My Genre Conventions

Genre Convention

The breakthrough of rap music came about in the early 1960’s, as it began to challenge a lot of music boundaries that other music genre had already set. With the genre firstly growing in Washington, Philadelphia and New York, the popularity of rap music was mostly influential to black teenagers and soon began to grow to entertain wider audience.  

The typical conventions of rap music differ widely from today’s par videos

·         Casual clothing, nothing too characteristic but more subtle and loose.

·         Sections of direct contact with the camera- the artists usually spends a lot of time looking straight into the camera as if to talk or have a conversation with the audience

·         Props regarding costume tend to be sued for example, jewellery

·         Show a clear display of emotions- if the tone of the songs is angry, the artist is likely to present this through their gesture and facial expressions

However nowadays today, a lot a rap artists have another artists featuring in their track- usually if it were a male rapper, they may decide to employ a female signer to vocalise the chorus.

The target audience that rap artists try to attract are not too specific but actually quite broad. It is claimed that they try to appeal to those of as similar age to themselves so this varies between each artists. However I did find that when looking at merchandise and blogs of artists such as Lil Wayne and Kanye West, the target audience was based and 14 to 25.