Sociology 2.1 Explain how the development of hip-hop music demonstrates the fact

Question

Sociology

2.1 Explain how the development of hip-hop music demonstrates the fact that even people of low social position play a part in creating culture..

2.2 What basic view of culture underlies the structural-functional approach? What is one weakness or limitation of this approach?

2.3 What basic view of culture underlies the social-conflict approach? What is one weakness or limitation of this approach?

2.4 What does the sociobiology approach tell us about human culture? What is one weakness or limitation of this approach?

2.5 “Human nature is the development of culture.” Explain how human beings came to be the only creatures to make use of culture as a strategy for survival.

2.6 What distinguish homo sapiens from lower species?

2.7 Explain the concept “cultural depravation” and explain the extent to which the term has or does not have relevance.

2.8 Give three examples of how ideal and real culture differ in U.S. society.

Explanation / Answer

2.1 The late Twentieth century saw a marked rise in subaltern or lowbrow movements in both visual art and performative arts such as music and dance in the United States. This emergent trend was constituted by young African American dancers and musicians who used the space of the public street as their medium to express their personal opinions about the treatment of racial minorities, government policy and social issues pertaining to the increasing ghettoisation of the American American population in the American society. The music which emerged in such a context has come to be known as hip-hop music. As an artistic practice, hip-hop has its roots in traditional Ethiopian music which involves social ridiculing and parody of the audience and the larger social situations. Like its predecessor genre, hip-hop as an art form has been shown by scholars to represent a symbol of ‘Black’ urban identity in the current time.

Hip Hop has had an overwhelming influence on the black community in America, as well as society as a whole. As such, it is more than music, Hip Hop is in fact a culture. Over the past three decades, Hip Hop has influenced and uplifted America as it has been providing a voice to a group of people trying to deliver a political message through the medium of their performance. According to Pardue, “ More than simply entertainment, hip hop is a major part of contemporary identity circuits –networks of philosophies and aesthetics based on blackness, poverty, violence, power, resistance, and capitalist accumulation” (Pardue 674). The emphasis of the street in hip-hop music resonates with the place of the street as extensended space of domesticity in the communities of lower socioeconomic stratus and it is such a representation in music which has moved hip-hop from the merely being a scene of performance to transforming the street gangs as the new normative process for the racial minorities against the hegemonic norm of the mainstream White nation.

References:

Purdue, Derek( 2007). Hip Hop as Pedagogy: A Look into "Heaven" and "Soul" in São Paulo, Brazil - Anthropological Quarterly 80:3

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