Artists were out to share these experiences, while also serving as messengers of the public who kept the government in check. [8][9].
This lack of representation was due to the fact that topics of gangsters, ghettos, violence, drug dealers, and misogyny were thought by owners of major record labels to attract a wealthy, suburban, white, teenage audience. The culture industry's intended one-dimensional representation of hip hop music for the purpose of attracting white consumers goes off of historically negative assumptions of Black culture, like the buck caricature of blackface. The buck caricature, which was considered a savage, violent-prone criminal, surfaced after the days of slavery as the stereotype of freed black men. This reshaping of hip hop music created an economic situation that made it necessary for rappers to adopt these commoditized negative images, which continued the cycle of one-dimensionalization. This is a prime example of cultural commodification, which as defined by Professor Madison, is the exploitation of a culture for profit. These record owners are determining the way artists on their labels are represented in their music by financially coercing hip-hop personalities into representing themselves in the negative ways previously mentioned.
Hip-hop music is performed by artists of many backgrounds as far as education, religion, wealth, and sexuality, and in full, hip-hop represents all walks of life. The culture industry's cycle causes hip-hop to act upon historically negative racial perceptions and reinforces them by only allowing this one-dimensional version of hip hop music to define the genre as a whole. This causes those exposed to hip-hop to project the negative characteristics of one-dimensional hip-hop onto the Black community and its individuals.
Contrary to narrow stereotypes of hip-hop clothing that the media associates with ghetto, rappers have utilized quite a variety of styles and outfits.