Rap vs. Blues: A Comparative Analysis

Introduction

The term Afro-American music can be both misleading and inadequate. Yet there remains the necessity of having an expression by which to refer to the musical traditions of the 'Negro' community in the United States of America. During the colonial period, between 1619 and 1776, about 1 million slaves were deported against their will in to the New World. 85% of them came from West Africa and specifically from the savanna zone extending between Senegal and Angola today. The slavery period have profound and irreversible effects on the history of music. Throughout history, music and mostly religious songs allowed black Americans to preserve their unity and culture, to ensure autonomy, against slavery and racial segregation, autonomy, and assert their difference and their pride. The paper provides a comparative analysis of Rap music and Blues genre of African American music.

Discussion

Rap Music is a musical style that emerged in the black neighborhoods and Hispanic New Yorkers. Linked from the early 80's to the environments of hip-hop culture, image and likeness of it integrates different streams, such as break dance music, electro, urban graffiti or scratch. If hip hop is distinguished by evolving from primitive forms of religious music in the U.S. black community, through a popular secular expression is often reconciled with funk, rap is mainly developed in two ways: severs all ties with funk and disco accentuates consumer relationship with the break dance while radical street symbols of their identity through autonomous forms and specific language and combative.

These essential features of the rap-especially all that relates to their lyrics, have their origin in the formulas advertising on radio and television where two or more colloquially talking about a product, combined with disco remixes that young Black, Hispanic and Chicano used to dance and have fun outdoors in the ghettos. Therefore, the rap was in its early times limited in scope, it rarely entered the area of nightclubs, taken over by commercial issues also played by blacks (like Grace Jones, Chic and Tina Turner). But from the 90's when rap albums reach a regular presence on the charts for Billboard magazine and style diversification, attracting to its ranks of adherents white musicians like the Beastie Boys, from the punk rock and heavy metal, such as Anthrax and Suicidal Tendencies, among a multitude of short-lived bands.

Rap music emerged in the black and Hispanic neighborhoods in New York. Their interpreters, large groups or integrated into very vocal nourished mimic the style of the messages television and radio advertising, with long and sarcastic stories of urban violence and social injustice. The genuine rap, assuming in their lyrics and rhythms of urban epic of daily violence (crime, drugs, prison, repression), explicit sex and hardcore pornography, sexism, the radical leftist political views and the rationale for the armed struggle against the established order, in line with the harsh thesis of Malcolm X and Black Panthers, has been attacked with unprecedented aggressiveness by the most conservative sectors of the U.S. and ...