What’s Going On :

1. What’s Going On: Black Music Black Culture. Why One Dictates the Other.

2. The history Of Black Music Music has always played a significant role in African-American culture. In order to understand its role, we must take a look into the history of African Americans and the music that coincided with that history

3. WOMENS Rights movement and Music The post-reconstruction women’s movement and civil rights movement, musicians and vocalists like Ma Rainey pictured, sang songs demonstrating the struggle to obtain the very independence we partake in now. W.E.B. DuBois, who was the preeminent social scholar of his day, called these songs sorrow songs and analyzed them as being a central signifier of black culture. Consciousness was a strong part of musical expression.

4. Single divorced mothers and music As we move into the more recent past we see teen pregnancy as a mounting concern along with an explosion of the divorce rate. More and more, young single and divorced mothers found themselves working and raising families by themselves. TupacShakur captured the conscious of America concerning this topic with songs like ‘Brenda’s got a baby’ and ‘Keep ya Head Up’ depicting young mothers urgently trying to make it out of tricky situations.

5. Social movements and music The social struggle for equality is a battle African Americans have been fighting since the inception of slavery. While enduring the perils of penury positions, music accompanied our ancestors reviving their demoralized souls.

6. Civil rights and music By the 1960’s and into the 1970’s civil unrest was wide spread in America. Many were upset about the Vietnam War, the continuing fight for civil rights and the overall direction that the country was headed in financially. The government discovered a way to maintain social control and repress the growing civil rights movement and that was the industrialization of prison. Artists depicted the signs of the times with songs like Ball of Confusion (Temptations), War (Edwin Star), What’s Going On (Marvin Gaye) along with many others.

7. A turn for the worse After the many crises of the seventies, the eighties and Reaganomics formed to ‘return the country back to its original owners’ so to speak. Corporations flexed their economic muscle and consumed everything they could get their hands on, including music companies. This is where African American music and culture took a turn for the worse.

8. As hip hop goes so goes our culture (Hip Hop Revolution, Ogbar pg. 142) Music cannot be separated from the social, political or cultural context from which it develops. Indeed, hip hop music of life reflects the urban culture and that culture births the music. More specifically, the conscious rap that ascended to popularity in the late 1980’s was a direct result of the desperate conditions of black communities in the 1980’s. Crime, joblessness, drugs and police abuse all converged to form what many would consider ‘positive’, ‘conscious’, ‘message’, or ‘black nationalist’ rap. (Ogbar)

9. Dummying down of America with music Furthermore, a very subtle globalization of everything has reduced the gen yers to a future of assembling space sprockets and clogs, ala the Jetsons. I call it the dummying down of America. It simply is a wooing to sleep an entire generation with false hopes and pipe dreams of opulent ‘realities” while never informing them about the true difficulties facing them in this new digitally dominant world of ours; Or better yet, never empowering them to overcome those difficulties and roadblocks so that technology will work for them and not against them.

10. Stand up and deliver Now I’m not saying that I am the Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. of Hip Hop, but I am saying that somebody needs to stand up and be; if for nothing else, to get the balance back in the most influential music on the planet. So the most influenced people on the planet, which are young people, can enjoy the variety of musical options within one genre of music. IT WILL ONLY STRENGTHEN THE MUSIC, which in turn will strengthen the struggle. After all, isn’t that the reason why we sing?