Does the stereotype of a genre completely effect the real message an artist could be trying to get across. In class we talk about the song Night of The Living Baseheads by Public Enemy, which is song that is a protest to the drug epidemic. But does stereotyping this genre of music with things such as crime and violence effect their overall message to those who don’t normally listen to rap. The same can be said about metal music being associated with satanic worship, meanwhile there’s christian mental bands. Automatically putting this genres in a box does that effect how someone will listen to the music, I picking and choosing what they want to hear rather than actually dissecting the lyrics.
In class we talked about the song Walk This Way by RUN-DMC and Aerosmith, which is two artist you wouldn’t normally hear on a track together during this time, and this helped push rap music into the mainstream by collaborating with a rock group. Today do unconventional collaborations like this song spike more talk than an artist collaborating with someone from their genre. Such as the song Old Town Road that had recently been super popular, which is a song collaborated with the artists Lil Was X and Billy Ray Cyrus. This song combines the two genres of hip hop and country, this song probably became popular due to it being so different from what has been put out recently. Is this song going to help bring country into the mainstream like Aerosmith did for rap?
In class we briefly talked about this when we talked about Micheal Jackson, do we disregard his actions when listening to his music. Well the past weekend from when I’m posting this a smaller artist who had a huge following on Youtube named Austin Jones was sentenced to 10 years in prison for predating on underage fans. This story was specifically interesting and I’ve heard things about him before the allegations really blew up due to knowing others who have worked with him. I have a friend who is photographer mostly Youtubers and Musicians and she worked with him during a concert and talked about he would openly say sexual things about underage fans to his friends and people he worked with, she also talked about how he was one of the rudest people she every worked with. I remember in 2015 people were talking about this but underage fans that were victims were silenced by the community due to lots of higher ups protecting Austin Jones. People who tried to call him out who had a platform, such as Damon Fizzy, were constantly harassed by his management and others trying to protect him. I linked an article that goes into more detail about the allegations and what he did, but I feel this story really shows the influence a young fan’s idol can have on them. These girls were 14 and 15, and the way he would manipulate them was by saying things such as “if you were really my biggest fan you would send the videos.” I’m also going to link the video of Damon Fizzy talking about how he tried to find justice for these victims for years but was constantly silenced by people trying to protect Austin Jones.
