Category: Let's talk
How far do references to violence in musical genres such as heavy metal and gangsta rap cause audiences to behave violently? What criticisms could be made of such a perspective?
this was the title of one of my papers last year. i will post the essay in a few posts, so bare with me, and i'd like to get your views and get a disgussion going on said topic. so here we go
How far do references to violence in musical genres such as heavy metal and gangsta rap cause audiences to behave violently? What criticisms could be made of such a perspective?
It could be argued that in music in the 21st century, hip-hop (rap) and heavy metal rock have an influence on the youth of today. Through the culture and subcultures of both genres of music, they have become major parts of society. With that has come great controversy and criticism from opponents who feel that the message given in the music and the lifestyle of the major artists outside of the studio does not give the young people of today a positive role model to look up to. Whether it’s through the lyrics referencing guns, and killing law enforcement in gangster rap to the more subtle darker elements in heavy metal.
In arguing the opposite point, it is not wise to take this at face value. Just because it is referenced does not mean that audiences who listen to these forms of music, and who follow the different subcultures will go out and commit acts of violence. I am going to focus mainly on rap music as i believe there will be more research on this particular topic.
"I would say to Radio 1, do you realise that some of the stuff you play on Saturday nights encourages people to carry guns and knives?” (David Cameron 2006)
He was leader of the opposition when he made this statement, where he was asked how he would tackle gun and knife crime in the United Kingdom. He was referring to Radio 1’s Saturday night schedule in which there has been a long running rap show hosted by Tim Westwood.
Studies have been carried out on both genres of the music, such as (Eliana Tropeano 2006) where experiments have been undertaken to prove the fact that watching a violent rap video, or a suggestive rock video can have a negative effect on a person’s thinking in regards to violence. According to the study, there was a direct correlation between watching a video which had violence in it, and having aggressive and violent thoughts. This apparently proves that being exposed to media violence has a significant chance of showing aggressive or violent behaviour in the short run. Bandura did a simillar experiment in the 1970’s where children were exposed to violent media such as Tom and Jerry cartoons, then put in a room with a Bobo doll and unsurprisingly the young children hit the doll. A criticism of this is that being exposed to media such as rap videos would not always be consumed in a lab environment. The “Hypodermic syringe” model of media consumption means that the viewer/listener absorbs the lyrics or the message of the video/song such as Ice T’s ‘Cop Killer’ and would act on the message given in the music. However a criticism of ‘effects’ research is that it takes away from individuality. Different people will act differently to a text and a message, so just because a person listens to a song promoting violence does not necessarily mean they will act on it.
“A main finding is that 22% of gangsta rap music songs contain violent and misogynist lyrics. A deconstructive interpretation suggests that gangsta rap music is necessarily understood within a context of patriarchal hegemony” (Armstrong 2001).
Rap has outgrown its juvenile victim status; it needs to recognise it can shape young minds as a powerful force. Power brings responsibility. So using rap and heavy metal as a scapegoat to pin all gun and knife crime in the UK could be seen as taking an easy way out by the politicians.
It is easy of course to stereotype a specific genre of music. More productive would be to examine the market forces that push the kind of songs we are talking about into positions of mainstream prominence – and to acknowledge that those forces do not act solely on hip hop, or metal but on mass culture at large, But it’s easier to pretend that violence and misogyny were somehow smuggled into the country through hip hop and metal as opposed to forces that act profoundly on us all.
Stigmatising people that listen to a certain genre of music because of what the lyrics say has become widespread with the bringing of the 696 form which all venues that promote music must comply and fill in. I bring this up because it says in black and white on the form that anyone who wishes to promote an event with “DJ’s and mc’s who speak over a backing track” should really fill out the form. So that implies that promoting a rap gig brings more chance of risk and violence.
The postmodernist and feminist vision holds that words, visions and music and other discourses are performative utterances that instantiate a condition or state of affairs (Swidler 1996) so Armstrong states that rappers create a commercially available everyday reality, and it is in accordance with the lyrics that the gangster rap music provides that individuals structure their perceptions (Armstrong 2001). People would bring different life experiences when listening to rap. Not every person would read in to the lyrics and take them literally. Audiences can develop an understanding of a video and understand the lyrics without acting on them.
