Tricia Rose Journey to the Motherland

Tricia Rose
Is Hip-Hop Harming Our Society?
I recently attended the Tricia Rose, Journey to the Motherland and was very enlightened by the event where students performed live dancing, singing, poems, etc… and had a speaker named Tricia Rose. Rose is a professor of Africana Studies at Brown University who specializes in 20th Century African American culture and politics, social thought, popular culture and gender issues. I found her ideas to be very interesting and inspiring, through her speaking, she discussed the idea of community and how our community is under duress. She spoke of sustaining hip-hop energy and use it again as our voice and for expression. Rose argues that hip-hop has become corporate and is no longer the voices of what people actually feel. She states that hip-hop currently is more about a product and trying to sell that product, whether it is fashion, clothes, footwear or automobiles. Interestingly enough, Rose mentioned the fact that often times these hip-hop artists do not have as much money as they claim to and often times go bankrupt from trying to attain the superficial items that are often times rapped about. Also through her speech, she mentions that hip-hop was once about dance, style, and creativity and now is focused on a commercialized form of that, that profit on half-truths and turns it into product. Rose also refers to the derogatory comments that are often rapped about in music these days whether it is about women, hustling, or the ghetto. Rose refers to the fact that hustling, which is now a product, at one time was a condition of survival, an environmental circumstance, not a cultural trait. The ghetto is a low-income area that people often struggle to overcome and to rise above, but these hip-hop artists glorify its existence, as if there were to be no better place to grow up. The respect of women has been lacking in the hip-hop world for far too long, never appreciating a women’s beauty and always demeaning her intelligence. Through Rose’s speech, I learned a lot, she has the ability to help a person turn the other cheek and acknowledge to imperfections in this community. Rose has dedicated here studies to helping us be aware as society and as consumers to the world around us and the music that we are listening to. She lectures frequently to scholarly and general audiences on a wide range of topics relating to American cultural politics, black culture, music and gender. Overall, I enjoyed this speech and would suggest for anyone to go and see her speak if for no other reason than a better perspective on our community and the youth of today. I believe Rose’s point of view coincides with that of Ann Arnett Ferguson, who wrote the article “Bad Boys” which I have recently read. I feel that both authors try to explain and understand hip-hop and how it is so impressionable on our youth of today. I also feel that Rose related to Lauren Greenfield’s piece, “Fast Forward”. Both authors seem to acknowledge the strains and struggles that societies go through in order to fit in and both authors try to analyze those struggles in order to help people in our society to make our community stronger and better.