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Society's Blama On Music

How Society Likes to Blame Music

Universally, music has always been a unifying way of bringing people together. Since pre-historic times when cavemen made animal-skin drums to presently when we have tons of different musical genres of whatever you can imagine, we always operate to some sort of a rhythmic beat. But as of recently, certain types of music have come under scrutiny, predominantly gangsta rap and heavy metal. Now you'd think that these two genres of music are complete opposites of each other, musically as well as culturally-based. When in fact, they have quite a few similarities.
Gangsta rap evolved from the early days of rap in the late 1970's [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/gangsta_rap] to include lyrics of violence and supposed mayhem. But if you take a look at some of the lyrics it's actually the rapper's life, but exaggerated. Now, you may ask, why bother exaggerating something as horrible as a drive-by shooting? But it's all about bragging rights, guys do that everywhere, listen to a typical gym locker conversation and you'll realize that 1/4 of the stuff that comes out is the truth, the other 3/4 is exaggeration. Same goes for rap. It's horrible that people have to witness such monstrosities as drive-by's, drug deals, and rape, but it's part of some of the most negative aspects of life. And musically, this is an artist's release from those negatives. Also, you can't read too much into these rap lyrics, a lot of them are written for satirical purposes. Some might say that it's degrading, and these types of purposes are showing how morally-starved our culture really is. But personally, to me, and to a huge majority of my generation, we don't listen to the lyrics word-for-word, and even of we do, we laugh because most of the situations depicted are so unrealistic.
Heavy metal is another genre of music that has been given the cold shoulder by critics, and by many god-fearing adults. They see a pentagram and think "satanic worship" right away. It's the...