Hip Hop Is A Culture
...Because of its enormous cross-over appeal, the hip hop culture has made a home in main-stream media. Although created by black youths on the street, hip hop's influence has become worldwide. Approximately 75% of the rap and hip hop audience is non-black. It has gone from the streets of inner-cities, to the suburbs, and into the corporate world. McDonald's, Coca Cola, Sprite, Nike, and other corporate giants have capitalized on the movement of the “hip hop culture”. Today, hip and rap is the fastest growing music genre in the U.S., accounting for more than 10 percent of the $12.3 billion music sales in 1998. 1 According to the Recording Industry Association of America, rock music accounted for 32.5 percent of the industry's $12.3 billion in sales during 1997. But this figure is down from 46.2 percent a decade ago. Meanwhile rap music's share of sales has increased 150% over the last ten years and is still rising.2Although many critics of rap music and the hip hop culture seemed to be fixated on the messages of sex, violence, and harsh language, this genre offers us a picture of what America does contain but hides.
“A trip down memory lane”
After seeing an advance print of the American Gangster, Jay-Z, the hip-hop phenomenon, found himself inspired. The movie details the story of the Vietnam-era Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas, who Jay-Z saw so many connections between Lucas's life and his own. Over the course of a few weeks, Jay-Z recorded his own lyrical epic, an album about the rise and fall of a gangster like Lucas, in his eyes, if the hip-hop game didn’t save his life from the life of drugs. American Gangster has a total of 15 tracks, which the first 13 outlines the criminal rise and fall we've seen in so many movies, which shows the connection in pop culture. The epic of a desperate youth involved in the neighborhood ways, the schemes, the crimes, and the...
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