The reel is a concept created by academic, MK Asante. He uses it to explain why hip-hop has changed lyrically. In the beginning, hip-hop talked about what happened in New York Brooklyn in 1970 when hip-hop started. At the start of hip-hop all of the emcee’s were rapping about social issues. Social issues in music where mostly black people talking about how there was police brutality and other stuff like that. It became popular and then all of the big labels started to buy them and after the big labels started buying them the sound of the music had changed to suit the audience: the surburban white kids. The surburban white kids were the main audience because they didn’t know what it was like to be a black person, what police brutality was and what it was like living on the streets. However, according to Flores (1998), white suburbia enjoyed listening to these topics in order to have a feel of what it was like. Because of this, the record labels changed the way the music sounded to suit the audience.

One of the emcees we have been studying is Mick jenkings the point he is trying to put across with the song martyrs is that life for black people is hard and we know this because in the song he says that he is hanging on for dear life and that means that he is struggling to live because it is harder to live as a black person in mordern day america. And the word hanging in hanging on for dear life relates to lynching that hapend in the slavery times which was making black slaves jump from a tree while they where attached to a gallows which resulted in them dying.

Another emcee we have studied is Kendrick Lamar and the song that we listened to was The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice and in this song he is talking about Trayvon martin he  was a young man who got killed by a police officer and the point that he didn’t do any thing to deserve being killed was put across and they put his death down to police brutality. After that Kendrick Lamar decided to make a song about police brutality.  One of the verses in the song says “the blacker the berry the sweeter the juice” this means that the blacker or darker you are the better your life is going to be but the only reason he said this is because at this time their was a lot of bad stuff happening to black people on the streets of America and he said this to help them get through those  tough times.

Another emcee we have look at is Akala and in his song he talks about how chlidren want to become a rapper and get lots of money, girls and guns.