From tonedef’s excerpt of Immortal Technique’s lyrics:
In other words, he’s one of those “Bush blew up the towers” morons.
The “four Non-Arabs,” I’m assuming, are the Israelis which were supposedly arrested filming the Twin Towers collapse and laughing, as cited also by fellow beat poet turned crackpot Amiri Baraka:
Though the first number is four and the second five, something makes me suspect that they’re both talking about the same thing. Oh yeah, that makes sense - ISRAEL is somehow responsible. Come on! The only thing he’s forgetting are the Illuminati.
Technique is a good rapper, but I can’t support him if he’s going to espouse that bullshit theory about the towers being destroyed by “controlled demolition.” As far as I’m concerned, that message IS destructive.
It’s a political point of view. If political points of view are destructive, we’ve got a whole lot of “destructiveness” going on in a democracy and we encourage it.
Political points of view certainly can be destructive. For example, the Ku Klux Klan’s political point of view, or Fred Phelps’s political point of view.
It’s free speech and I know they have a right to say it, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be bullshit. A whole generation of college hipsters - my peers - actually believe that Loose Change 9/11 conspiracy shit, and since music is a huge influence on young people, anything espousing such a message has vast potential to spread idiotic viewpoints on impressionable people.
Yes, I have no problem with rap as a musical genre. I simply had to raise an objection to the citing of Immortal Technique as an example of rap that’s non-destructive. Just because the message is political rather than bitches-n’-hos doesn’t mean it’s not also ignorant, vile nonsense.
I don’t agree with Immortal Technique on the twin towers, and he his allowed his own thought on it just as you are.
So if you don’t agree with someones political views then its destructive?
Hip Hop artists like Kanye West or Lupe Fiasco are also more positive. The fact that Kanye’s new album outsold 50 Cent’s might also be a strong indicator that people are getting tired of the juvenile cartoonishness of gangsta rap.
But much of rap is juvenille. Chris Rock said that you used to be able to defend rap like Public Enemy on a political or artistic level. You can’t really defend “To the window, to the wall, to the sweat drip down my balls” on an artistic level.
Why? Why does an art form that you don’t appreciate piss you off. Let’s leave literature out of it, sense the ‘old writers’ are exempt in your mind, and focus on action movies. If you can see misogyny in hip-hop, but you don’t see it in Hollywood, then you don’t want to see it in Hollywood for some reason. So tell me why Hollywood doesn’t piss you off.
Also, all this talk of mysogyny in hip-hop kinda makes me wonder if the people bringing it up have some set of rules in their mind of how a female should behave, and are judging rappers preference of females based on those rules. Does a rapper have the right to speak about the kind of women that hangs around drug dealers? Those women often have an interesting story. And what’s more, I think people confuse ‘gold digger’ with ‘girl in the club, droppin’ it like it’s hot, likes to get it on with the ballers and the thugs’. The latter girl is no different from lots of women that are making their own decisions about their sexuality, (no different from Sex in the City, which made huge Hollywood stars out of those four women) Unless someone is pushing their religious values on these women, which I’m certain no one should be doing, then the outrage seems misplaced.
I wish those that don’t get rap, or flat out don’t like rap would just go ahead and dislike it without being so freaking annoying about it. I hardly ever see any hip-hop fans saying, “Gawd, I hate heavy-metal, it is so dark and the talk about killing is so morally screwed up OMG it just pisses me off”. I mean really. Most hip-hop fans that don’t like rock music (and I love rock) just don’t listen to it. What the heck is up with the campaign against rap? I am starting to get conspiracy paranoid about it.
I agree! No one can defend “To the Window” as good rap at all. It is garbage. The only people that don’t recognize it as garbage are people that wouldn’t know good hip-hop if it hit them in the head. (hip-hop fans, see what I did there? I used ‘hit you in the head with it’ in a sentence about hip hop. That is like a hip-hop pun. Ha.)
I think Kanye only out sold 50 IN America BUT with worwide sales 50 Cent Sold more.
(sorry just got about of bed and can’t find the link but will look for it later if any wants it.)
Hmmm. I thought the sales numbers were worldwide. 50s probably not that good of an example though. Like Snoop Dogg and Eminem, 50 does have some talent. There are a lot of generic rappers out there who have nothing more than a club-friendly single and a gangsta image.
Oh I think you can defend that on an artistic level. Defending it on a political-statement-intended-to-improve-the-condition-of-a-people-or-make-a-deep-statement type of thing is another matter. But as art, it’s just expression. Pornography is art too.
I agree, but I don’t know about that last part; I hear distaste and mockery of ‘redneck’ music, for example, from rap fans. I always thought that was because of their suspicion that those redneck singers wouldn’t like them in real life as people so to hell with their cracker music, etc; conversely, I suspect that some of the people that hate on rap probably have the same supposition about the way they imagine rappers would feel about them as people in the real world. Pat Buchanan has a whole theory of ‘culture wars’ that goes to the heart of this, I think.
I’m going to have to take your word on that. But there are an awful lot of ‘country ass’ Southern rappers making very Southern music. And, I don’t often hear my peers making fun of country as ‘red neck’ music. As a matter of fact, I swear to you, the following country artists get some serious props where I come from.
Actually, among my friends those do get props though; but yeah, I meant it as a broader point. I was just playing Islands in the Stream (original, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton) for a friend of mine who’d never heard it before…and then he reminded me of what I’d forgotten: it was redone as Ghetto Supastar.