[QUOTE=Mosier]
It’s difficult to understand your question, but my answer is yes, rap is destructive. It encourages intolerance, violence, and abuse toward women. The music style has become stagnant and impotent. The people making modern rap are less focused on art or expression, and more focused on a tough image they can sell. Rappers who don’t try to sell a tough image are dropped from the mainstream and abandoned, called sellouts, accused of going soft, and accused of not “keeping it real.”
It’s so predictable. Always so damned predictably confrontational in the same silly way, every single song. Real rap is dead, until fans can pull it back out of the dumpster that the labels and producers have thrown it in.
[/QUOTE]
I hate to put my ‘myth bustin’ hat on, but I am afraid I have to respond to Mosier’s statement that positive rappers are accused of ‘not keeping it real’. Actually, positive rappers get tons of respect and support from even the hardest ‘gangsta’ rappers.
KRS-ONE, Rakim, The Roots, De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest, etc, are considered the godfathers of hip-hop, and I have never heard anyone accuse them of selling out. Rappers that used to be more ‘gangsta’ have even gone more positive, like for instance, Nas. Did it cause his sales to slide? Yes, I think it did. But that is because he lost ‘commercial appeal’ and I believe he still gets much respect from ‘gangsta’ rappers and from true hip-hop fans.
You speak as if being ‘dropped from the mainstream’ means that the hip hop artist is a failure, and hip hop is dead. That is not how it works in hip-hop, though. In hip-hop, too much ‘mainstream’ is considered not good. Those that are plastered all over MTV, looking crazy, doing some watered down version of what corn balls think is hip-hop are not considered great. They are considered successful in the same way that Avril Lavine is considered successful. But when she makes music, no one declares the death of Rock and Roll. They recognize that she does not embody true rock.
Also, if hip-hop encourages intolerance, violence, and abuse toward women, then I hope you are willing to accept that there is classic literature, art, scultpures, movies, religions (Christianity included) that do the same thing. I think it very strange that hip-hop alone should be criticized for it.
Now, if you want to criticize the propaganda machine for making the worst rap* glossy and pushing it to the suburban masses, then fine. But that crap on MTV is not the whole of hip-hop…it is the tip of the ice berg. Go underground to find the best of it.
*in my opinion, not all commercial rap is crap. Eminem used to make good commercial rap, and Kenya West is a master at it. Heck, 20 years ago, Will Smith did it well too.
