Hip-hop/rap is a unique genre, and plays an important role in society because of the racial issues the world carries with it. Hip-hop brought a new way for black people to express their struggles, differences, and racial injustice. Yet, society has granted dominant culture the power to define standard sounds over time throughout history, which fail to incorporate the quick, powerful, and complex sounds of hip-hop culture and music. Hip-hop has built fear in others because of the unique topics, bold lyrics, heavy bass, and intricate rhythms. As a result people misinterpret the meaning, strengthening the line that segregates them.
Sound studies author, Jennifer Stoever introduces two terms in her book: The Sonic Color Line and The Listening Ear. The sonic color line is a way to put sound in the context of race and cultural dominance in America. Furthermore, it explains how dominant culture has created a separation between races through sound and has even built it up through the year so much to the point that it’s almost unnoticeable but only to them. Additionally, Stoever proclaims, “the sonic color line describes the process of racializing sound … and its product, the hierarchical division sounded between ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness.’ The listening ear drives the sonic color line; it is a figure for how dominant listening practices accrue – and change – over time, as well as a descriptor for how the dominant culture exerts pressure on individual listening practices to conform to the sonic color line’s norms” (Stoever 7). Throughout her book she explains that we have racialized sound by dominant culture forming a way of listening that incorporates only normalized and desirable sounds. Then, the listening ear is used as a way to implement this defined process and ignores all other sounds, ultimately leading to more discrimination. Additionally, she explores how, “particular sounds are identified, exaggerated, and ‘matched’ to racialized bodies” (Stoever 11). In other words, the sonic color line “is a socially constructed boundary that racially codes sonic phenomena such as vocal timbre, accents, and musical tones” (Stoever 11). Not only do people differentiate sounds as normal and abnormal but they also specifically identify a racial group for the sounds to belong to. Now it is almost normalized and acceptable for racial profiling based on the sounds they hear, once again further emphasizing the separation from the sonic color line.
Racial segregation, discrimination, and profiling are important issues that have been happening over many years and continue to happen today. Minority groups feel they are not equal and that these recurring racial issues do not receive enough attention. Jennifer Stoever uses her book to apply this social and cultural perspective to sounds, she explains, “the ongoing struggle of black people to decolonize their listening practices, exert their freedom to sound in safety, diversity, and solidarity, and shift how they are heard in everyday life and in spaces allegedly public” (Stoever 2). Racial segregation, built in and enforced by the sonic color line and the listening ear, forced black people to discover a new way to be heard and express themselves. Hence, that is why they turned to music.
Hip-hop culture began around the 1980s with deejaying, rapping, graffiti painting, and b-boying. At first most songs emphasized percussion instruments and were used for clubs and parties. As more and more artists became associated with rap music they started to add a more personal and meaningful purpose to it. Tupac Shakur, one of the most well-known and influential figures of hip-hop, helps us understand the intentions and purpose behind his music in an interview with E! News.
Over the entire interview he justifies his music in a variety of ways but he begins by demonstrating, “it depends on who you’re writing your music for… if they were doing their music for black people or for people who wanna come to a better understanding of how things really then they did a good job,” (2PacDonKilluminati). The overall goal of rap is to allow others to truly understand the artists’ perspectives. In order to inform listeners they often include stories of their experiences, struggles and situations. Similarly, Jennifer Stoever quotes another sound scholar who states, “above all, in its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary, black popular culture has enabled the surfacing… of elements of a discourse that is different – other forms of life, other traditions of representation” (Stoever 16). They were forced to find a way to be heard and they did exactly that by creating a completely new genre that others were unfamiliar with. Being unfamiliar with it, people identified it as outside the boundaries they created and at first rarely even played it on radio stations or sold it in music stores because they were intentionally avoiding it. Later on, people started bringing attention to it by pointing out all the ‘harmful’ and negative aspects of it, coming up with this whole viewpoint of rap music as improper, unstandardized, and immature. Fundamentally giving it just the qualities it needs to fall on the outside of the boundaries that were created through the american listening ear. Thus, they ‘matched’ hip-hop – consisting of slang, and other unfamiliar sounds – with their own interpretations of its meaning and people of color. For this reason, the racial issues of today are continuing to happen because of how the sonic color line and listening ear place people of color.
To further demonstrate, people thought rap music was directly about promoting murder, street violence, and drugs. However, rap gives minorities a chance of having a voice in hopes for others to be able to understand their issues from an inside perspective rather than just their own personal outside point of view. Although, as Stoever defines, “listening is an interpretive, socially constructed practice conditioned by historically contingent and culturally specific value systems riven with power relations” (Stoever 14). She emphasizes the importance to understand listening is shaped by an individual’s experiences and perspectives. Thus, music can be interpreted differently depending on who is listening to it. Not to mention, music in general is already something that involves various likes and preferences. But when you look closely at rap music, there is a lot more than just personal music taste because of its complexity and boldness. Now, included in the qualitative assessment of rap music are the unique topics, the ‘undesirable’ language and tone, and the ‘unnatural’ beats.
