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<title> HIP-HOPPIN'TO THE BE-BOPPIN': DEFENDING THE HONOUR OF RAP MUSIC </title>
Ever since rap, or hip-hop music began to reach beyond the urban black ghettos of North Americas major cities, it has been accused of glorifying violence and sexism as well as proclaiming reverse racism. But perhaps most importantly: rap has to date not been recognized as a distinct and valuable form of music. 
	This essay will argue that rap music is a valid continuation of the African American cultural idiom, and that it as an art form, and as a social and cultural testimony, must be valued as highly as earlier forms of black music like blues, gospel and jazz. 
	I will show that the driving force behind the development of the different genres of black music, can be traced to a basic dialectic process in which each new form of black music has been a reaction against the commercialisation of the previous generations musical expression. 
	This process of reclaiming ones cultural heritage and recreating it is as evident in the birth of the modern jazz movement of the 1940s, as it is in the creation of hip-hop and rap in the late 1970s and early 80s.

Rap, the music of the African American youth, is primarly the music of resistance. Like all earlier forms of black music it constitutes a radical attempt by black people to express themselves, as well as trying to create a sphere of communication that's beyond the grasp of the white commercial recording industry. 
	Rap music is perhaps the best example of how a new generation of black people are taking the music "back to the street", in order to escape exploitation at the hands of greedy business men. The abandonment of the glamorous disco movement, with its extravagant stage shows and outrageous costumes, in favour of the simple formula of a turntable and a microphone, clearly manifests the essence of black music. 

Music has never just been about money for black people. It has been their only available mode of expression, in a racist society that seeks to control their every move (especially when this movement was collective). The slaves were left with nothing but their voices and bodies, and that was enough. With these instruments they created worksongs, which later merged with hymns and became gospel. 
	All throughout history this has been the main characteristic of African American music; the ability to incorporate all kinds of instruments and forms of music in order to multiply the forms of expression. The clearest examples of this phenomenon is found in jazz and rap music. Jazz incorporated European instruments and concepts from classical music and transformed them into a distinct form of black music. The pioneers of hip hop changed the gramophone, a devise constructed solely for the purpose of playing recorded music, into an instrument capable of making its own melodies and improvisations. 
	What the African American musical evolution has been about, is in essence, the attempt to "africanize" all these elements of European music. Africans never bothered with meter, scales, pitch etc. in the same way as the European composers. I'm not implying that these concepts don't exist in African music, they do. But the people never payed them much mind. Music was about communication, a forum for social commentary and a form of oral history. This was the main difference between the African American and European conceptions of music. The conflicting ideas about the function of music being either communicative and participatory, or composed pieces which should be performed before an audience, not together with them.

Thus, the core of African American music isn't about theories or concepts. That's the way white people talk about music. Black music is about soul, it is about a certain attitude, it is about that special beat, that moan, those small nuances that lets you know that it's a black person singing or playing. White musicians have always tried to sound black, and white businessmen has tried to squeeze that sound out of their manufactured light skinned copies, but extremely few, if any, have succeded. 
	But they certainly have tried, and their attempts to steal the music from its creators and stripping it of all its "blackness" has outraged African American musicians, and driven them to find new, distinctively black forms of expression. This has created a dialectic process, in which each attempt to capitalize on a form of black music, has been met by a new generation of musicians adapting the earlier tradition to a new social and cultural climate. Just as the modern jazz of the 40s was a slap in the face of the racism of white middle-class America; just as the soul and funk of the 60s and 70s raised their fists in the name of Black Power, so is the rap music of today a cry for justice from the back alleys of the Promised Land. 

The critics of rap music is basically expressing the same racism and fear (fear of having to finally take responsability for centuries of oppression of its minorities) that critics of the different modern jazz forms did decades ago. Those who claim that rap doesn't qualifiy as an art form, or even as music, has not understood the African American conception of what music is. The quality of music is not measured in relation to its complexity, orchestration or theorethical blueprint. Good music is emotional, it's provocative, it raises questions about right and wrong. Good black music speaks to you, and it demands a response, it demands your participation. Good African American music is an expression of what it means to be black in a racist society. It is, by definition, a social commentary, whether it's instrumental jazz or vocal rap music. 
	Black music doesn't need words to express the anger and frustration of it's people. Every aspect of their emotional spectra is right there, in the composition of he music, in the beat of the drum, in the howling cries, or the sweet, warm tones of the saxophone. Black music doesn't require notes or a schooled musician, it doesn't even need a melody (in the Western sense of the word), all it really needs is rhythm and a message. 
	
The violence and sexism in the lyrics of rappers is not fictional, neither is it a form of entertainment. The lyrics are a reflection of an existing reality. A reality where black people are constantly being oppressed and isolated, and turning on each other in desperation. These lyrics are no more violent, and no more unjustified than the furious cries of John Coltrane's saxophone in the turbulent days of the 1960s.
	Rappers today are doing what black musicians always has done. They are trying to regain the control over their own cultural heritage from the hands of a predominately white recording industry. They are demanding that they be given the freedom of expression that they've never been granted. The freedom to express every aspect of what it means to be a black person in the United States (including those aspects that certain parts of society don't want to deal with). Therefore rap is, as all forms of African American music, a protest and a social commentary. But, as all other forms of black music, it's also an art form and it shouldn't be judged on the basis of Western concepts of music. Instead it should be viewed as the latest stage in the evolution of African American music, and as a revaluation and readaptation of all the earlier stages of this process to a new social and cultural situation.
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