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The United States is known as a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities making it difficult to pin point authentic original music of the Unites States of America. One can argue that the true authentic music of the land would be American Indian music and I do agree but for my lecture I would focus of modern music of American and that has very little connection to indigenous music. In my lecture I would choose to talk about rap music and rock music. I would choose to talk about the differences and similarities of these very popular genres of American music. Since America is so culturally diverse sub genres within these genres vary depending on the races performing the music. For example there is Latino rap which incorporates Spanish into the mix and the same goes for some rock performed by Latino artists for example the band 311.
I would then go on to aesthetics of both rock and rap music; I would point out that rap music contains ostinato signified by the reoccurring beat, and lyrically focuses on the topics of money, cars, and women. Most of this type of music is made popular by the beat and how good it is to dance to, so one can say that rap music is dance music in the U.S. This is due to the fact that most of the background music is mixed together to produce these beats through sampling others music in turntables, this being the basic instrumentation of rap music. Rock music has been influenced more by jazz music; the distortion of the guitar is a clear example of its influenced. The basic usual instrumentation for rock music would be but is not limited to electric guitar, electric bass, and drum set. Rock music and Rap music similarly have the same type of song structure of verse-chorus-verse-chorus sometimes a bridge and end with the chorus. To show this I would play the rap song “Give it to Me” by Timbaland ft Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake; and would play the rock song “Helena” by My Chemical Romance.
One of the major components of Rock and Rap that I would like to point out is their ability to make statements and the way some bands use music to speak up on societal issues. Although rap now may seem to be more materialistic and shallow; artists like Tupac Shakur made statements about the currents issues of his time and speaks up on discrimination and how change is needed. For this I would play the song “Changes” by Tupac. Another thing that is mentioned by some rap artists would be problems of the government for this I would point out certain lyrics of the song “Propaganda” by the rap group Dead Prez. Rock has similar ways of speaking up about the government and on other issues like the war in Iraq and “Free Trade.” For this I would include songs like “Give it All” and “Prayer of the Refugee” by Rise Against.
Rock and Rap may seem to be on totally opposite sides of the music spectrum but when it comes to societal issues it seems that their mode of speaking to the people is very similar, by using clear uncensored lyrics both genres make a statement to most people in America. It is pretty hard to talk about such a diverse country in not only music but culture especially in a 2 hour lecture but this is the type of music that I would include in my lecture and view on American music.