However, in a recent documentary made by filmmaker Byron Hurt called Beats and Rhymes he states:
“that rap music can be as sexist and homophobic as it can be positive and enlightening. Marginalized young women and men have found their voices in hip-hop arts, gathering to share culture at b-girl conventions around the world or reading for each other in after-school poetry classes.”
Rather than pointing the finger at the genre of music, the documentary points the finger at American culture, which has exploited race, sex and language for centuries. This in turn gives the impression to the young African-American men to adopt the hardcode gangster lifestyle. The culturalist view point would be to look at all the encoded messages in the music. Stewart Hall’s theory that meanings are encoded into the media text e.g. the lyrics. However the lyrics and the message can also be decoded; a person can completely read in to the message and the lyrics and act in a violent aggressive fashion. It can also go the opposite way ware a person can completely reject the message and find their own meaning in to it. Some people can take some aspects of a song and be happy with that.
It is important to note that hip hop in some cases gives the youth of today an identity with which to label themselves also. It allows them to have a label, and to be a part of a community, for example a black youth will relate to hip-hop language, if English is not his or her first language. It is perhaps down to cultural imperialism that there exists the need to warn people to have to find a demographic to fit into.
In 1941, T.W. Adorno used his essay “On Popular Music”2 to contend that pop music’s “fundamental characterization” lies in standardization (17). The word “standardization” implies its meaning: the careful structuring of songs so that, despite the occasional change in pitch, beat or subject matter, all popular music can be characterized by a distinct formula that must be followed.
Using Adorno in this context, every gangster rap song follows the same formula, so the change that needs to be made won’t be made. The listener according to Adorno doesn’t realise this, and there for will continue to listen to the main stream commercialised rap.
If no attention is given to the song, it cannot be sold; if attention is paid to it, there is always the possibility that people will no longer accept it, because they know it too well. This partly accounts for the constantly renewed effort to sweep the market with new products, to hound them to their graves; then to repeat the infanticidal manoeuvre again and again. (Adorno, paragraph 25 in Theory About the Listener)
It is difficult to find a way to support gangster rap except for the normal arguments that people make. It is the disillusioned youth of today, who are trying to express themselves by the most aggressive way they can think of.
“...the central cultural vehicle for open social reflection on poverty, fear of adulthood, the desire for absent fathers, frustrations about black male sexism, female sexual desires, daily rituals of life as an unemployed teen hustler, safe sex, raw anger, violence, and childhood memories. It is also the home of innovative uses of style and language, hilariously funny carnivalesque and chitlin-circuit-inspired dramatic skits, and ribald storytelling. In short, it is black America's most dynamic contemporary popular cultural intellectual and spiritual vessel.” (Rose, 1994, p. 18)
Gangster rap music also has a strong tendency towards the demeaning of women, promotion of drug use and violence as a way to achieve empowerment through symbolic verbal action. The negative implications of rap music have become as popular as the music itself. It attacks racism with more racism, lack of power through supremacy, and perhaps most disturbingly through the sales of racist and misogynistic materials to those who want to be entertained and influenced by their desire to learn about ghetto culture.
There is a rap fan base who listen to positive, “conscious hip hop” which talks of politics, and real struggle. However these artists are never given mainstream coverage, and are not in the top sellers of the year when it comes to albums. Tshombe Walker wrote in the essay “Hip-Hop and the Rap Music Industry,” that hip-hop artists who promote positive values in their music often have trouble getting record deals to others who commodify violence and sex, which sells more records (Conyers 215).
50 cent one of the most commercially successful rappers of the last decade put it best when he stated in an interview.
"You get typecast," he says. "Robert De Niro, Al Pacino? Those guys are forever Scarface, no matter how many other great roles they've done. And when I start to do things that are away from [my image], my core – the people who initially supported me – they say, 'Aah, I ain't feelin' that.' I've got to give them what they're looking for.
