Exploring the Captivating Hip Hop Fans Subculture

Abstract

[Name] Introduction Hip Hop is a genre of music and serves as a complex system of ideas, concepts, and values. It is interesting to note that hip hop as a culture/subculture revolves around songs, poetry, fashion, and films. Break dancing, rapping, and tagging serve as the primary artistic variations that define hip hop artists and their fans in general. MCing/rapping, djing and turntablism, graffiti writing, knowledge/beatboxing, and break dancing serve as the primary characteristics and strong pillars that define hip hop as a culture and its revolutionary aesthetic. Hip hop as a subculture becomes primarily characterized by people whose love for rap is defined. Within this essay, a detailed analysis of the hip hop subculture, in this case, the hip hop fans, will be provided. It is interesting to acknowledge that hip hop lovers genuinely identify themselves with the message of racial struggles and poverty conveyed clearly through hip hop music. It is a subculture that enjoys the hip hop rapping and free styling aspect and leads a life that speaks loud for the black culture. It is a subculture that the society and the media associate with independence and intolerance, which becomes broadly hypocritical. Hip hop fans serve as a subgroup who becomes devotee to rap music, a characteristic that outstandingly defines hip hop music passion. Hip hop music or rap music becomes characterized by defined words conveyed in a rapid and rhyming manner. It is a style that the hip hop fans are well conversant with, making them unique while identifying themselves with this type of genre. It is essential to offer an overview of the historical facts about the hip-hop subculture. It is good to understand the origin of hip-hop music. Hip-hop music is dated back to the 1970s when the black youths started Djing and rapping for entertainment purposes using prerecorded electronic and instrumental beats in the [City, State] (Amar, 108). It becomes assumed that the Bronx, as the origin of hip hop music, was associated with crime and poverty, a theme that most hip hop music aims at addressing in an outstanding manner (Sun et al., 5). Besides Djing and rapping, break dancing also became popular at the black youth parties, a quality that added to the pillars that define hip hop music. With Djing, rapping, and break dancing, a subgroup of hip hop lovers became formed, which enhanced the realization of talents amongst Bronx black youth, which served as a potential origin of the growing hip hop fans subculture. One of the exciting facts borrowed from the Bronx black youths is the freestyle dressing fashion which proved to be influential amongst the hip hop fans and passed along to-date. In general, American society and the media defines hip hop as an African American Cultural music as attributed to its origin. However, hip hop fans emphasize that hip hop is more than just rapping as attributed to the voice and message about the feelings and the never-ending struggles and slow-evolving successes of the black youths in the United States of America (Evans, 23). It is unfortunate that society views hip-hop fans as a subgroup consisting of rebellious members against authority, graffiti walls, and beat-boxes. In such a case, society accuses the black youths of imitating a drum with sounds of the mouth, among other stereotypes that aim at defining the adverse effects that hip hop addiction exposes to its lovers. Such stereotypes are criticized by those within the hip hop subculture, citing that, though hip hop music became initially centered on money struggles, drugs, trials, crime, and tribulations, a new phase of this genre became defined through many modern hip hop artists. The critiques further add that hip hop fans can enjoy the message of success, happiness, love, marriage, among other positive vibes that come along with hip hop music with the contemporary hip hop artist. Hip hop is a genre that has continued to flourish and grow in popularity across the globe bringing in a different perspective of its taste and value to its target audience. It is unfortunate that unlike pop fans who the media associate with knowledge and entertainment, hip hop fans become associated with gangster hood and the ghetto humanism, which distress a significant number of this genre subgroup (Graves et al., 3). The mainstream media outlets construct and represent the hip hop fun subculture negatively affecting the public perception towards hip hop music in the same manner. The media employs an underlying paradigm that places hip-hop music in an oppositional category that is a threat to the nation's moral fabric. The media critiques the hip-hop subculture, claiming that the members within it have ill motives towards the nation's peace. Such allegations become attributed to the negative stereotypes that define the hip hop subgroup associating it with black culture. The black culture is related to criminal activities, explaining the gangster aspect that the media associates with the hip-hop subculture. Therefore, being a hip hop fan exposes the subgroup to segregation as the media imprints a negative image of the characteristic of hip hop music to society, enhancing a negative attitude towards this genre and its associates from the community. An excellent example of how the media constructs the hip hop fans' subculture is through the experiences encountered after Tupac Shakur's death. This hip-hop artist died of shooting on September 13 in 1996. Unfortunately, Tupac was a black rapper that defined his violent nature regardless of his talent in the music industry (Edgar and Keven, 644). Upon his death, the media failed to ensure messages that would have defined appreciation of a life lived by Tupac. On the contrary, the press criticized the deceased, terming him as disastrous and a character who loved to engage in violence to capture a position in the newspapers' front pages. The journalists expressed the negative representation of Tupac through the media in an obituary published on The Guardian, on page 14 claiming that “Though he sold millions of records in America, and in England, he will better remember him for his violent life and many ruin-ins with the police (Bennun, 14)”. Such a note does not express any appreciation of life. On the contrary, the media aimed to warn the community of any association of hip hop subculture regardless of the wealth that such a genre may bring back to their nation's economy. Such a construction is coming from the media ruins society's attitude towards hip hop fans, making their lives unbearable in a grand manner. One can confirm that media reporting on the rap community is overwhelmingly negative regardless of the flourishing and growing rates of hip-hop music worldwide, as rarely do new stories about this subculture...