The African-American Subculture

Abstract

In the 2000s, hip-hop has become not only a music genre, but also a subculture movement in the U.S society. However, hip-hop is just a “tip of the iceberg” which is called Afro-American or African-American music culture. Since the 17th Century, when the first group of African slaves arrived to the America, a new form of culture has been developed, although there were several prohibitions and non-acceptances from the white American. Since then, new genres of music originated from the African-American society have occurred, grown and become well-known, such as, blues, jazz, soul, rock-and-roll, rap, R&B... There were also a number of researches conducted to figure out whether the American culture and society affect or are affected by

They discovered that music was also a tool to pronounce their strength and unity (Sullivan, N.D.). Therefore, despite being restraint by the European-American (through bureaucratic music industry, economic control...), they established the new ways to spread their music, such as making individual recording labels. Songs in this period of time were full of self-discrimination, because the African-American had discovered their own identity through the Civil Right movements and desired to show it to the other people, especially the European-American, who always disregarded them. According to Maultsby (N.D.), in the journal Soul Music: Its Sociological and Political Significance in American Popular Culture, during the 1960s and 1970s, music acted as a tool for African-Americans expressing their self-awareness, protest and their views towards social changes. The author of the book The power of Black music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the United States (1995) showed that Randy Weston, and Dizzy Gillespie were among the artists following this path. Weston showed his thoughts about this way of making music as the only way for development of black musicians because the artists should own everything (lyrics, rhythm, feelings...) and they should stop working for the others. In short, the black musicians tried their best to get out of the control of the European-American and express their true feelings to other people. One of the new functions of Afro-American music during that period of time was showing the thoughts of musicians not only to the black people, but to the American citizens. At the first steps, they gained some certain success. For instance, in the 1970s, the golden period of black bands, soul became much more popular than before, funk songs having intelligent and philosophical lyrics were