Gangster Rap

I really agree with one of the ideas mentioned in Chaptor 2 of the Weaver book. Cultural critic in the US Gilbert Seldes "beleived pop culture should not be held up to the standard of high culture but could produce masterful works on its own". I do agree that popular culture can produce masterful works. I remember one American Literature class I took and they talked about Walt Whitman, and one of his colleagues spoke about him when he began writing and publishing, and they said the sleeping giant has awoken. I think they meant that someone has began writing poetry not from high society but from low society, from the dunghill. Someone finally wrote about the less fortunate, the forgotten, the lower rungs of society. These people do need a voice too.

When Gangster rap music hit the scene, and even still today the critics say how violent the music is, and that it promotes voilence. That it is a bad influence on the youth. Being a bad influence is not their goal, for most at least. They are writing about their lives. What they grew up with. The conditions they were raised in, and what those struggles were like.

This is a main problem I have with commercial, main streem media. They only look at a small, very small perspective of the issue. This is an issue that Raymond Williams worried about, "When a person or group attempts to communicate with others there is always the potential for exploitation or the presenting of only one perspective.  If any media outlet did have on a member of the gangster rap community the goal of the segment was to ambush them and make them look bad, instead of really asking them to explain wha they are doing and creating, and what their experiences were like.

It is so odd to me, so twilight zone to me that when gangster rap goes mainstreem and becomes very popular movements popped up to say how wrong it was. Movements said I dont want my kids listening to filth. But while it was filth, for some, it was someone elses real world experience. So these movments are also saying "I dont want my son to hear about your struggles, your rough experiences, and how tough it was for you to experience you youth. Instead I want to keep my child isolated from the world and only share with them the warm and fuzzy parts."

The main streem media never looked at the horrible struggles the youth in poor neighborhoods that produced gangster music had to go through. This aspect was never covered. That should have been the real message. How do people live like this? How can we help them? How can we change this? Instead we heard, I dont want my kids to know about this. Twilight zone.