Multi-posts are the new sampling.
Blackalicious, Blazing Arrow. You can get it on iTunes for $10.
Just as a starting point.
It certainly seems that way.
Well, admittedly, all I have to go by is what I hear on the radio, and that’s usually not a good barometer for any genre. It used to irritate me when people used to judge all metal (my former genre) by the likes of Poison or Warrant. I’m sure I’m doing the same thing.
Didn’t they sign to Death Roe?
You’re not the only one chuckling at the irony , here.
So, you saw a couple super-popular acts and are equating that with all hip-hop, even though people who know considerably more about hip-hop than you do have pointed out that that’s not accurate and given you dozens of names of performers that contradict your limited assessment.
Hey, folks. Am I nuts, here? Is it not a popular notion that people should actually know what it is they’re talking shit about before they actually talk shit about it? I mean, DragonAsh, don’t you feel some shame at the fact that you’ve been caught publicly embarrassing yourself by talking all about a subject you obviously don’t know about? I sure would. And I’d stop trying to compound it by trying to invent some fantasy world in which what I said was accurate. I’m not saying you should feel shame for everything you don’t know, just that you should feel some shame when you’re blatantly caught running your mouth off about something you don’t understand.
I noted earlier that my username is based on an inside joke in the band I’m in; three of us were also bandmates in Tokyo; we only did covers and starting playing around with various medleys (i.e, Walk This Way, Sublime’s What I Got, Beck’s Loser…with Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping). Our rap-lovin’ bass player started throwing in some Eminem (Without Me) and stuff, and one thing led to another and we started making reference to Dragon Ash (who first became famous in Japan thanks mainly by copying songs from The Smashing Pumpkins).
I don’t know. Seems to me I could watch a boring half-hour of a movie, and then run a thread decrying the lack of talent of that director, producer, ensemble, genre etc. if I chose, without necessarily displaying my colossal ignorance. It might not be my proudest moment (if I’m calling Kubrick a hack because of some slow-starting film) but just how much of a sample of hip-hop do I need to hear before qualifying as a legit critic in your eyes?
If it’s hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours, please just shoot me now.
No, seriously, check it out. I’m coming at hip-hop from more or less the same place you are. I’m not defending my favorite genre, I’m just showing you the door that got me into it. Just check out “Chemical Calisthenics,” or “Make You Feel that Way” off the album I mentioned earlier. It’s not at all like the hip-hop you hear on the radio.
Wow, half the bands you named are utter shite, and you’re calling hip-hop crap?
Maybe if you listened to some better rock I would be able to respect your opinion a bit more. As it stands…nah brah, nah. I’ve heard plenty of rap that blows the shit out of some of the bands you named. And this is coming from a diehard rock fan who owns no hip hop and doesn’t really plan on buying some anytime soon.
Well, duh. They’re ‘super-popular’ for a reason. AmsterJam was a major event, with some major names - and there wasn’t a single hip hop act there even remotely like Sage Francis or Aesop Rock. The least irritating was Tego Calderon, because the somewhat latin feel to the music at least was a change of pace. He still needed a bevel of hos, however.
And Soapbox Monkey, I only named a handful of well-known bands that I’ve seen in concert recently; not all of them were bands that I liked (or even knew before the concert). My iPod is considerably more varied. But, since you seem to consider yourself the oracle of all rock wisdom, just what rock music should I be listening to?
Are you saying you don’t actually play an instrument? Or that there’s no diference between learning how to play a very complicated riff on the saxaphone and playing the section of the album over and over again on a turntable?
Or, you could say something like, “You know, I don’t like what I’ve heard so far, and I’m not interested in learning any more.” And you don’t really have to pass judgment beyond that. Honest.
Or you could just not offer an opinion on the subject. Not everyone has to have an opinion on everything, and if you’re not interested enough in hip-hop to make the effort to familiarize yourself with the genre, no one is going to hold it against you. Unless you hold yourself forward as an expert on it based on three bands you heard at a concert one time. Then people are going to point and laugh.
It’s actually worse. It’s like someone in the 1980s decrying Elvis Presley as playing devil music.
Oh, and anyone who doesn’t think that “playing” the turntables is making real music needs to see the movie Scratch.
None of the bands you listed earlier would be a good start. The only place “rock” exists anymore is on the major record labels, and it’s all being “performed” by those specifically picked because they would appeal to the greatest portion of their target audience.
Since you keep saying that your musical tastes are so much more varied than your earlier list, perhaps you’d care to tell us about some of the bands that you think are talented that you haven’t necessarily seen live recently.
A clever man would read some of the posts in this thread, realize that he is painfully ignorant of the subject in question, and go educate himself. It should only take a few albums to realize that the rap artists on the radio are the boy bands of this decade.
That’s not a real great analogy, is it?
Watching half an hour of a movie and turning it off? Sure, perfectly legitimate. However, proceeding to decry other movies by other directors with other actors as a result of it? Doesn’t make a lot of sense, now, does it? If I watch half an hour of Giulietta di Spiriti and decide it’s a boring film, that’s my right. (I always thought it was a rather dull movie, personally.) If I decide that Fellini is thus a hack filmmaker and start complaining about him on a message board, people would be perfectly within their rights to suggest that my opinion of him was limited by my narrow experience. If I decided to also declare that Passolini and Antonioni were crap because they’re also Italian filmmakers, I would hope the helpful folks at the SDMB would mock me so viciously that I eventually saw the stupidity of my ways.
DragonAsh has very little experience with hip-hop. I think my earlier mention of jazz was relevant. Because there’s not a lot of radio stations that play jazz. And, of the ones that do, almost all of them play “smooth jazz” by the likes of Kenny G or Dave Koz. And worse yet, “artists” like these guys are considerably more popular than most of what jazz fans would call actual jazz music. The only thing you’ll hear on most “jazz” radio stations is music deliberately designed to be non-threatening and blandly appealing. Judging an entire, large genre of music with dozens of sub-genres based upon the one style that is frequently heard on the radio is extremely ignorant, because it’s judging a lot of music on the basis of a small, unrepresentative sample. It’s been pointed out that this is true of other styles of music as well; not only is the music familiar to non-fans of any particular genre only a limited selection, it’s generally a particularly poor selection.
And judging an entire genre of music based upon what you know is a poor sample of it is simply stupid. If someone were to tell me that they hate jazz music because it’s boring and blandly affable rather than being harmonically complex and challenging, I would conclude that that person is a moron, because the content of their opinion reveals exactly how shallow and poorly-founded it is. People who go around passing judgment on what they don’t understand are morons. Why should I pretend otherwise? Jazz largely escapes this stigma, mostly because, even if most people don’t have much familiarity with it, it has a reputation for largely being challenging, complex music. But someone who simply judged it based on what they heard on their local smooth jazz station would most likely come to the exact opposite conclusion.
And yet you wouldn’t see the problem with judging modern rock by the super-popular crap you hear on the radio? Like Nickelback, or Hoobastank, or Staind? Oh, wait. That’s the kind of thing you like! 
There’s something really surreal about having someone who listens to Hoobastank pass judgments on other types of music.