ipl-logo

Mo Meta Blues Analysis

453 Words2 Pages

In “Mo Meta Blues” Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, examines his career and life through a postmodern lense. To start, he revisits his upbringing, how kids used to tease him for acting and dressing “white”. He retrospectively questions what this means claiming “Trying to be white? What the hell does that mean?” (55). He concludes that when people called him white they meant that he was missing out on the traditional black experience, which he believes is inherently inauthentic because “clothes that wannabe gangbangers wear on the street? What's authentic about that?” (56). Broadening the scope of this experience he questions the purpose of clothing in identifying culture. “Aren’t clothes a second skin you wear over your real skin to obscure who you really are” (56). This is a …show more content…

Although the essay seemed to jump around alot and have no central thesis, I was able to take away a few key points from the essay. A major topic in the essay was the black community’s relationship with rap and hip-hop. The essay claims that frustrations are felt when “black diasporic communities are taken out of control of their originators and producers” (5). Hip-hop and rap have been appropriated by the masses, and have lost sight of their origins in the black community. This appropriation draws from the commercialization of hip-hop and rap, and artists turning their music into simply a commercial good. Another point I think was interesting in the essay was how hip-hop constantly switches from seriousness to unseriousness. In rap and hip-hop artists can go from threatening to playful in one verse, the essay claims that this quality of the genre allows is to “push the boundaries of the political, in the process redefining the very structures of resistance” (15). This is why, the essay claims, rap and hip-hop are so influential in shaping opinions regarding resisting dominant

Show More
Related

  • Summary Of How # Blacklivesmatter Movement

    643 Words  | 3 Pages

    Commercial hip hop is too blindsided by making profit to assist in the rallies for Black justice the same way that hip-hop proper is doing. #BLM has liberated rap from its default setting today, and is beginning to break the white stereotype that hip hop is defined as a consumer market where “rhyming negro gentleman callers and ballers sold vernacular song and dance to an adoringly vicarious and increasingly whiter public” (para.6). Tate concludes with stating that #BLM’s “reclamation of hip-hop proper has brought complexity and revolutionary street cred back to the race conversation in commercial rap. The public can no longer be sold the noxious and recherché notion that 21st-century rap culture is only about trap-happy nigras getting paid for getting dumb, or coldstoopidwackretarded, even. Thanks to #BlackLivesMatter, the beautiful struggle against racialized injustice once again matters where rap and hip-hop proper live” (para

    Read More

  • Summary Of Hip Hop Planet By James Mcbride

    328 Words  | 2 Pages

    The summary of “Hip-Hop Planet” by James McBride In the essay Hip-Hop Planet by McBride, a national book award winner, he states that he believed the newer music like rap wasn 't meaningful. McBride talks about how he never understood why rap was so popular, he didn 't see why everyone liked it. In the essay he describes the first time he listened to rap and how he found it absurd. McBride noticed no one really cared where rap come from or how it came to be, people just liked it regardless of who created it.

    Read More

  • Post-Colonial Lens In Black Like Me By John Howard Griffin

    983 Words  | 4 Pages

    Imagine walking down the middle of 5th Avenue, always having to worry about getting discriminated against, pushed into the street, or even shot. That’s exactly what John Howard Griffin had to worry about as a recently converted black man in the South. I chose the ‘Post-Colonial’ lens because ‘Black Like Me’ is about the black culture being kept down by other races in America, which accurately describes this lens. In the book ‘Black Like Me’, it shows precisely just how the black culture is oppressed in society and as author John Howard Griffin goes deeper into Southern black culture, he soon finds out just how unjust and biased white culture used to be.

    Read More

  • Color Blind Ideology Summary

    343 Words  | 2 Pages

    This article focuses on the color-blind ideology that allows white people to participate in and appropriate hip-hop culture. Rodriquez notes that they do so by using the guise of inclusivity of all races to justify their participation in hip hop and to adapt characteristics of the culture without respecting Black identity. He uses his own interviews of several white audience members of hip hop concerts who identified as participants of hip hop culture. Rodriquez identifies two groups resulting from social collectivity to reinforce his argument: consciously collective white groups, who actively reinforce racial segregation and passively collective white groups, who unknowingly unite and reinforce systematic racism through their adherence to color-blind ideology. The participants of his research are part of the latter, who unconsciously reinforce systematic racism through treating cultural objects, namely aspects of hip hop culture, as shareable products and experiences.

    Read More

  • Hip Hop Planet James Mcbride Summary

    160 Words  | 1 Pages

    The article “Hip Hop Planet” by James McBride is about how hip hop is not his favorite type of music but, it needs to be heard. McBride shows us this by explaining that he avoided hip hop most of his life. In the article McBride says that he basically ignored “the most important cultural event in my lifetime.” James informs us that hip hop has influenced the world globally and that it has become a phenomenon. Furthermore, McBride made clear that he eventually realized that hip hop is much more than just music, it has a message.

