My son is a very creative rising hs junior who has a new passion for writing and recording rap. He uploads it to YouTube and Facebook and gets a fair amount of praise for his lyrics. I don’t want to stifle his creativity, but I can’t help but fear that this could hurt him at college application time. Can anyone please help this mom to know whether I
should just chill? (in case you’re wondering, the raps do have some cussing with an occasional drug or violence reference and definitely a little sexual innuendo).
Clean it up? Change his style just for colleges? I’m no expert but that doesn’t seem like a good suggestion to me. I wouldn’t want to be told that I need to “change” my hobby to make it more suitable for colleges.
Instead, describe the hobby/passion in a way that doesn’t reflect the “flaws” (language, references, etc.). Call it “songwriting/recording, 15+ hours/week, 100k+ views on YouTube” for example. Describe it in a positive light.
Hopefully others can pitch in with some better advice.
And that would be changing his style for the sake of pleasing colleges, which is stupid. While posting racist stuff on the internet is a bad idea, swearing and making sexual references is not an issue - it’s commonplace in the genre and is found both in high school hallways and on college campuses.
Unless there’s racist or other hateful content in them (in which case it’s an issue for an entirely different reason), this will not hurt him admissions. If anything, this will be helpful, because it can be presented as an interesting, unusual, and compelling EC.
I feel like rap could be a really good advantage in a sea of betaclubnationalhonorsocietybandsoupkitchen-type kids. Or the innuendos and language could turn off admissions officers and be really bad.
No college will take a rap song with profanity, sexual references, ect. seriously. I agree with the previous poster. Clean it up. Life is not fair, and this is something he will have to learn at some point. You wouldn’t go to a job interview in night-club attire would you? If you don’t believe me, go ask any professional adult/professor. I would bet my life on him being rejected if he sent something like that in.
On the first day of class, DD’s AP Stats teacher played a YouTube video of an AP Stats rap that was pretty cute. I think, however, that they just changed the wording slightly on some other commercial rap song. I also saw once a feature story on a math teacher who made up a rap to help his students remember formulae. True, son & other young people would probably find it pretty lame, but I think it would be great to have raps out there to serve as mnemonic devices for those of us in the population who are memory impaired.