How has public policy shape hip hop culture?
There’s actually a whole book on this that I used for a report I did on something just like this… In the Reagan Era, there was the practice of what was called “Reaganomics”, or Trickle-Down Economics, in which Reagan focused on helping the extremely rich get even richer by lowering windfall taxes in the hopes that they would spend more, which would then help the middle class, who would make more money and then that would in turn help the lower class. Although it succeeded in helping the rich upper class, though, the trickle down effect never successfully reached the poorest people, so the “rich got richer and the poor got poorer”. Because there was next to no help from the government for the poorest during this era, many people believe the Crack Cocaine Epidemic of the 80’s was a byproduct, and artists such as KRS-One and NWA have commented on how this epidemic resulted in their political opinions that they would later express through hip hop. To sum it up, Reaganomics birthed politi