" (50 cent http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/sep/05/50-cent-robert-greene-interview) so playing up to the violent gangster illusion that made him successful is something hard to let go, as it makes album sales consistently high.
"They can't use my music to advertise for Coca Cola / they can't use my music to advertise for Motorola / they can't use my music to advertise for anything / I guess that's reason the industry won't let me in / refuse to be a product or a brand I'm a human / refuse to contribute to the gangster illusion." (Lowkey ‘My Sole’)
The media and the way it portrays and glamourises rap music has a lot to answer for, by not promoting the conscious, and the more positive hip-hop, whereas it allows the gun and knife carrying hip-hop listeners to feel empowered.
If we look at the people rap is aimed at, which is mainly adolescents and teenagers, who can now access rap so easily, it has become very difficult to regulate and manage.
“Music alters and intensifies their moods, furnishes much of their slang, dominates their conversations and provides the ambiance at their social gatherings. Music styles define the crowds and cliques they run in. Music personalities provide models for how they act and dress (Bull.” 2007)
It is these things that give Fifty Cent, and Jay-Z the platform to promote violence. The fact that Fifty Cent has been shot 9 times, makes him a hero in these young children’s eyes, which has been glamourised by the record labels, the videos and the lyrics in his songs.
If we look at the statistics from the birth of gangster rap in the late 1980’s up to the point where Eminem’s ‘Marshal Mathers’ LP was released in the year 2000, it shows a sharp rise in the violent lyrics that are being used.
“In terms of violent and misogynist lyrics, gangsta rap music (1987-1993) scores a 22 percent while Eminem (2000) reaches 78 percent. Concerning the percent of the violent and misogynist lyrics dealing with women's murder: gangsta rap music (1987-1993) yields 31 percent and Eminem (2000) 82 percent. As a reward for extending the presence of violent and misogynist lyric content beyond his musical progenitors, Eminem has made the cover of Rolling Stone (8/3/00), The Source (7/00) and Spin (8/00)”
In conclusion the research shows that violent lyrics and the more aggressive side of rap are increasing. The use of guns and other weapons in videos has also become more widespread from the early days of Public Enemy and NWA. To me it seems that to achieve commercial success in the world of hip-hop and gangster rap the more “hard” you are, the more chance you have at achieving commercial success. However, listening to gangster rappers necessarily means that it will breed a culture where all men are violent and are going to be misogynistic towards women.
As with other cultures gangster rap has gone through many changes since it found prominence in the late 1980’s. The demographic has changed. At the beginning it was predominantly aimed at young disillusioned black people, with its message of police brutality, and the system that they thought was against them. It has strayed away from that. Now it preaches the rich lifestyle which you can acquire by any means necessary, whether it be by selling drugs, gang warfare or getting “props” (respect) by doing time or getting shot.
We should remember that hip-hop as a culture has many facets to it. We all know of the gangster rappers like Snoop Dogg, Dr Dre and the like. However there are artists who stray away from this mentality the talent they have for good. If the media focused on these people a lot more, maybe the perception of hip-hop would change, and public figures such as Mr Cameron would not make statements like he did at the beginning.
let me know your views on this topic, and if you would like my bibliography. please don't hesitate
to ask.
A good start on a paper for such a topic. I would love to see an extension on this featuring artists in rap, hip-hop and metal that both have a strong fan-base and promote A) non-violence, B) inclusion of "other" (non-heterosexual, gender fluidity, disability, etc.) in a positive light, and/or C) the negative consequences of violent acts.
The danger is a lack of critical thinking. We accept a presence, or prevalence, of violence in popular music partially because of constant exposure and partially because of the scandalization of it in the news. However, in accepting it we do not question it - why is it there, from what lifestyle does it spring, and what (if any) is the end goal of individual artists portraying this violence?
hmm.. very interesting and well written essay.
This is one of those questions where we should ask ourselves which came first, the chicken or the egg? And although some can argue in circles all day, the answer is pretty clear to me.
