Yu Katayama
Before I read the article on the interview with Jeff Chang, I thought the hip-hop culture was just about rap music. In the interview, Chang said that hiphop culture was designed to "bring people together and to raise the roof." During those days, the racial conflict between the black and the white culture was very bad, which forced the African American culture to produce what we called "hip-hop" these days. The black community attacked the social and political aspects of America by singing or rapping the lyrics. However, I thought that hip-hop culture these days talks more about sex, money and power instead of focusing more on the political and social issues. Chang believed that hip-hop culture is evolving from talking more about deracination, which is eliminating the racial issues. The question that i asked myself was that how the theme of "bringing people together and raising the roof" relates to the hip-hop culture that we have today, which, i think, focuses more on sex, money and power. I think over the last 20-30 years, hip-hop culture became a lot more subtle regarding the racial issues, which made the artists to talk more about what they desire and what they are proud of in today's society. I believe that black community talks about sex, money and power to show what they are capable of doing and i think thats the way they represent their culture - by showing those elements, i think, they bring people together. The racial issues today is a lot more subtle than it was back in the days, so I believe that these elements symbolyzes their culture and that's what they were desiring for the last few decades.