I also meant to add that for the record [no pun intended] there are a lot of different genres of rap music including the gangsta, misogynistic rap that the recording studios promote so heavily. There's bubble gum rap, roots rap, rap-jazz fusion, Latin rap, and much more.

I absolutely detest gangsta rap with its "women="ho", violent, sexist lyrics and its excessive valuation of materialistic bling bling.

But I understand that we, the public, are being played if we believe that gangsta rap is the only form of rap that there is. Gangsta rap rules the airways because the music industry directs its money to it rather than to other more positive, and in my opinion, more creative forms of that genre.

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I also want to share this exerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop_music:

..."Beginning in the early 1980s, hip hop culture began its spread across the world. By the end of the 1990s, popular hip hop was sold almost everywhere, and native performers were recording in most every country with a popular music industry[citation needed]. Elements of hip hop became fused with numerous styles of music, including ragga, cumbia and samba, for example. The Senegalese mbalax rhythm became a component of hip hop, while the United Kingdom and Belgium produced a variety of electronic music fusions of hip hop, most famously including British trip hop.

Hip hop also spread to countries like Greece, Spain and Cuba in the 1980s, led in Cuba by the self-exiled African American activist Nehanda Abiodun and aided by Fidel Castro's government. In Japan, graffiti art and breakdancing had been popular since the early part of the decade, but many of those active in the scene felt that the Japanese language was unsuited for rapping; nevertheless, by the beginning of the 1990s, a wave of rappers emerged, including Ito Seiko, Chikado Haruo, Tinnie Punx and Takagi Kan. The New Zealand hip hop scene began in earnest in the late 1980s, when Maori performers like Upper Hutt Posse and Dalvanius Prime began recording, gaining notoriety for lyrics that espoused tino rangatiratanga (Maori sovereignty).

Hip-hop has globalized into many cultures worldwide. We now find hip-hop in every corner of the globe, and like the South Bronx, each locale embodies a kind of globalism. Hip hop has emerged globally as an arts movement with the imperative to create something fresh by using technology, speech, and the body in new ways. The music and the art continue to embrace, even celebrate, its transnational dimensions while staying true to the local cultures to which it is rooted. Hip-hop's inspiration differs depending on each culture. Still, the one thing virtually all hip-hop artists worldwide have in common is that they acknowledge their debt to those Black and Latino kids in New York who launched this global movement in the first place.[7] As hip-hop is sometimes taken for granted by Americans, it is not so elsewhere, especially in the developing world, where it has come to represent the empowerment of the disenfranchised and a slice of the American dream. American hip-hop music has reached the cultural corridors of the globe and has been absorbed and reinvented around the world"...