The misconceptions of hip hop is important because it can cause people to make wrong assumptions and prevent them from finding the beauty in the music and the culture. This issue is relevant because I see it everywhere, and most teenagers listen to hip hop, but their parents might not approve. In this essay I explain how hip hop culture is about thriving amidst struggles, not violence, drugs, and abuse of women, the misconceptions, and the results of assumptions.

To start, hip hop is not rap. Hip hop is the culture and rap is the music. Hip hop has been misconceived as a culture that embraces violence, drugs, and abuse of women. This is far from the truth and people who think this won’t unlock the true meaning of hip hop. As one b-boy website explains, “Living Hip Hop is about being active and improving his skills in one or more elements daily to inspire others to keep the culture alive and to bring it to the next level.” This shows that hip hop is more than sitting around and doing nothing while others are out there struggling for a living. It’s about how we as a people can get past our everyday challenges to become who we want to become and achieve what we want to achieve. The website also says that hip hop was made to fight against violence, not create it. This is can be misinterpreted because sometimes it makes very strong references to homicides and other felonies coupled with vulgar language, but this is just people expressing themselves through their music, which is what hip hop is really about.

To answer the question of why there are these misconceptions came to be we must first look back at when hip hop first started. Hip hop was started in the 1970s in Bronx, New York City. Ever since it started, white people didn’t want to associate themselves with the music. Since they didn’t know what it was really like they just assumed, and these assumptions were passed on through generations, which is why we still have most of them today. For example when people see a song title they automatically assume that the songs about that topic in a negative aspect. Take the song “Murda” by Youngboy Never Broke Again. When you see the title “Murda” you think, “Oh this song is about killing people,” when really it’s about how he lost so many of his friends to shootings and how so many people want him dead but he knows that he has to live. It’s also about how the media portrays him as this problematic 18 year old, but he states that he won’t ever change for the people who criticize him. When we just assume that a song is “trash” or “stupid” then we aren’t opening ourselves up to change. So how could someone who doesn’t even bother to find the understanding behind a song give their opinion on the entire culture?

Some people might still believe that hip hop has bad meanings or intentions but these people refuse to find the deeper meaning. Yes, some songs might not have a strong meaning but there are plenty of songs that do. Unfortunately, these people are unwilling to find these songs and therefore unwilling to involve themselves deeper in the culture. This might be because they are scared of the people they might encounter or the issues that might be brought up. For example, the Colorado police issued a statement after a shooting outside a nightclub that was playing hip hop music saying that the violence was due to, “gangsta rap.” This happened at the nightclub La Zona Roja in Colorado Springs. The police assumed that because there was hip hop music playing, a shooting happened. This is why misconceptions can end up having consequences, like the police might arrest a black man instead of a white man, because he was at a nightclub that played hip hop. Without the proper knowledge of the topic and true meaning, these misconceptions lead to people thinking that hip hop has bad meanings or intentions, which have consequences.

In conclusion, it is important to understand the misconceptions of hip hop because then we can understand people’s perspective on the culture. But this doesn’t mean we should take these perspectives to heart because these are often just assumptions made through internal bias. As proven above, hip hop isn’t just about violence, drugs, and women, it's about how people are getting through life. These misconceptions make it seem like it’s a bad influence when really it can be the exact opposite. This is why this issue needs to be solved.