Hip Hop and the Media in the USA

Seminar paper from the year 1999 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0 (A), Humboldt-University of Berlin (American Studies), course: Transnational American Culture Studies, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction: In the following study the relationship and interaction between 'Hip Hop and the Media in the USA' will be discussed. The aim of this paper is to put hip hop into a wider framework of media and culture. Hip hop has triumphantly emerged from the underground to take its place in the mainstream of popular culture. It is clear that the pervasive influence of hip hop extends to television, film, advertising, fashion, the print media, and language itself. Although it has taken almost twenty years to reach this level of mass exposure, the movement now stands as a multimillion-dollar enterprise and a dominant cultural force that continues to grow. To put it quite bluntly, hip hop cannot be considered as an independent entity on its own; it has to be explained in a broader context - a creation out of a reaction with and against existing conventions. Hip hop must be reinvented from moment to moment, centered around the impossibility of closure - the moment it becomes identifiable, its modes reducible, it dies - but hip hop's ability is to reinvent itself continually. Hip hop is, as Potter puts it, 'a cultural recycling center, a social heterolect, a field of contest, even a form of psychological warfare' (109). This paper tries to shed light on the following questions: What is the media's influence on the history and development of hip hop culture? How are the different rap categories treated by the media? Why is authenticity especially appealing to a white audience and consequently to the major spending power? In how far are violence, drugs and misogyny important for the development of hip hop culture, how is the media coping with these issues? The latter question leads to the next one: Why is rap, as a part of hip hop, the subject of a permanent call for censorship? To answer this question some examples will be illustrated. [...]