Nah, it was The Platters. These kids today with their new-fangled rock and roll. What talent does it take to play barre chords and scream into a microphone over a dull 4/4 beat? I mean, The Platters had talent. They could harmonize, you could hear their instruments, they sang beautiful music, not this cacophonous crap teenagers are into these days. Anybody can play rock music.
So start a trend and be the first. If they played nothing but nu-metal on the new music stations nationwide like they do with hip-hop you’d have people rallying to your cause. Instead we get the same manufactured no-talent hip-hop/rap/R&B yodeling over and over again, and this is the backlash. It happened with disco, it happened with grunge, it happened with AOR, it happened with hair bands, now it’s hop-hop’s turn in the barrel. Suck it up.
I play traditional instruments (double bass, banjo, guitar etc…) and I wasn’t comparing the complexity of the two acts you mentioned. I was just saying that making music is done by emulating what came before you. I just see sampling as a continuation of this with new technology.
Playing 3 power cords is easy; playing a Charlie Parker song is hard. Do all 3 cord rock songs suck because it’s easy? How many songs are carbon copies of the 12 bar blues? It just seems people have strange standards when it comes to hip-hop that they don’t apply to other genres.
So the fact that Rage Against The Machine (I assume that’s who “RATM” is) can see value in hip-hop and listens enough for it to be a musical influence, and the fact that they’re undoubtedly more musically talented and have a greater understanding of music than you, isn’t enough to convince you that the problem is on your end? You like them, and you like their music, but they’re simply wrong in their opinions of other music? That’s a mind-bogglingly arrogant attitude.
All those genres were relatively short-lived trends. Hip-hop has been around for, oh, twenty odd years now. It ain’t going anywhere.
While 90% of my musical collection is guitar based rock/punk/post-punk, I have to say that when it comes to popular music, Top 40 hip-hop is more creative and original than Top 40 rock. With hip-hop I hear completely new sounds, new basslines, new beats, new ways of writing songs. It’s a whole new sound, very fresh and exciting. Top 40 rock all sounds the same to me.
I’m not saying this to be contrarian. I’m saying this as a lover of rock music. As a genre, it really hasn’t produced much innovation since the 80s. Hip-hop, on the other hand, as a nascent art form, is showing the same sort of creative explosion that you saw in rock from the late 50s to the late 70s.
Those genres were short-lived precisely because of the backlash. Kurt Cobain is held up as the voice of his generation by millions and yet you almost never hear the genre he helped to found because it’s dead. No-talent hacks like Candlebox and the like killed it. Same here. All the gangsta rappers want to be Dre, all the pop rappers want to be LL, all the singers want to be Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey, they all sound the same. Whatever freshness there was years ago is gone. Now it’s cover after cover, sample after sample, lots of scat nonsense on every note, a whole lot of moaning and groaning, and nothing else.
If I want to hear rap I listen to the old stuff. You know, the good stuff, when it was new. If I want to listen to R&B I’ll listen to Motown, back when it was new and fresh and sounded really unique. This crap they pass off now is, with any luck, sounding the death knell of this nonsense, which will inevitably be replaced by something newer and original. Then that will die and the cycle will repeat itself.
But don’t tell me that this crap that’s out now is good. Tell it to some other sucker. I’m not buying.
Huh? I seriously don’t get your point. I don’t care that what they listened to. They could have been inspired by polka for all I care. If hip hop was so great, and such an influence, why didn’t they just stick with hip hop? The whole point is that they decided to use their talent and go in another direction.
Bill Maher said it better than I can, but it’s something that I’ve felt for a long, long time: we’ve been programmed to believe that there is no ‘better’ or ‘worse’, things are just ‘different’. Bullshit. Sometimes things are just ‘better’. There might be a ‘relatively good’ daytime talkshow host - but it doesn’t change the fact that the daytime talkshow genre is trash. There might be a ‘relatively good’ porn movie out there - but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still porn. And while there are obviously ‘relatively good’ hip hop artists out there, it doesn’t change the lack of substance for the genre overall.
