Annotated Bibliography (Source Three)

Brown, Veda. "Guiding The Influence Of Hip-Hop Music On Middle-School Students' Feelings, Thinking, And Behaving." Negro Educational Review, The 57.1-2 (2006): 49-68. ERIC. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.

The article discusses how hip hop music affects middle-school students’ psychological being and how teachers can use the consumption of hip hop to help in the academic field as well as in the classroom. Brown talks about how adolescents follow trends introduced through music and shows how they are greatly influenced by this music. She asks questions as to why they are so easily influenced by the music industry and why they are targeted for this type of market. She goes into detail about what exactly about the music appeals to these students and what emotions or behaviors this evokes. They hope to take these same types of appeal from music and implement them in the classroom setting.

Veda Brown breaks down her research into a couple points. She wants to explore how motivational music is to the middle school students, how the music appeals to them (ie. marketing strategies), and how the teachers and parents of these students can use these strategies to make learning appealing to students. She wants to see how meaningless lyrics and catchy beats affect the students’ behavior in the way they approach subjects or scenarios and why they take to them. Most of the middle school children listen to hip hop or just music in general to evoke emotion or as a form of release to life’s problems.

This article will help me in my inquiry paper because it focuses on the mind of students and how it affects their behavior and psychological status. It also focuses on a specific group of students; I’m not sure of what ethnic group but I am assuming African American students because they mention hip hop. I am using the information found in this article to prove or to illustrate how music and the how the rhetoric in music can change or significantly affect a student in the academic field and why this happens.

·       “Adolescents' attitudes about school, material success, appreciation of themselves and others seem to be shaped to a large extent by the music they listen to” (49).

·       “Well meaning adults have often complained that the popular music of today seems to have a detrimental effect on children's thought and subsequent behavioral patterns. Particularly, many adults believe that the lyrics of some celebrated musical artists such as Fifty-Cent, Nelly, Foxy Brown, Marilyn Manson, Lil' Kim, and Eminem have often undercut the very attributes, skills, and values of emotional intelligence that form the basis for pro-social behavior”(51).

·       “In contrast, children who lack pro-social skills associated with stable emotional intelligence tend to be easily influenced by various environmental factors such as peers and media. Some adults believe that this emotional weakness in children may leave them vulnerable to ideas of violence, sexual promiscuity, and other forms of anti-social behavior that are often portrayed in some popular hip-hop songs and videos”(51).