    Read More

  • Critical Whiteness Studies

    765 Words  | 4 Pages

    Critical Whiteness Studies responds to the invisible and normative nature of whiteness in predominantly white societies, criticizing racial and ethnic attribution of non-white subjects who have to grapple with their deviation from the set norm, and opening the discussion on white privilege that results from being the unmarked norm (Kerner: 278). As Conway and Steyn elaborate, Critical Whiteness Studies aims to “redirect[...] the scholarly gaze from the margins to the centre” (283) and, more specifically, to interrogat[e][...] the centre of power and privilege from which racialization emanates but which operates more or less invisibly as it constructs itself as both the norm and ideal of what it means to be human. (ibid.) Thus, Critical Whiteness

    Read More

  • Hip Hop Culture In Mcbride's Hip Hop Planet By James Mcbride

    921 Words  | 4 Pages

    Hip Hop was the wildfire that started in the South Bronx and whose flames leapt up around the world crying out for change. James McBride’s Hip Hop Planet focuses on his personal interactions with the development of Hip Hop culture and his changing interpretations of the world wide movement. Many of his encounters and mentions in the text concern young black males and his writing follows an evolution in the representation of this specific social group. He initially portrays them as arrogant, poor, and uneducated but eventually develops their image to include the positive effects of their culture in an attempt to negate their historical misrepresentation.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Hip-Hop's Betrayal Of Black Women

    633 Words  | 3 Pages

    In her essay “hip hop’s betrayal of black women,” Jennifer McLune implies that “(h)ip-hop owes its success to the ideology of women-hating” (193). She does not agree with Kevin Powell’s article that hip-hop does not mean to “offend” black women, but instead artists are only letting out their temper throughout their music. McLune feels infuriated that many artists in hip hop (including black men) rap about their community and downgrade their own women. In the hip-hop genre, sexism is mainly used, not only by black men but also by many other race hip-hop artists. Artists assume that women-hating in their rap songs will be accepted by women, but do not realize that it is affecting all women.

    Read More

  • Hip Hop Planet Speech

    1186 Words  | 5 Pages

    Hip Hop is seen as something inspiring, but most people see it as a way to speak out the truth about a problem. As in “Hip Hop planet” being able say the truth can sometimes worsen any situation because sometimes what we say can promote violence and whatever happens after is not in our control. The essay is about how hip hop has changed into speaking out the issues that need to be taken care of in order to maintain a proper society. McBride talked about how rappers use violent lyrics to degrade women and gays and because of this it shows how the music has evolved into something entirely different that no one would have ever expected to have changed. In James McBride's essay “Hip Hop Planet,” he argues that hip hop has a negative influence on American Culture despite people thinking of it as inspirational and how people live through different experiences in life despite of your race.

    Read More

  • Essay On Invisibility Of Whiteness

    1788 Words  | 8 Pages

    At the heart of whiteness studies is the invisibility of whiteness and white privilege (Ahmed, 2004). Whiteness is thought of as the hidden criterion to which every other race is measured against. Through the lens of whiteness, the “other” is seen as deviant (Ahmed, 2004). The invisibility of whiteness, however, is only from the perspective of those who are white (Matthews, 2012). To people who are not white, it is pervasive and blatant.

    Read More

  • Hip Hop And Feminism Essay

    759 Words  | 4 Pages

    ¨If Hip Hop has the ability to corrupt minds, it also has the ability to uplift them.¨ Hip hop music, also called rap music, is a music genre developed in the United States by African Americans consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted. Mainstream hip hop culture is also filled with misogyny and negative images of women. These artists are unaware that sexism has been forced onto them through the brainwashing from the media, which is controlled by a patriarchal society. Conversely, feminism is the belief that both genders should have equal power.

    Read More

  • The Influence Of Hip Hop On Black Culture

    1006 Words  | 5 Pages

    The Impact of Hip-Hop Ever since its birth in the 1970s in West Bronx, Hip Hop has been known as “Gangsta” music and most commonly associated with black culture. Since its creation it has become a fast growing genre of music and has growing fame all over the world. The popularity of it has increased to all races, age and gender. However the growing popularity of hip hop has come with several controversies among scholars. Some scholars argue that the growing popularity of the genre is very helpful to low income families who can use this as their outlet into going to Universities, on the other side some believe associating the genre to black culture is bad for the culture as a whole and they should not be associated together.

    Read More

  • Summary Of The Film 'Beyond Beats And Rhymes'

    392 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Beyond Beats and Rhymes” Summary This movie was a broad discussion about hip-hop music (or more specifically gangster rap) and what kind of social issues the music not only showcases but seems to promote. The producer of this film, Byron Hunt, interviewed people involved in all aspects of the hip-hop industry, including famous rappers, to try to get to the bottom of this. Some of the most prominent issues discussed in the film were the over-sexualization of women, gun violence, and anti- homophobic attitudes. Hunt would ask those involved in the industry about why they think these themes are so prevalent.

    Read More

  • Racism And Violence In Richard Wright's Black Boy

    671 Words  | 3 Pages

    The story represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Racism is so insidious that it prevents Richard from interacting normally, even with the whites who do treat him with a semblance of respect or with fellow blacks. For Richard, the true problem of racism is not simply that it exists, but that its roots in American culture are so deep it is doubtful whether these roots can be destroyed without destroying the culture itself. “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never looked "white" to me” (Wright 23).

    Read More

  • Rap And Hip Hop Essay

    898 Words  | 4 Pages

    These children find their way out in many ways, including creating an identity through music. Rap and hip-hop have always drawn in young adolescents that have lost their innocence to city culture. This is because rap gives us something to feel and relate to in society, even though the good of rap may “get lost in the flurry of profanity, party rhymes, and braggadocio.” (Pate 2). These children who face daily struggles of american city culture, find peace in knowing the song of rap, which encapsulates the true problems within the deep streets of cities like Chicago or Detroit.

    Read More

More about Mo Meta Blues Analysis

Open Document