Immediately after hearing Tupac’s and other hip-hop artists’ songs they are interpreted through the process of the listening ear. People who have defined these sounds as different and undesired will interpret the music as just another noise. But, noise is “not merely loudness measured in decibels…‘when you talk about noise, you are talking about sound that is bothering you. There’s no party so noisy as the one you’re not invited to.’ I consider noise a shifting analytic that renders certain sounds” (Stoever 13). Whether hip-hop is venting anger and creating a imaginary world as an escape or it is telling stories of experiences, the listeners interpret the song differently based on their individual selves. Those who do not necessarily like the music, artists, or interpreted meaning will interpret the song as whatever they want it to be. A loud party is fun on the inside but when you are watching from the outside you tell everyone it looked boring anyways. That being said, after rap began being used as a way of expression for black people, many people were unhappy with the content of it. A song about police brutality and racial inequality goes unheard and instead it is presented as dangerous, violent, and immature. For example, in an article from the magazine “How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back: Violence, misogyny, and lawlessness are nothing to sing about,” Journalist John H. McWhorter writes, “Now top rappers began to write edgy lyrics celebrating street warfare or drugs and promiscuity… It depicted ghetto life as profoundly desolate… Police forces became marauding invaders in the gansta-rap imagination” (McWhorter). Until hip-hop, people like McWhorter were not confronted with such heavy political and cultural content and now these aspects within the music scare them, resulting in the people leaving this music on the other side of the sonic color line. A response to the typical argument that this music supports violence is described by Tupac in his interview, “what we’re talking about is fake violence. All this, when we’re rapping, it happens in the streets but us rapping about it is not the violence and the movie about it is not the violence, you know what i’m saying. It’s an adventure world that we’re creating, trying to get out, what we’re doing is using our brain to get out of the ghetto any way we can so we’re tell these stories, and they tend to be violent because our world tends to be filled with violence,” (2PacDonKilluminati). Tupac explains that music allows minorities and other people in the situations like him to escape reality and share experiences of it from their own perspective. In the same interview, he also says, “I don’t care if he feels uncomfortable because what about when I felt uncomfortable for 400 years. You know what i’m saying, then now all of a sudden it’s bad to talk about something real,” (2PacDonKilluminati). He argues that the topics of hip-hop might not be the most friendly or ideal for some audiences but he would rather speak the truth as a way of expressing how he feels and how people like his have felt for the past four hundred years. If Tupac made music solely for incorporating violent or provocative topics without meaning, he may then better understand the argument people are making against him. However, the important part that Tupac is trying to show others is that violence is what is occuring in reality and he wants to bring attention to that. So he talks about violence but he does not promote it. The world around us is violent and hip-hop artists are not afraid of the truth. It may make people uncomfortable but that does not mean it can just be ignored. In fact, artists may use aggressive lyrics to emphasize the aggression of the world. Furthermore, lyrics, which Jennifer Stoever refers to in terms of literature as “the densely layered poetic language…conflicting, contradictory, and evocative,” are a large part of all music but especially the poetic language and rhythm used in hip-hop. Stoever also claims the poetic language “frequently attempts to replot [the sonic color line], constructing representations that urge readers to hear their world differently” (Stoever 24). While the contradictory and evocative lyrics of rap music is viewed as celebrating street warfare to those like McWhorter, it is referred to as poetic language used to express their world by others. It simply depends on the intentions of the listener, meaning if you want to make the music seem bad you will interpret it as bad, violent music. Furthermore, Stoever emphasizes that the lyrics are a way to directly communicate with listeners and express their stories to be heard in a different way. On top of that, Stoever explains how another sound writer incorporates sounds and beats into listening, “Steph Ceraso, for example, urges us to think of listening as ‘multimodal,’ vibrations experienced by the entire body and interpreted in conjunction with other senses” (Stoever 15). It is important to understand the relationship between the different layers of music, meaning the lyrics, the musical accompaniment, and even other sounds such as ad libs. The lyrics and beats help listeners interpret the song in the right way but both must be done through true listening practices rather than the process created by the dominant culture, which lack any genuine connections to the significance of the music. Through the musical accompaniment in rap songs, people can get various feelings or emotions from them and can reveal deeper aspects within the music. One of many examples to represent this may be how a fast tempo and beat can make the lyrics less noticeable and more something that requires focused listening. This way only people who are intentionally listening to the lyrics are listening to them, thus, resulting in accurate interpretations of them. Journalist John McWhorter helps represent this concept by including in his article, “Rap’s musical accompaniment mirrors the brutality of rap lyrics in its harshness and repetition” (McWhorter). Yet, repetition is part of rhyming, and hip-hop uses a combination of complex inflections and double-time or triple-time rhythms, which are things only this genre consistently does; it is a style of music. As McWhorter refers to the intricate beats of rap music as harsh, others may refer to it as a way to represent giving power and voice to the minorities. Through different listening interpretations we come up with different meanings. In a similar way, the “harsh” musical accompaniment emphasizes the harshness of the police brutality, and the racial injustice of the situations and perspectives that not only the song centers around, but also the entire genre of hip-hop.
Jennifer Stoever’s terms the listening ear and sonic color line has tremendously affected racial segregation and discernment because of the power that listening gives races and defined black culture and hip-hop as something of their own. On the other hand, dominant culture can break the separation across the sonic color line and through listening, give power to all races. Instead of letting it decide which sounds to categorize with different races and which are universally referred to as noises, let us interpret music in an artistic way in which each individual has its own experiences reflecting the meaning but it also has an objective perspective without sound labels of things such as race.
Works Cited
McWhorter, John M. “Violence, Misogyny, and Lawlessness Are Nothing to Sing About.” How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back, July 2003.
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York University Press, 2016.
2PacDonKilluminati. YouTube, YouTube, 3 July 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=leZo-kD39TM.
