Violence throughout genres of African-American music

Through genres like blues, soul, and hip-hop, if there’s one recurring theme, it’s that of violence either blatant or in the undertones. Blues, emerging in the early 1900s lyrically depicted a lot of the worst that was happening to black culture in America. It showed how down into poverty many people who wrote this music were and how it affected them at such a level that they needed to write music about it in a therapeutic way. This erupted in the song “Strange Fruit” written by Billie Holiday. This song depicted the most brutal violence seen since slavery in the South, except at this point there was almost always death involved which wasn’t the goal of violence towards slave because slaves were a commodity.

In Soul music, while a bit more upbeat than most blues songs, they still showed a sense of loss that blacks felt more so than white people in American society. In many of these songs, they were losing their loved ones because they had left them or they weren’t getting the love they needed to receive. Otis Redding sings about a lot of this in his music. While his career ended tragically early, he and his counterparts at STAX showed the nation what it meant to be black in America. Despite the many hardships they faced, it wasn’t going to hurt their soul for the worst.

Hip-Hop is the modern genre that has developed out of blues and soul taking parts from each. While hip-hop relies mostly on beat, the themes in all of these genres run similar and eerily deep. I’ve found that hip-hop tends to be a bit more blatant in the way it describes violence, poverty, and sexualization of African-Americans. Artists like Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, and Kanye West have all used their lyrics to show to the rest to the nation what kinds of hardships black people in America still face. Kendrick and Kanye each show the dramatic violence, policing, and poverty that happens daily for the black community in our nation. They write lyrics about losing their family or having their family in jail. They emphasize the importance that this is a strictly black problem and because hip-hop has become mainstream, it sends out their message more widely. Beyonce on the other hand humanizes black women in a way they haven’t been humanized before. She gives them things like emotion and marriage which aren’t things often associated with black women in American society. The evolution of American music in this way is important because it shows that these themes haven’t changed and