Incidentally - I distinguish between hip hop and rap. I understand there’s a lot of overlap; my haphazard not-well-thought-out defining point has been mainly to include songs/artists with guitars etc. in with rap. I definitely think that rap takes serious skill - ever tried to sing a rap song in karaoke? I like Eminem, and used to listen to Run DMC and the Beastie Boys, etc. But I’ve never associated those acts with hip hop.
Oh you mean the Pixies ripoff band? Oh yeah, they were okay. 
Well, I’d start those threads but I’m too busy listening to Tony Furtado in this cozy little niche here.
This is a Great Debate in and of itself. I’m open to argument to the contrary, but I fail to see how aesthetics are anything but subjective. I can measure how long a song is, how heavy the CD its printed on is, I can tell you its meter, but how do I know how good it is? Is the goodness of a song proportional to the instrumental proficiency of the individual who created it? If so, Steve Vai > Kurt Cobain.
It seems to me the only criteron we have for deciding whether or not a given piece of music is good is how many people (and how well educated and/or published they are) say it’s good. Is there another way to assess the validity of a piece of music that I am missing?
Also, the Typical Cats are a really good hip-hop group. That is all.
Uh-huh. So anyone who doesn’t agree with you is just a relativist who refuses to admit that “there’s no better or worse”? I’ve always been sort of ambivalent towards Bill Maher - on one hand, he’s an incredibly funny guy. But on the other hand, he’s also built a large part of his career by repeating slogans like this one that come from right-wing talk radio and the like. Of course some things are better than others. The big lie is the ridiculous idea that anyone is going around claiming otherwise. It allows people - people just like you, in fact - to try to dismiss anyone who doesn’t share their opinion, or who points out the rickety ground on which the opinion stands, as simply being a mindless relativist. Even in a case like this, in which not one person has made the argument you’re arguing against!
See the problem with your argument is that (for once) this whole thread has gone by without anyone making the claim that taste is entirely subjective, and it’s all a matter of opinion, and so on and so forth. No one has said that! What people have been doing is illustrating, over and over again, that you don’t have the knowledge to opine meaningfully about hip-hop. Your own statements about it undermine your point, because the criticisms you’ve leveled are only applicable to one part of an extremely broad genre. That’s not a matter of opinion, either - that’s a simple statement of fact. You have decided that a very large genre of music is somehow inherently bad based upon a set of criticisms that don’t apply to it at all! I’ve already demonstrated that the “reasoning” (though the term’s a bit of a stretch in this case) you’ve applied doesn’t work when applied to other genres of music either. No one here has argued that all music is equal in value. The argument has been that you have demonstrated that you don’t have adequate knowledge to make the claims you’re making. (Of course, given the breadth of the genre of hip-hop and how complex and varied it is, anyone who declared that it could be meaningfully compared to another large genre like rock would be a fool; how can you compare too things that are so large and varied?)
Do you actually, honestly not see how thoroughly your ass has been handed to you in this discussion? Because it has, over and over, by a lot of different people. It’s been clearly illustrated that you’re offering up an opinion about something you don’t know anything about. Dozens of examples of artists who don’t in any way resemble the criticisms you’ve leveled have been offered up. Are you still arguing because you actually think you haven’t made yourself look utterly foolish? Because if that’s the case, then I recommend you reread the thread. Pay closer attention to the points people have made, because you haven’t offered a refutation of any of them. And if not, if you’re just defending your stupid, stupid post because you don’t want to back down, consider whether admitting you were wrong really makes you look worse than arguing a dumb point that’s already been clearly demolished.
I like both of those bands, obviously, but they never particularly sounded that much alike to me.
Even though you’re quoting me, I can’t help but feel that you didn’t read my post at all. I posted 2 examples of producers whose material is entirely their own – these producers are 2 of the 3 most successful producers in modern hip-hop (both on the charts and in critics hearts). Neither of these guys sample – your accusations of thievery simply do not apply, and I told you this before you said them a second time. Surely you understand why I’m confused and a little frustrated with your response.
Moreover, anyone who is bitching about samples is sorely mistaken about the state of modern hip-hop. Yes, Kanye brought soul samples, and yes there are a bunch of people on his dick. But when the evidence is right there on the charts I can’t understand why people refuse to consider the facts unless they have some weird addiction to being mistaken and then subsequently shown to be wrong. Look at the hip-hop charts, guys. The amount of new material being originally produced greatly outweighs the amount of new material crafted together through sampling. Whatever metric you choose, popular hip-hop is dominated by original songs.