Violence and explicit sex existed long before rap music made a point of dragging it into the spotlight. Musicians have historically been pushing the boundaries of how far they can go for years. Think of people like Elvis or Jim Morrison, for example. They were condemned for some of the risque stuff they did at the time, but did it decrease their fan base? Of course not. It makes me wonder what rock people have been living under if they think they can suddenly pop out and have the right to bludgeon current youth culture to death when those same people probably had parents who disapproved of the music they listened to when they were young.
On a final note, for anyone who honestly believes that explicit descriptions of sex and cursing in music have been confined to the last 25 years or so really needs to listen to this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr6xjWEYGSs
That's all, folks, enjoy.
A bit of perspective, and Faraaz I think you'd do well to dig back a couple decades on this.
Your essay is responding to a sort of moral panic, like what we dealt with in the 1980s.
The first thing you'll want to do is figure out what is fact, what is fiction and what is supposition.
Taking from my own era of Judas Priest, Metallica, Iron Maiden and the like, there were a few facts:
The music was new, portrayed some darker aspects of society and the 'old people' didn't like it. Another fact: it made a lot of money.
The fiction:
Messages were encoded backwards into these songs that would affect kids' behavior by a sort of remote control mechanism the moral panickers never could scientifically describe.
This is fiction on several counts: Time and again the music was demonstrated to not have any messages reversed in it. Also, studies where people were given some simple instructions (Go down the hall and turn left, there's a five-dollar bill on the floor) in reverse, people could not decode them let alone be remotely controlled by them. This is more an area of childhood fantasy, possibly has a parallel in the moral panic you're dealing with.
The supposition: we were all supposed to turn out slackers, good for nothing, any number of other nebulous derogatory terms.
All that has come out has been the generation of so-called slackers now pays for the generation who called them slackers via their text dollars / entitlements for seniors.
You've got what amounts to as a laboratory of decades and generations to demonstrate for you exactly how credible this type of moral panic really is. It often takes pseudoscience to a whole new level.
I'll admit it: I'm an average 40-something white guy, and rap does little for me. I say what my parents said of our music: "I can't understand the words." There's some I have, sure, and we had some groups like Run D.M.C. and others that probably don't measure up to modern standards for rap. There was Two Live Crew, which while admittedly racy, didn't have any cop killing in it.
During my workout the othe rnight, Pandora played an old Metallica standby: "I Ride The Lightning." So far, it hasn't remote-controlled me into moving to an electric chair state and signing on as an executioner.
well said, leo. it isn't music that makes people do bad things, but some people have to place the blame somewhere, I guess.
Most people can't take responsibility for their own actions. So if a parent did a shitty job of parenting, it's easier to say the music made their kids do drugs, or cut themselves, or become depressed. It's just so simple to pass judgment on things you don't understand, but not so easy to look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself how you contributed to the problem.
Agreed, but here is a question. If one doesn't, in some small way, agree with the messages in the lyrics, why listen to it?
Do you really need to agree with everything the lyrics in a song say though? Wouldn't it be better to learn to filter out what you dont like and learn to rise above things that you don't agree with? For example, maybe a heavy metal song has lyrics about torture, but you like it for its sweet guitar solo and you wish you could scream like that to get your aggression out. Or maybe it's just a good life skill to be able to take the good with the bad. Now by all means if you find something truly offensive, don't listen to it, or if the style of music just isn't your thing, then why bother? But I still say this whole debate is more about pointing fingers than about any facts about the songs themselves. And, just out of curiosity, did anyone actually listen to the link I posted?
I second what SS said in her last post, regarding not having to like/agree with all lyrical content of music you enjoy listening to. in fact, there are plenty of songs I can think of whose words I don't identify with, or even like. but, for one reason or another, I still love and appreciate said songs (whether it be for their instrumentation, the person's voice/way of conveying themselves, or memories that are attached to the songs in question).
yes, SS, I listened to the song you posted. lol.
I agree with Chelsea!!! Faraaz, I love this essay and would definitely love to see illaborations on it. It's very well written and the topic is a great one! It's about time it get addressed!!