Hip Hop Music May Have More to it Than Meets the Eye!

Hip Hop Music, hate it or love it it is a force to be reckoned with and it is here to stay as a cutting edge pop cultural staple. I know that there are the detractors that hate the entire genre of music like it is poisonous and see little or no social value in the loud and often obnoxious sounding songs. They hear the bass bumping up and down the street and they roll their eyes and look down their noses at the "kids" that are bobbing their heads and snapping their fingers as they sing along to their favorite hip-hop artists. However before you trash the entire genre of music have you considered this: Hip hop music if it has done nothing else, has improved and increased the linguistics and the vocabulary of the youths that listen to it.

You know that many kids with linguistic or even learning disabilities do listen to music, all kids listen to music. If you have children or if you know any you also know that they can recite backwards and forwards the lyrics to any of their favorite songs at the drop of a hat. Well take a look at the words to the popular song, no not just the curse words! Hip-hop is the only genre of music in which I have ever heard the word Paraplegic. Not only did Afroman integrate this word with the proper diction and pronounciation, but he also inserted it at the end of a line so he also had to find syllables that rhymed in meter with Paraplegic in his song "Because I got High". Did you also realize that the term "Bling bling" has been added to the new Merriam-Webster dictionary, thus making it a legitimate word/term.

The subject matter of many Hip-Hop and Rap 'heaters' is also quite important and useful in day to day interpersonal interaction? Such as Aaliya's "We need a resolution" which discusses the topic of conflict resolution in relationships. Or have you heard the outpouring of parental and familial values that is contained within the taboo and not to be listened to lyrics of Marshal Mathers AKA Eminem? In his songs, "Help I think my dad's gone crazy!","Mockingbird" and "Encore". Not to mention the good solid child rearing examples that he exemplifies in his songs? There are hundreds of songs that define the rules and edicts of the ghetto culture, making clear the accepted and expected boundaries even the most likely outcome of overstepping those boundaries.

To many people Hip-Hop may sound like unintelligible noise but it is phonetically and verbally teaching sound pronunciation skills, better verbiage, definitions of terminology, and social skills to a huge body of our youth populations. These are some of the things that are encompassed in the word "Skills" when they say that a person has got skills, it means that they can rhyme, they can maintain the proper diction and cadence, to a proscribed beat. Also this term indicates that they do all of these things well, while referencing ideas, information, pop-cultural commonalities, and even sexuality in a format that is interesting, clear, and quite obviously memorable.