Throughout the past years, rap and all other types of music artist use their music to express their views, opinions and feelings in their songs. From their lyrics, you will have a little understanding towards what they see and feel about the society. The artists should be happy because this is a freedom of speech country and they can compose any types of music to express themselves. Although there are voices saying rap music should be censored and it has been influencing youth’s mind, but is rap music negatively influencing the youths’? There is a survey from the United States saying 48% Americans think popular music should be heavily regulated and 59% Americans wanted to restrict violence in music. However, there were no studies providing evidence towards a cause and effect relationship between violence, sex and behavioral effect. Even if there are studies, artist and composer will not be concerned about the regulations and / or rules.
From this ignorance, this is how violence in rap music begins. Rap is defined as a form of popular music developed especially in African-American urban communities and characterized by spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics with a syncopated, repetitive rhythmic accompaniment. In the early ’90’s, rap music was beginning to be popular, and there were two different rapper groups: the East and West Coast. The wars between these two groups were not quite obvious until East Coast rappers began to get more publicity. West Coast rappers were upset and jealous so that they started to make fun of East Coast rappers through their music. East Coast rappers made revenge at West Coast rappers and the war has continue until one day, there was voices saying the other coast had gone too far.
Nonetheless, West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur had a personal feud with the East Coast rapper The Notorious B. I. G… In one of Tupac’s song, he proclaimed he had slept with the Biggie’s wife and Notorious B. I.
G. revenged by saying “stupid niggaz mess with Big Poppa, mother keys get roasted if you f k wit B. I. G.” (. com).
On September 7, 1996 West rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur was shot to death in Las Vegas. Members of Tupac’s entourage thought the only way to make things better was to kill an East rapper. And in my opinion, that’s exactly what they did. On March 3, 1997 East rapper Christopher Wallace aka Notorious B. I. G.
was shot to death. Both murders are unsolved so no one except the killers know why these senseless deaths happened.