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1. Rap: Culture & Identity (introduction) Serious social critics could once dismiss hip hop's purveyors as a bunch of crude vulgarians extolling ghetto-centric lifestyles. In spite of this, Hip hop has become one of the most influential U.S. cultural exports. In every city on the planet, there are hip hop communities that not only have adopted the percussion-heavy music and spoken-word vocals, but have appropriated the sartorial and attitudinal style of the black and Latino youth who created the genre. Perhaps the most exportable aspect of hip hop is its existential sensibility – its celebration of place, despite limitations. With verbal dexterity, hip hop's creators transformed themselves from ghetto dwellers into esteemed characters involved in complex narratives. Hip hop infused their neighborhoods with cultural currency and mythical resonance. Hip hop culture renamed and re-imagined. Some 25 years after its birth, the genre has become a $5 billion industry but remains troubled at home. Beset by a growing chorus of critics who charge that its glorification of the "Thug Life" promotes misogyny, violence and crime, hip hop's advocates are on the defensive. This is not a new position; since its emergence from the ghettos of New York City in the late '70s, many mainstream critics have deemed hip hop a dysfunctional element of pop culture – a soundtrack for sociopaths. The violent murders of some of hip hop's most popular artists give its detractors a powerful argument. A dedication to authenticity, or "keeping it real," is an important value that requires hip hop artists to stay close to the fears and aspirations of the community that birthed them. But since murder remains the leading cause of death for young black men, hip hop may be keeping things a bit too real. Commercial motives have warped and corrupted the genre. The record industry uses personal rivalries between rappers as marketing tools to increase sales. Rap "beefs" may acquire profits, but they also cause disorder. Carlton "Chuck D" Ridenhour, front man of the influential group Public Enemy, blames the East Coast-West Coast beef that virtually paralyzed the rap world in the mid-'90s on a "climate of violence" perpetrated by the record industry. "I think the culture has been mishandled by putting out violence," he told Newsday following the October murder of Jason "Jam Master Jay" Mizell of Run-DMC in his Queens studio. The New York Times revealed the existence of a special NYPD unit designed to focus specifically on the hip hop industry, investigating violence and other crimes and consulting with "detectives who do similar work in places like California and Florida." The FBI is investigating whether Jam Master Jay's murder is linked to organized crime, reports the Ananova.com news service, and "federal authorities say several unnamed stars from the rap industry are under the microscope for possible criminal conspiracies." If the FBI is indeed sowing the seeds of division, the hip hop community is fertile soil. Though these murders provoked temporary spasms of remorse and public gestures of self-reflection, little seems to have changed in the brutal, materialistic core of rap culture. Some of hip hop's most important innovators are Five Percenters: Rakim (whom some still consider hip hop's best lyricist) is a member, as are rappers Nas and Busta Rhymes and singer Erykah Badu. Numerous rap groups, including Brand Nubian, Gang Starr, Mobb Deep and the Wu-Tang Clan, are also affiliated. Much of the hip hop vocabulary ("word is bond," "represent," "show and prove," "dropping science," "cipher," "seeds," and "G") is rooted in Five Percent ideology. Ted Swedenburg, a University of Arkansas anthropologist who has studied the Nation of Islam and its offshoots for many years, has compared today's "Islamic rap" to the spread of Afro centric ideas during the days of Marcus Garvey and Noble Drew Ali in the early 20th century. But through music, the Five Percenters' influence has been much greater. "What is interesting here is the fact that these heretical, esoteric teachings have been propelled, from their obscured places of origin, to the center of global culture," Swedenburg wrote in a 1997 paper titled "Islam in the Mix: Lessons of the Five Percent." But with greater visibility comes increased scrutiny.
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