(This is an essay for my social studies class, but I felt like sharing it here. Enjoy!)

The current state of hip-hop, and even hip-hop back then (specifically, 90s-2000s), had a big influence on the black culture. Hip-hop is a genre of music that is mainly focused on the rhymes, and the beats. This genre was created by the legendary Kool Herc (a.k.a. Clive Campbell). Back then, it was about the streets and everything else of that nature, although, it was pretty cool! They often rapped about stuff in their lives, things that occur in their culture, and about others, with others! The hip-hop back then was pretty similar with the streets and gangs, but that was it. It influenced the culture a lot, and thats why hip-hop is so well known.

Currently, the state of black America has a high gang violence rate (67% in cities with a population more than 100,000), and there are many cases of black teens just doing whatever they want in the streets, whether its gang related, or just them being pretty bad kids. The reason these sorts of things are happening is because of the hip-hop of current. The impact the new hip-hop has on the new generations are BIG. Dont get me wrong, there were a tad bit of wrongs back then, like the shootings that the music they rapped about caused, but that was about it. Now we have artists influencing us in a very worse way, artists like NBA Youngboy, Sexyy Red, Ice Spice, Playboi Carti, etc; They even got a kid involved into street politics (i.e. Lil RT).

The hip-hop back then was pretty similar with the streets and gangs, but that was it. It influenced the culture a lot, and thats why hip-hop is so well known.
Kind of like theyre brainwashed, I guess. I personally think its mainly just the beats that make people dance to it in the club or whatever, because people don’t really listen to the lyrics anymore like that. If it has a groovy beat, then they dont really mind. And when they do listen to the lyrics, they decide to act out some of the things they say in the aforementioned lyrics. Also, in the raps songs of now, its just all about sex, money, bragging about women/men, and murder. Its sort of in our DNA. (shoutout kenny)

That's it. Thank you for reading.