Hip Hop Planet

There's a joke in my family about music. My vavo, who speaks very broken English, loves music. When she tells us this though, it sounds as if she's saying that she laaaaaaaaaaaves moosic. We all kid around with her, and she laughs at it herself. But the point is, my vavo, who grew up between foster homes and has seen her own child die, holds music very closely to her.
This is because music expresses the emotions we all feel, love, sadness, happiness. But they also express the experiences and emotions of particular groups, like people in the black and Hispanic communities. Let's face it, white Americans treat their fellow citizens differently because they have darker skin. This treatment has been going on since the first Europeans landed in America, and it still exists today. There is no one isolated incident; instead, it is truth that if you are black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or Native American, you will be treated negatively. You will face discrimination just because your skin contains a different amount of melanin or your hair looks different or that your lips/eyes have a different shape. You will face violence and cruelty and ignorance.
So where's this going (I do have the tendency to ramble after all)? Well, it goes back to music, especially hip hop. Hip hop is considered to have originated in South Bronx and Harlem. However, the music that was produced by those teens and young adults reflects the music of Africa and many Latinix countries, with the beat and sound. Hip hop is considered urban, but more importantly, it is considered black. (It's a big problem that something being associated with being black makes people think it's trashy but hey people are gross racists, and that's not what this post is about.)
Hip hop is taken one of two ways by white people-it's either rude garbage, or is the coolest thing ever.

Let's start with the latter. Black music and terms and language were not started by white people. (For example-on fleek? Yeah, not by a white kid.) White people appropriate black music and culture and clothing, completely ignoring the problems faced by the black community. White kids seem to consider that anything that isn't suburban country club to be some cool, urban kind of fun. White people viewing black culture as being underground and fun because it's not "proper" is insanely racist.
Now for the former. People think (it's usually the older community or the teen members of the KKK) that see hip hop as trash. They associate the music with black people-which is not wrong, because black people and Latinix people invented it, and it came from native African music-but like I said before, this is wrong because they associate things that have to do with being black with being bad. They talk about how all of the lyrics are trashy and gross. But do they acknowledge the part that white artists add to the "trashiness"? Didn't think so.
What really sucks is that the treatment of hip hop music by white people is not only giving it a bad name, but causing young people of color to see it as something to get away from. As McBride described, it reminded him of violence and the past he wanted to leave behind. "It held everything I wanted to leave behind." (McBride) Hip hop music is frank-it discusses the violence and the problems that many ethnic communities have to deal with. Especially the younger generation, as McBride says, is discouraged from listening to hip hop, and to embrace whitewashed Western standards. And if that happens, if hip hop artists are deprived of their voice, then who knows what the world will be like in the next few years?


Hip hop gives oppressed youth a voice that would so often be ignored. So, what will they be forced to pick by society? Whitewashed western beauty, or being black AND being beautiful? Because black and beautiful, hip hop and voice, go hand in hand.