African Americans.
Conversely, the social pathetic appeal of the political hip-hop is debatable. Similar to the resistance, not every audience is pleased with the language the hip-hop artists use to address the social issues. For example, African American women are among the racial minority women who are marginalized. However, in the hip-hop songs and videos, the male artists employ vulgar and obscene terms that are demeaning to women. Caldwell (2008) laments that hip-hop elevates misogyny, is sexist, and praises violence. Sullivan (2003) argues that because of the style and packaging of hip-hop to address social issues, it captures African Americans as a violent race. Resultantly, instead of finding solutions to the important issues African American face, it has become part of the problem.
Identity Reaffirmation
Hip-hop is an art movement and a subculture that identify a particular group. Evidently, hip-hop is predominantly an African American affair and gives them the identity. Audiences from across the multiethnic and multiracial America have diverse perspectives regarding hip-hop and identity. The idea is corroborated by the fact that the majority of African Americans listen to hip-hop as their preferred choice of music. The argument is that the songs talk about their social issues, and addresses the aftermath of such social issues, and uses lyrical language that is unique to them, which justify the claim about identity reaffirmation.
However, the identity leads to further marginalization because as Sullivan (2003) puts it, the white race avoids hip-hop because it is a direct critique to racism. The concept of race has been used to portray the whites as the dominant race and they are not ready to face the atrocities of racist ideologies.
In summation, hip-hop is a subculture associated with the African Americans. The genre is employed as a method to resistance social, and political injustices, to highlight socially unacceptable issues, and to reaffirm identity. The rhetorical analysis of the resistance, identity, and social issues in the hip-hop reveal that the objective of hip-hop is debatable depending on the racial group one comes from. In this regard, the language, style, and artistic demeanors in hip-hop raise ethical questions.