Love Yourz Rhetorical Analysis

Academic performance and listening to a certain type of music does not affect one another. Listening to Hip Hop is some students ways of trying to fit in with a certain group of friends. "The common assumption is that teens who dress in a certain way or act tough are in gangs or aspire to lives outside mainstream society, but when you talk with them, you discover that the way they dress or challenge authority in class often doesn't mean that at all” (Blagg). Among teenagers, listening to a certain type of music and dressing a certain way portrays a message, but that message doesn’t correlate with academic performance. Listening to Hip Hop doesn’t prevent a teenagers success in school, it has no effect. Teenagers dress a specific way, listen

However, critics are missing the point of the hip hop song’s message, because they are too focused on the violent and explicit lyrics of some rappers. Many people who believe that hip hop is too violent don’t see what the artist is trying to get across to his audience. In the song Love Yourz by J Cole, J Cole mentions materialistic items such as cars, money, homes, as well as women. He mentions these things, but he isn’t talking about those things in a negative way. He says there’s always going to be a bigger house or better car or newer clothes, but that doesn’t matter at all unless you can love yourself first, and be grateful of what you do have in the first place. The message J Cole tries to get across is that frustration over material things will only lead to hatred, especially envy of others who have what you want. He uses the perception of feeling worse off compared to other people, which eventually leads to frustration, for his main focal point of the song. Violence isn’t affecting America’s youth because in Hip Hop artists and listeners lives are already full of violence. The violence that artists talk about is their struggle through growing up in a violent areas, and overcoming racial prejudice