Ludacris is a well known southern rapper who has been featured in films such as Best Picture winning CRASH, music videos, and had sold millions of albums world wide. He started out talking about hoes, and money, and othe
r stereotypical things that rappers talk about. But in the last few years he has really been on a serious crusade. Talking about families, runaways, and other issues facing communities in his albums. However, his record sales have dropped dramatically since he made the ‘serious shift’.
He has just put out a new record, called “How Low Can You Go,” it is already getting a lot of airplay on urban radio stations and people are saying “LUDA IA BACK,”. Look at these pictures, and video towards the end of the blog post to check out, what it means to be back:
http://bossip.com/202776/ludacris-makes-the-locals-shake-they-aets-and-drop-it-low/#more-202776
This is interesting when talking about what exactly you have to do to gain appeal. As Carla Fercerro says in her article Popular Culture, we must look at what this represents about black culture, or black popular culture. It seems like to “get back to yourself” rappers have to play into the stereotypes about rap. If we talk too much about serious issues, no one wants to listen. But when we talk about dropping booties and overt sexuality people get intrigued. Popular culture is designed to suppress social discourse and rather exploit social constructs such as stereotypes.
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