“Runaway Love”
Ludacris is a very well known artist across the United States. He has won tons of awards for his music. Ludacris is also a co-founder of a record label. The genre he performs in is rap/hip-hop. Ludacris is known more as a hip-hop artist. Not all his songs talk about problems going on in the world. Some are very explicit, and can be seen as degrading to women. However, no one seems to care. Some of Ludacris’s songs are about problems that are current in the world. One of his famous songs is “Runaway Love” featuring Mary J. Bilge. It is mainly about three little girls going through a hard time in their life. The song is for young girls who are going through this around the world and expressing they story that they are too afraid to tell.
The first verse is about a girl name Lisa, 9 years old who is being raped by her mom’s random boyfriends. In addition, when Lisa tells her mother, she don’t believe her. So Lisa is forced pack her clothes and runaway. The next verse is about a girl named Nicole, 10 years old, who is being abused by her alcoholic step dad. Then she finds a friend who is going through the same thing she is. However, her friend is shot in a drive by shooting and she dies. So Nicole packs her clothes and runaway. The last girl in the last verse is named Erica, 11 years old, who is having unprotected sex with a boy that is sixteen. She pops Ex pills to get rid of her pain. She finds out she is pregnant and the boys leaves. In addition, she can’t tell her mother, because she would freak out and she can’t afford abortion. So Erica packs her bags and runaway. At the end of the song, Ludacris tells them to not runaway and that he can only image what they are going through. This song is made to tell young girls that they are not alone.
HI Jerann,
ReplyDeleteIt seems like you begin to examine Luda's ethos, but toward the end of this post, you examine pathos, which is appropriate. Luda is very interesting to examine. Have you seen any of his movies? He did a fantastic job on Law & Order and Crash.
He certainly is not without criticism, but who isn't. I'm not defending him. I think that we all should examine the ways that we use language and how it limits or restricts us; however, like Tupac, Luda does have some interesting music that we can take away from like the one you describe above. While I did not ask you to include the target demographic for this assignment. Who do you think would listen to this (e.g. please don't assume everyone :))? What would h/she take away from this?
Ms. C