RealTalkAJ

I’ll be addressing the question should rap be capitalized.

Honestly the suggestion in general’s pretty silly.

What’s the importance of having the title of a genre capitalized?

That’s immediately what I thought of as soon as I came across this question.

I went to a school in my elementary years and I remember days when staff and students had to get on the same page about if the word God should be capitalized.

It was justified with doing it because we were discussing a high ranking religious figure.

It was partially in line with the same general lessons you would receive on grammar.

But let’s move on.

Should rap be capitalized

It shouldn’t.

The rule of only capitalizing a word if its a proper Pronoun seems fair. This same question actually comes up for other genres of music as well.

An interesting point that relates is how this discussion comes about when talking about music from historical time periods. One rule of thumb is being guided by what the context is in which it’s used.

Proper noun rule

The rule of capitalizing a proper noun was in my head early on but I vaguely remember it being a thing where whenever we wrote papers teachers would check for this rule to be followed.

I’ve seen this practiced with a few words:

He
She
They

Those are a few of the obvious examples that i feel confident to share.

If we break it down to what this title means it’s simply another name that you can use to identify the subject of discussion.

Applying it to the word rap just feels unnatural and unnecessary.

What about other genres?

The suggestion of having rap be a word that’s capitalized extends well beyond that genre alone.

R&B is a genre that has the capital letters which make the word because it’s short for rhythm and blues.

I guess that means acronyms get a pass but oh well.

The rules can be pretty tricky when you see why some titles get the capital letter to their name.

An example is a genre that I discovered, British pop (in other words known as Britpop) is a combination of a genre and proper noun.

The only universal rule that seems to be followed is when you’re writing the title to a post or something similar.

When you’re capitalizing the words that make the title you can usually include the genre as well because it’s only a label to preface the content.

Historical music

Did you know depending on the time period when different music was made it influenced whether the title of the genre earned a capital letter.

This is especially true for music made during the Baroque classical period and renaissance times.

How I understand it best has to do with proper nouns again.

If you group a large selection together you don’t capitalize the name but if that group falls under an even larger group then it would be capitalized.

A non music example (but with the same concept) that I can share with best fits would be if I were to say humans (multiple people) it was stay lower cased but if I were to say the Human Race that would be capitalized.

I could be wrong but that’s how I see it.

Does context matter?

I want to take the time to acknowledge the reason why most capitalization happens in written conversations.

It’s in the context people!

There’s a reason why when someone sends a text in all caps that it usually has to do with a strong emotion.

You could be in trouble, getting exciting news or even trying to be firm in a message that you’re sending out.

Now I could see this being applied to rap in a few of its sub genres if you’re trying to communicate what to expect from whichever specific sound you’re talking about.

One that comes to mind pretty quickly could be trap.

That style has a pretty loud sound and encourages activities related so that’s my candidate.

Final Thoughts

Let’s revisit what was just mentioned.

I don’t think that rap alone should be required to have a capital letter in its spelling.

The proper noun rule helps make some protocols clear before trying to determine what music genre names deserve capitalization.

Good for R&B to have it, since it’s closely associated with hip-hop and rap.

The historical point made some since to me, it took a little extra research to understand it better but my earlier comments on the topic is my best attempt at explaining it.

And lastly on context.

I feel that came naturally because ever since texting was popular to do that was when everybody seemed to elevate ways to communicate thoughts, and caps was definitely a method.

It still is today but that’s another discussion.

Maybe I’ll be able to get further in depth after doing another WordPress prompt, but we’ll see.

Fin.