RapConsideredHarmful

Quora Answer : Do you think rap music is brainwashing black kids?

Aug 29, 2020

To an extent.

I want to say I'm a fan of rap music. I think it's fantastic. I'm also absolutely opposed to racism, to white supremacy, to any justifications or excuses for white oppression of black people. And I strongly support BLM.

With all that said, I think it's obvious that hip-hop, despite some historical counter-examples of more communitarian and positive / conscious rap, has become a music that largely promotes and reinforces a particular world-view in which :

• the paper-chase, money and success are everything. The only way to happiness, to sex, to self-fulfilment
• you are worth nothing without this money and success
• in particular, women want nothing to do with you if you aren't rich and successful (increasingly female rappers seem expressing their own empowerment and independence by denigrating men who can't afford or keep up with them financially)
• wealth and success can only be achieved through individualistic endeavour. It's all about skills and personal ambition. No communal, political activity can do it for you. "I made it on my own" is the proudest boast. There are no stories of collective empowerment.
• friends and associates who might have contributed to your earlier success will have to be jettisoned if they can't / won't follow you or celebrate you on your rise to success. If they criticise or don't cheerlead you they are jealous / haters who must be abandoned
• pretty much anything is acceptable or can at least be forgiven on this quest for success. Drug dealing, pimping, violence are all valid. The ends (of personally getting rich to escape the oppression of racism and poverty) justify the means.

I don't think anyone can listen to a lot of hip-hop and not see these themes constantly. You can't watch hip-hop videos without seeing them constantly reinforced visually.

Sometimes these themes are treated "ironically" and we're invited to laugh at the stereotypes. But even then they are rarely repudiated altogether.

Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" is the only major anti-wealth / anti-consumption success I can think of in recent hip-hop, and it's likely that only a white rapper could get away with making a statement like that. He could trade off his white privilege to say it's OK to be poor.

It's VERY hard for someone black to say that, within black culture. Because an admission of failure is more or less capitulation to racism. Success is the only thing that can protect you against racism. So not "making it" is the same as letting them win.

Even conscious rappers today will play the game of pointing out their success. What credibility would they have if they weren't also personally successful? And they'll go right out and collaborate with other rappers who follow the script earnestly. The ideas cannot be escaped.

Now this is more than hip-hop. These ideas infect all of young people's pop music. But they often came in through hip-hop. Hip-hop's dynamism and creativity and energy has made it so influential and other pop musicians have adopted these attitudes exactly when adopting other hip-hop tropes.

Hip-hop has become the culture which most ruthlessly promotes this capitalist, individualist world-view. I like to point out that we're horrified to discover incels. But incels are basically just kids that take the message of hip-hop videos (and hip-hop influenced pop videos) at face value.

Does it "brainwash"? That's a clunky word which denies people have any agency.

But does it create a Weltenshauung or world-view which influences people's beliefs and behaviours? Undoubtedly.