Can you expand on the music part? I am not familiar with the revolutionary spirit of Black music from decades ago. I've always been suspicious, though, of the narrowing down of contemporary rap radio to just hedonism or violence when there was much more representation (and pro black messaging) within mainstream rap culture two decades ago. You're dropping knowledge in here.
From what I've heard, post civil rights era black people's attitude towards each other was a lot more positive and about building up their families/communities/businesses, and it no doubt it had a lot to do with the fact that for the past decades even back then, black musicians were making positive, socially aware music that had black people excited about their future prospects in this country. Someone like MLK could never have risen to such status, if the groundwork hadn't been set in people's mind and people weren't set & ready to move. MLK had people doing major demonstrations & boycotts, and organizing politically in a way that would be impossible today because of the effects that systematic oppression has had over the last 40+ years since he died without a voice to replace him.
But up until hip hop started going mainstream in the late 80's, most mainstream black music was either about: Partying and having a good time, love, being proud, struggling and calling for unity, or some straight up attack on systematic corruption that just went viral, like early reggae, coming from Jamaican Rastas reclaiming a lost part of the culture. You can hear in the music that it would have been
super weird for someone as negative and aggressive as most of these rappers today to show face, I don't think they would have even existed back then as an archetype, they'd have just been militants, there would be no outlet for their frustration, people were on their
Lets Stay Together and
War, What is it Good For? vibe, not to mention dealing with real threats to their existence from the outside... The negativity you see in the music today was deliberately cultivated because it would reach a larger mass audience and do the work of putting a lot of black people in a worse off state at the same time...
You can listen for it in the mid-70's though, when the formerly positive artists start getting fed up and the music becomes more aggressive and takes on the "rapping/talking" tone that we know today.
Marvin Gaye - What's Happening Brother and the whole What's Going On album really..
The Temptations - Ball of Confusion - You know it's getting bad when The Temptations have to stop singing and rap for a second.
