Checking Ourselves : Hip Hop vs Rap: Which Should We Keep?

To start, I love Hip Hop or Rap what ever you want to call it. From Doug-E-Fresh to Paul Wall, but I must admit. During the last 10 years or so I have developed more and more of a problem with so called “Rap music”. The general creativity is top notch, the beats are slammin’ and as an adult the lyrics only really bother me if I listen to too much of it. Through out rap history there has always been lyrics and songs with adult content, but they were the minority. Today they are the majority. My main concerns are: Is today’s rap music helping the image main stream has of us and is it helping us get ahead as a community. Most do not understand…and probably never will. I’m not only speaking of the words, but also the subject of the songs. Today with slang you can say a lot without technically cursing. Should adult subject matter rap or songs in general be played on live radio before 9pm where most kids are listening? Also, what impact is it having on our kids? Just a refresher, the definition of pornography is: Lurid or sensational material; Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal; Material that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement. Is today’s popular rap music mostly about anything other than sex, money, drugs, and violence?

As an adult I know that there are plenty of other Rap songs that are just fine. Even songs by so called “Thugs” but, the lyrics and subject matter of radio songs and music videos have gone over the top. I am not talking censorship even thou I would support family friendly radio time schedules; this is America where freedom of speech exists. I’m talking of personal censorship within the African American community. I applaud BET for the show “Uncut”, but I feel BET needs to go further by putting all adult subject songs on after a slated time.

We create the music; we can control the music. If the Adults of our community reach out to the Rap Industry and make them understand our concerns I believe we can come up with a compromise in regards to limiting the words and subject mater that’s aired on the live radio and TV.

In addition, Parents, we must do a better job of censoring what music our kids are listening to. Rap has been around a long time, we don’t have to start our kids off listening to Snoop Dog. How about starting off with some old school and slowly as they grow older introducing newer and newer rap music. Ok, here it comes….”They are going to here it any way”. This is true, but if they are not allowed to here it on the radio, and they are not allowed to have the songs in their homes or in their personal players. The only place they will have access is with other kids. That’s ok though…most kids will get the point, just like we did. That is that these songs are not intended for kids and should not be celebrated. Also as we got older we began to understand why our parents had those rules and now most of us agree with them.

In addition, parents need to do a better job of getting to know the kids their kids are spending time with. So when you identify a kid as a bad influence you can take action to protect you kid. There were things when we were kids that we were not supposed to see or listen to, so if we did we respected our parents and their rules by sneaking. Today to many parents are allowing or putting adult content (music/video) right in front of kids. I mean buying your 9yr. old kid a Bow Wow cd is ridicules. Bow Wow is not a kid any more he's in his 20's and is talking about 20yr. old things.

There are not enough clean respectful songs about love, break-ups, fine women & men, partying…etc. I bet most of these Rappers don’t allow their kids to listen to their songs. It is pass time for us to make this change and save the adult music for the adults.