When delivered with integrity, rap can be a cathartic experience for both the speaker and the community receiving the message
Albert Johnson, aka Prodigy, (left) and Kejuan Muchita, aka Havock, of the hip hop duo Mobb Deep in New York in 2006. Johnson died on June 20, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nev.
(AP Photo/Jim Cooper)
Music can provide incarcerated youth with opportunities to build confidence, engage with learning, develop social skills, and and redefine themselves from young offenders to young artists.
Canadian rapper Drake at the Billboard Music Awards in May 2019. Drake’s recent beef with American rapper Kendrick Lamar highlights how Canadian rap is often seen as distant from American hip hop culture.
(Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP)
Beefs often target Drake’s race, constructing him as a Canadian who is not Black enough to claim an authentic connection to African-American hip hop culture.
Rappers Kendrick Lamar (left) and Drake have released a series of diss tracks attacking each other recently as part of a growing feud.
(AP Photo)
The diss tracks released by rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar raise interesting questions about defamation in music lyrics.
Canadian police and television reporters gather outside the rapper Drake’s Toronto mansion after a shooting there in May 2024.
(Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star via Getty Images
Since rap’s emergence, artists have boasted about themselves in ways that were funny and sometimes violent, vulgar and sexist. The popularity of the music and its exploitation can be dangerous.
Asian martial arts and films functioned as mythic models which inspired Black and brown youth in the making of ‘urban warriors,’ and later the Wu-Tang Clan.
Drake has made a career as a heartbroken player who sings and raps.
Drake accepts artist of the decade award at the Billboard Music Awards on May 23, 2021, in Los Angeles.
(AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)
Canadian R&B artists, including Drake, have built lifestyle brands that simultaneously reinforce and challenge dominant beliefs about R&B music as Black and American, and Canadian identity as white.
Snotty Nose Rez Kids, the rap duo from the Haisla Nation, perform at the Polaris Music Prize Awards in Toronto, in September 2022.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
Created as an art of resistance by Black artists in the U.S., hip-hop culture has inspired global struggles and youth culture across the world, including in Canada.
Brooklyn rapper 6ix9ine’s lyrics were used against him during his criminal trial in 2019.
John Parra/Getty Images
A critical race theory scholar explains why it’s problematic to use rap lyrics as evidence of a crime, and what some lawmakers are doing to protect artistic expression.
Music education has evolved and now includes more popular music genres, such as hip-hop.
Maskot, Maskot Bildbyrå AB/Maskot via Getty Images
The lyrics illustrate what it means to grow up young, black and deprived on the fortress like council estates of London.
The exhibit “Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures” at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., on May 4, 2023.
Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images