The influence that hip-hop has made on modern world, society and culture is extremely strong. Nowadays hip-hop is already considered to be not just a genre of music - it is a culture itself; for plenty of hip-hop fans it becomes the style of life, a complex of ideas and concepts, a way of self-expression and communication between people. It has reflected in many spheres of today’s life and such impact is explained by the origin of the hip-hop – it is the style of streets, hence – the phenomenon of independent thinking. The influence of hip-hop on today’s communication – both oral and written – is significant because of the close connection of this culture with commerce, hence, with media.
As it was mentioned before, hip-hop culture has had an effect on different spheres of life – the system of values, the style of clothing as well as the language of communication. Numerous slang words and phrases have appeared with the development and popularization of hip -hop; some of them can be used in the context of music culture and only by “real” hiphoppers, but there are also a number of words from hip-hop slang that are used by most of the young people in their everyday life. For instance, nowadays everyone understands that “Wassap” means “What’s up?” or “Hello, how are you?”, “Ya” is instead of “you”, “peeps” are “people”, “dat” is “that”, “cuz” is a short of “because”, “nigga” and “bro” mean “a good friend”, etc. As the role of commerce in the development of hip-hop has risen, these slangs and a lot of others became an integral part of the vocabulary of modern generation. Hence, today youth always use hip-hop slang in their oral and written communication with friends and the adults as well.
With the rapid development and spread of the culture of streets, it started to occupy a place in different types of media – from printed magazines and TV-programs to separate web-sites and radio stations. The hip-hop culture became an essential resource for commercial companies to make more money since they found out the great popularity this style among people mostly of the age 16-30 – from the independent style of streets hip-hop turned into the profitable sort of mainstream. Thereby, hiphoppers have moved from the basements to the media and some types of modern oral and written communication is under the effect of the hip-hop culture.
As soon as hip-hop culture has become an integral part of today’s communication, the negative impact of it on the media was presented. “A recent content analysis of six types of media found that music contained substantially more sexual content than any other media outlets. Sexually explicit and derogatory lyrics are especially apparent in rap music” (Cundiff “The Influence of Rap and Hip-Hop Music: An Analysis on Audience Perceptions of Misogynistic Lyrics”). This natural symbiosis of hip-hop culture and oral communication causes a number of problems: “commercial exploitation of gangsta-rap stereotypes amounts to media violence that feeds into negative images of racialized ethnicities, particularly black youth” (Pieters “Hip hop culture's identity crisis”). Therefore, by putting the hip-hop culture into televisions, newspapers, magazines or websites, the amount of violent scenes and perverting lyrics is increasing that, in turns, lead to negative perception of mass communication at all. However, the concept of successful commerce includes the satisfaction of the inquiries of the audience, and a great part of media consumers is young generation. This orientation on the youth’s love to hip-hop culture allowed mass communication to increase the share of this genre within the media. As a result, hip-hop production made the communication focus on the violence even more: “The mass media portrays domestic violence both visually and aurally by normalizing the use of force in relationships” (Cundiff “The Influence of Rap and Hip-Hop Music: An Analysis on Audience Perceptions of Misogynistic Lyrics”).
Speaking about the effect of hip-hop culture on written communication, it should be mentioned that beside the emergence of thematic magazines, hip-hop also has occupied the new forms of communication, for instance, social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. After analyzing the popular hip-hop magazine “XXL” it becomes obvious that the effect of this genre of music is not bigger or worse that the effect of, for example, popular music on the media. The magazine has the common rubrics such as “News”, “Music”, “Lifestyle” and mostly presents the information about rap stars, new releases, albums, reviews, etc. It also has the accounts on the popular social networks, and the negative influence or presence of texts that proclaim violence or abuse was not noticed. It is also should be noticed that the design of the magazine is similar to any other popular written sources of communication.
The effect of hip-hop culture on the oral and written communication is associated with negative influence of this culture on the society in general. The popularization of hip-hop has led to the production of new programs on TV, broadcasting video clips on the number of channels, publishing hip-hop magazines and occupying the new forms of written media – social networks. Oral and written communication started to promote the hip-hop ideas to the society, therefore the content of the modern media was diversified by the greater amount of violent scenes, popularization of gender or racial inequality, etc.
Works cited
Cundiff, Gretchen. “The Influence of Rap and Hip-Hop Music: An Analysis on Audience Perceptions of Misogynistic Lyrics.” Elon Journal of Undergradute Research in Communications. N. p., 2014. Web. 27 Nov. 2014.
Pieters, Gary. “Hip hop culture's identity crisis.” The Star. N. p., 17 May, 2007. Web. 27 Nov. 2014.
XXL Magazine. Web. 27 Nov. 2014.
