This week in American Studies we started working on a little project known as Junior Theme. This paper will take up much of fourth quarter and is a major part of our grade, thus it's probably a good idea that we choose a topic that we're really interested in. Personally, I knew that the general topic wouldn't be very hard to choose. Two things that I am really interested in are music and technology, thus I quickly narrowed my search for a question down to these two topics.
From there it got difficult. I had no idea what my "why" question should be. I thought that I could do something about music technology, electronic music, rock music, Apple computers and how they're taking over the world, but I just couldn't think of a question that would not only be interesting to me but also had a history in America. After thinking some more, I finally came up with one topic that is truly one of the most controversial topics in pop culture right now: hip-hop music.
Portraying themes of violence, sex and excess, hip-hop was the perfect topic. It had its roots in race music, such as jazz, blues and R&B, yet was a modern topic that has two very distinct sides to the argument of whether it is healthy for our community or not. Because of this argument, it led me to the perfect why question: Why does hip-hop influence people's perceptions about African-American culture?
While it was a difficult process, I found a topic that I am really interested in and I cannot wait to research it further.
UPDATE: Turns out my teachers didn't like that question, they wanted something more honed in and focused, which makes sense. I have now changed my question to "why did hip-hop become part of mainstream music?" This will be very interesting to research and I am very excited to write this paper.
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