Certainly. But when it comes to hip-hop many of these reasons are either unsupportable (that creating a hip-hop song requires no talent and cannot be considered art), bizarre hypocrisy (popular hip-hop music is only about dancing, crime, doing drugs, or women; completely unlike pop and rock which are only about dancing, crime, doing drugs, or women), or completely from ignorance that could be easily solved by asking simple questions instead of making assumptions (sorry, Dio, but you’re example #1 here: “I never listen to hip-hop because I don’t like it, but I will simply assume without knowledge that hip-hop producers are thieves who steal”). I do understand that people have their reasons for not liking hip-hop on an aesthetic level. I don’t understand why people insist on claiming that the reasons they hate hip-hop having nothing to do with aesthetics but instead are any combination of the three reasons listed above. Reasoning can be good or bad; the confusing thing is not why people have good reasons, but why they have bad ones.
Uh, yes, it is a gangster rap song, but no I haven’t heard it – I’m basing my opinion off of the wikipedia entry about the controversy surrounding the Weird Al parody. Gangster rap isn’t necessarily rapping about how good it feels to be a gangster (noted exception: Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangster, by the Geto Boys, is necessarily about how good it feels to be a gangster). Many of the greatest (and most popular) songs in gangster rap are cautionary tales about the perils of hood life – consider Ice Cube’s “It was a Good Day,” in which a day is considered to have gone pretty sweet simply because Cube wasn’t killed (and he didn’t even have to use his AK!). Consider roughly half of Tupac’s career. It’s kind of like how “Still Fly” (the funniest song in modern hip-hop) is still a bling song. Kind of like how “Munich” is still a revenge thriller. Cautionary tales are still genre tales.
Oh, and thanks for being snide to a guy for talking about Coolio in response to a direct question about Coolio by another poster (the guy that you were being snide to is me!).
Oh, wow. Pervue is my fiend, etc. Let’s try again:
So anyone who doesn’t agree with you is just a relativist who believes that “there’s no better or worse”?
Oh shit, I kind of said that. Did I fuck everything up? Sorry.
You’re frustrated and confused because you’re arguing with Diogenes, and completely ignoring it when people refute his arguments is the one of the very few tools in his rhetorical purse. If you’re looking for an insightful or productive discussion, you’d be better off with a pet rock. Diogenes likes to be right, and he’d rather pretend to be right even after being proven wrong than admit he was wrong.
I wasn’t aware that this was a win-or-lose kind of thing, or even that we were keeping score.
This might be the pit, but that didn’t stop me from learning something, despite your rather infantile efforts to ‘prove’ that you ‘won’ the debate.
Perhaps you should give up on your relativist attempts to pretend that all opinions are of equal value. Because, you see, opinions that are based on knowledge of the thing being opined about are inherently better than opinions that are not.
I’m not sure why you’re calling me infantile here. You see, my whole argument has simply been that your own opinion of a genre of music is not objective truth; you have persisted, through out the thread, in trying to do exactly what you’re accusing me of. You’re attempting to prove that your personal dislike of a particular genre of music is based upon some inherent deficiency of that genre, rather that simply acknowledging that different people like different things. What’s more “infantile” - by your very own standards, as articulated in this quote, even! - then trying to prove that a genre of music you dislike is inherently bad?
Okay. I won’t. What’s the point–you obviously won’t listen, no matter how coherent an argument I could make about the artistry of the work of producers like Timbaland, The Neptunes, Danger Mouse, etc. And that’s just the mainstream guys that I know. Somebody who really knows hip-hop could probably name off a dozen other people I’ve never heard of who are better.
I would love to hear an argument how Top 40 rock music is more innovative and creative than the work of any of these guys. Love to.
I agree with you. Even though Kurt Cobain himself admitted to ripping off the Pixies (and the Melvins), the two bands don’t sound very much alike to me. For that matter, even though Nirvana were lopped into the whole grunge movement, musically they sounded very distinct from bands like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden (who seemed to take more inspiration from bands like Black Sabbath, while Nirvana definitely came from a more pop and punk background).