Many, if not all of you, will find this post to be elitist. And if you consider opposition to lowest common denominator culture – the “mass man” that Ortega y Gasset warned us about decades ago and Nietzsche warned us about even earlier – to be elitist, then this post most definitely is elitist and I’m not in the least ashamed of this.
You see, you have to judge rap/hip-hop not against the low standards of most post-millennial rock (as some have done here), but instead all Western music has to be compared against the highest standard Western culture has ever produced: what we call Classical Music. The standard set by Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart centuries ago. And against that standard, rap/hip-hop does indeed suck, and suck hard (to employ the vernacular).
By that I mean that, though it has some musical value, it has an abysmally low level of it. Lower than anything else out there of which I’m aware. There is no real musical or compositional effort put into it; it has no grounding theory; no valuable set of aesthetics; it places almost no value in melody or harmony; it has almost zero respect for its audience, etc., etc.
Note that this is most emphatically NOT a question of taste or of liking or not liking rap/hip-hop. For example, I don’t like traditional, free-form jazz, but there’s no denying that it has enormous musical value and represents a huge musical gift from our African-American heritage. I’m saying nothing new when I point out that African-Americans are far and away the greatest contributors to our musical heritage, from gospel to soul to blues to jazz to r&b to rock, no one has exceeded African-Americans in their enormous contributions to great, awe-inspiring American music.
That is, until African-Americans started producing rap/hip-hop with Caucasians following. Then the hideously ugly mass-man reared its repugnant head and started spewing stagnant, hate-fueled vomit at us. (Well, maybe that’s a little strong… 
) Seriously, though, only the truly desperate and those unaware of musical history and musical aesthetics can force their mouths or typing fingers to claim that rap/hip-hop has more than extremely low musical value. It appeals to the mass-man, yes, but so do penis and fart jokes. In my experience, usually the more popular something is the less merit and value it has. The mass-man, as we were warned would happen, has trumped value and aesthetics and most things good and noble about humanity. What better proof than that rap/hip-hop is so popular, even far outside the African-American community? These listeners don’t want music, they want mindless noise with a beat. Music is far too complex and sophisticated for them and they don’t want any part of it.
Now this has nothing to do with “cultural relativism”. The racist claim that rap/hip-hop has high musical value to African-American culture can only mean that African-American culture is largely incapable of making aesthetic judgements, and I refuse to believe that. Musical value judgements are inter-subjective; they don’t change from culture to culture. For example, the native African music mentioned above is truly great music regardless of one’s culture of origin. Like jazz and other African-American inspired music other than rap/hip-hop, it compares quite well with the Western gold standard of Western classical music and also with Eastern musical gold standards.
While rap/hip-hop is essentially irredeemable shit on a plate when evaluated with musical theory and musical aesthetics in mind.