by James Harvey

Created on: November 09, 2009   Last Updated: December 04, 2009

Rap music, without a doubt, has proven to be the most enduring musical genre in recent music history thus so far. While Rock 'n' Roll has also endured for many years, it has undergone various changes, whereas Rap Music has seemingly undergone little change as far as its style is concerned in the roughly 30 years or so since its advent in the late 1970's.

It has, nonetheless, undergone a change-a major change indeed, particularly in the past 17 years or so, since the early 1990's. The Rap of the late 70's and early 1980's was very different than the Rap that has become immensely popular today, namely Gangstarap.

When it first started to be heard on the airwaves in 1979, many young people were mesmerized, or 'knocked out' by this "new" form of music-a music that most young people at that time had never heard of before. Most persons back then-just like people back in the 1950's with Rock 'n' Roll-didn't know what to make of this music. By the mid-late 1980's, Rap Music had become the biggest chart-breaking music in the world.

By the 1990's this music genre was beginning to make a marked change in its message and its image. Whereas in its early days, groups like The Sugar Hill Gang, Curtis Blow and The Breaks and Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five rapped mainly about love and getting the attention of teenaged girls and young women in their early 20's, the newer Rap groups began to take on social issues, such as drugs, sex, hatred of authority (especially the Police) and promoting a anti-social criminal mentality. This newer form of Rap became known as "Gangstarap", which such performers as "N-with-Attitudes", (I think you can figure out what the "N" stands for); Ice-T (now an acclaimed actor, who originally started out as a gangsta-rapper and who also was once labeled "The Father of Gangstarap"), the late Tupac Shakur and Thug Bones-n-Harmony began to make this music immensely popular, particularly after 1995.

It is this form of Rap that has created a storm of controversy in recent years, especially in the past 10 years. There are mixed views on whether the influence of this music is harmful or helpful. Countless debates and blogs jibber and jabber back and forth about Gangstarap's supposed "good" influence while others argue that the genre has obviously contributed to social breakdown, especially in the Black Community, where Rap as well as Gangstarap had its start. As one can probably imagine, most of Gangstarap's defenders are mostly young people, who

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