Hip-Hop: Say What?
I think kids are becoming more socially aware and politically aware...Of course music is not supposed to play that role. Music is supposed to play an entertaining role: music is communication, so we fill the void of "communication-slash-entertainment" with "music-slash-education." And the people who grow up nowadays are growing up into this more socially oriented thing. -Rapper KRS-ONE (Kris Parker) (Woodlief, 1990 p. 56)
 Urban culture today is formed through the unifying voice of hip-hop music. Hip-hop can be defined through the vernacular of its p. poetic lyrics. Modern hip-hop is a versatile form of music that embraces the creativity of jazz and Afrocentric folk music, and is an "offshoot of black masculine toasts, the revolutionary poetry of Gil Scott Heron, The Lost Poets, and American soul-funk" (Hill, 1998 p. 1363). Gil Scott Heron is one of earliest musicians to use his lyrics as a vehicle for expression and change. His cyberpunk behavior pioneered and created the role of the modern hip-hop lyricist. There is nothing commercial about hip-hop, and it is not to be confused with its commercial counterpart, Rap. Some popular artists today are Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Jurassic Five, and The Roots. Hip-hop is revolution music. Hip-hop has emerged as a major mode of expression for the emerging youth culture. As Gil Scott Heron said, the "revolution will not be televised." All the revolution needs is a beat, created physically or technically, a mic, and a poet behind it. Hip-hop music is a phenomenon of new media's influence on youth culture in America. Rear-view mirror society provides no answers, so the youth of America have looked to hip-hop as its way of interfacing their new environment. As McLuhan has argued new media is moving us from a visual to an auditory based society. Hip-hop is a manifestation of that change. Hip-hop is sound, it is an auditory expression and perception of ones environment. One realizes the essence of hip-hop music when he/she is willing to "accept that a sound is a sound and a man is a man, give up illusions about ideas of order, expressions of sentiment, and all the rest of our inherited aesthetic claptrap" (McLuhan, 1967 p. 119).
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