Verse One:<\/p>\n
This song is dedicated to all the happy people Verse Two:<\/p>\n I wanted to start this with some fancy line that lives up to \u2018the preceding paragraph\u2019 \u2013 but I couldn\u2019t. My grandmother doesn\u2019t like rap. In fact she despises it. As I was utilizing dictionary.com, I clicked on rap music:\u00a0a style of popular music, developed by disc jockeys and urban blacks in the late 1970s, in which\u00a0<\/i>an insistent, recurring beat\u00a0pattern provides the background and counterpoint for rapid, slangy, and often boastful rhyming\u00a0pattern glibly intoned by a vocalist or vocalists.\u00a0<\/i>(I apologize for this side note, but the definition of glibly is \u2018readily fluent, often thoughtlessly, superficially, or insincerely so.\u2019 <\/i>I wonder why this adjective was chosen. Aside from other problems I have with this definition, why should one conclude that rap is done in a \u2018boastful\u2019 and \u2018thoughtless\u2019 manner? The generalization seems almost detrimental to the words reputation.) After I looked up rap, I looked up slang which was defined as:\u00a0very informal usage in vocabulary\u00a0and idiom that is characteristically more metaphorical, playful, elliptical, vivid, and ephemeral than ordinary language.<\/i> I don\u2019t know about you, but I think those two words just contradicted each other. How can something be thoughtless and<\/i> metaphorical? I don\u2019t think it\u2019s thoughtless, I think it\u2019s brilliance that\u2019s incapable of being measured. It\u2019s an innate brilliance that a chosen few posses. I think I\u2019ve made my point\u2026 but hey, that\u2019s what happens when you try to define indefinable words\u2026 Anyway, that\u2019s the story of how I looked up hip-hop and ended on elliptical. \u201cPretty accurate, huh?\u201d<\/p>\n If I were to define the concept of rap by comparing it another form of art, I would compare it to Virginia Wolf\u2019s stream of consciousness. When you hear a person speak slang, do you think of how intelligent they are? \u2018Obviously, not\u2019<\/i>. When someone speaks slang, we all make an assumption that the person is uneducated, or doesn\u2019t know any better. Is this true? If a person chooses to switch between two different \u201clanguage codes\u201d, is it wrong? Are teenagers who speak slang communicating in a dialect, or are they simply a group of ignorant people consistently making grammatical errors (according to the ‘standard language’, of course).<\/p>\n Rap music breaks convention, and this is what makes people scared. What happens when a minority group actually creates a form of art? What happens when this art form happens to be beautiful because it encompasses the pain and sweat brought upon its\u2019 creators by oppression? What happens when people listen? What happens when the minorities influence popular culture?<\/p>\n Eminem is not only a rap artist, but he\u2019s a person with a story. He grew up in poverty and in his raps, he often tells the story of a person who has been oppressed by society.\u00a0The above Eminem verse comes from a song called \u201cRockbottom\u201d from his first released<\/i> album. When some people hear this song, they only hear the violence, the drugs, and the curses instead of the \u2018ugly picture of reality\u2019 it paints.<\/i> I hope I helped to place this paintbrush on the canvas\u2026The person in \u201cRockbottom\u201d doesn\u2019t have anything of his own. He works endless hours to earn a paycheck that isn\u2019t enough money to support him. All of his life, he has been chasing success- but he never quite gets there. His child is born and he can barely afford diapers. Sometimes, he has to sacrifice his own meals so that his baby can eat.\u00a0<\/i>Rap music is the voice of the minority, and it needs to be heard.<\/p>\n Verse Three:<\/p>\n It would be disrespectful of me to the hip-hop community not to mention that Biggie and Tupac were two of the greatest hip-hop legends of all time.<\/p>\n \u00a0Ironically they were both shot and killed.<\/b><\/p>\n -Krystal Temple<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Verse One: This song is dedicated to all the happy people All the happy people who have real nice lives And who have no idea whats it like to be broke as fuck I feel like I’m walking a tight rope, without a circus net I’m popping percocets, I’m a nervous wreck I deserve respect; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":685,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions\/685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meadmedia.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/i>All the happy people who have real nice lives
\n<\/i>And who have no idea whats it like to be broke as fuck
\n<\/i>I feel like I’m walking a tight rope, without a circus net
\n<\/i>I’m popping percocets, I’m a nervous wreck
\n<\/i>I deserve respect; but I work a sweat for this worthless check
\n<\/i>Bout to burst this tech, at somebody to reverse this debt
\n<\/i>Minimum wage got my adrenaline caged
\n<\/i>Full of venom and rage
\n<\/i>Especially when I’m engaged
\n<\/i>And my daughter’s down to her last diaper
\n<\/i>–Eminem<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\u201cI\u2019m going to cut off MTV and VH1 and BET! I can\u2019t believe they show such foolishness on TV!\u201d
\nI\u2019m sure her opinion is a popular one. If I asked you to describe rap, what words would you use? It\u2019s a popular misconception that all rappers do is talk about money, sex and drugs. However, even if this were true, wouldn\u2019t you look deeper into it and wonder why?<\/p>\n