Hip-Hop in Media by Jared A. Ball Ph.D.

I understood what Jared A. Ball was discussing in his two articles about Hip-Hop in media. In the first article, it was saying how it can be good, but sometimes bad. Africa Americans created Hip-Hop, and it's been popular now for over thirty years. I found this quote in Jared's first article"Hip-hop’s popularity has done nothing to improve Black America’s overall wealth, education, health-care, or certainly rates of imprisonment. In fact, the popularity of hip-hop is used to deny these conditions or explain them as natural to the conditions of African America. It is not to the people that these conditions are natural but, instead, to the condition of being colonized. Popular media and, therefore, hip-hop cannot be changed prior to a societal shift (revolution) in who holds power and how that power is to be wielded." I think what he is saying here, that it's the condition, that we live in, and what the media is trying to tell us. It's not the peoples fault.

In the second article, Jared talks about censorship in Hip-Hop music. He discussed how some songs  that have the wrong messages, like "Fuck the police" should be censored. How in even some music videos it is censored. But it's not just Hip-Hop music, its all kinds of music. Jared said,"Corporate lockdown of popular media is a political necessity and scientific inevitability requiring further description of this process, along with suggested avenues of resistance, which will be the focus of subsequent columns. Our approach to the study of and response to media must be akin to that of Huey P. Newton who said he “studied law to become a better burglar.”

Hip-Hop music can have some bad messages in them. But it might also have some good messages too.I feel that any type of music can have a positive or negative affect on our society.

This is a Hip-Hop dance from the TV show from "So You think you can Dance?"

Hip-Hop is huge in dance, and there is a lot of different kinds of Hip-Hop around.

Heres a video about Hip-Hop Music:

This video explains a lot about Hip-Hop from the past to Hip-Hop now.