Black music exploited for hundreds of years

I want to expand on an idea we talked about in class on Monday, Oct. 8. Our discussion that day was centered on dominant ideology and doing ideological work. I believe it was Brian who gave us an example to illustrate the point. He said something like hip-hop music was created by African Americans as a form of their own entertainment but has since been exploited as mainstream culture by the media. by That was all that was said Monday; I made a small note of it in case I wanted to turn it into something bigger for a blog idea. My wish was granted when Wednesday we analyzed three different songs and their meanings. We noted again how hip-hop music was initially a way for blacks to talk about things they dealt with growing up: poverty, bad neighborhoods, crime, drugs, sex, etc. This was their way of expressing themselves through their own form of music.

Somewhere along the line, someone got the idea that this type of music could become popular and make someone rich. So hip-hop became more and more popular and became mainstream culture. On page 174 of our text it reads, "Althusser wanted to understand how ideology was transmitted socially, how it was that people took and accepted the values of the dominant groups even if these views might not be in everyone's interests." I think this applies to hip-hop because it wasn't accepted in social culture by the dominant groups at first. But once the media said it was ok, it was like the rest of society felt it was ok to accept it.

This topic overlapped a little bit with my African American Literature class. We talked about how blacks created other types of music in the same way that they created hip-hop. Even as far back as slavery, blacks would sing songs of the struggles. This would eventually become the first wave of blues music, which like hip-hop was eventually accepted by others, in this case whites. Whites then dominated the blues genre, while blacks kept creating new ways to express themselves. They also came up with soul and jazz music. Whatever type of music African Americans come up with for their own uses, they eventually are taken over, controlled, and tweaked by the media and the rest of society.