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Don’t Knock the Rap: A Response to Venise Berrry’s “Redeeming the Rap Music Experience” Rap music has been getting a bad rap from parents, legislators, and other authority figures ever since it first hit the American pop music scene in the early 1980’s. Adults tend to see rap as having a harmful effect on its listeners, promoting violence, free sex, a bad image of women, and racist attitudes towards Jews, Koreans, and whites …

…early 20th century blacks, and the late 20th century blacks as they moved from bondage to segregation to wanting to state their identities as African Americans. The community that rap music comes out of is struggling with feelings of low self-esteem and powerlessness. These kids have to struggle with poverty, racism, lack of opportunity, and with mainstream America seeing them as “deviants” (p. 615). So they express their anger and helplessness in angry, sometimes violent songs.