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The Rapper Report Card: Do Hip Hop Artist have an ethical obligation to society?

Music is often fictional, but there’s something “real” about a song that isn’t replicated in a TV show.  If you watch The Dark Knight and The Joker’s murderous rampage, it’s very clear that he’s entirely fictional.  No one is watching that movie thinking of him as an actual person, and that applies to all movies – so it’s easier to file away the violence and sex in a movie to the drawer labeled “fictional” in your mind.

 

But music is more ambiguous.  Music isn’t necessarily autobiographical, not is it entirely conjured up from false memory; it primarily lurks between the two, and so it’s entirely realistic to cast Miley Cyrus and Tyler, The Creator in the light of a role model in a way that you might not with a fictional character like The Joker.  Sure, it’s doubtful any of Eminem’s listeners legitimately think that he’s a murderous, violent rapist, but you won’t find many kids reciting and memorizing lines of The Joker, will you?  Eminem’s the one on posters in kids’ rooms, he’s the one whose lyrics are going to be written on arms and committed to memory, and he’s the one that kids are going to be looking up to.  It’s easy to separate actors from their characters – not so much with musicians and their real selves.

 

So does that put a kind of social responsibility onto rappers and singers, if they know that their music is capable of influencing millions?  Lupe Fiasco: “Rappers influence your shooting sprees/Turn around and publish bars like it ain’t got shit to do with me/Easy to record so ruthlessly.”  Ethics and art are always intertwined, but the parallel is really brought to the forefront with a form of art like music that’s virtually inescapable – very few girls between the ages of eight and thirteen don’t know who Miley Cyrus is.  So does that mean Miley Cyrus has to censor her music under the knowledge that kids are following her example?

By: Sun-Ui Yum on October 9th, 2013

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