Obviously about a decade since Tupac Shakur http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/lapd/race/deathrow.html , but the violence is still there for some, such as Top 6, who are still killing and getting killed: http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2007/03/29/m6a_TOP6_SIDE_0329.html
I don’t personally like most rap and hip-hop that I come across, which is admittedly not much. Most of the tunes Dave Chappelle had as guests on his show left me cold.
I have the greatest hits of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five floating around my house somewhere, though, which is great, and there was a DMX song a number of years back that I really liked.
Yeah, I’m a middle-aged white guy…
Sure, but so the fuck what?
Honestly, since when have musicians been role models of morality? Led Zeppelin destroyed more hotel rooms than the Kobe earthquake. How many musicians have died of drug overdoses or been caught doing Christ knows what? Wasn’t Johnny Cash a convict and an asshole? How about that paragon of virtue, Michael Jackson? Jim Morrison was drunk half his life.
But I don’t hear anyone talking about how classic rock music isn’t music because of the terrible lifestyle Led Zeppelin had. Or how country music’s bad. Or pop.
But ohhh, when it’s black folks…
Radio-friendly emo music is in the style of Fall Out Boy or Maroon 5 (to use a band with simpler licks) ranging up to the more interesting arrangements of Panic! At The Disco. It’s generally white boys with standard arrangements playing soft-to-medium rock. Emo bands are fond of amazingly long song titles - not sure if that means anything, but there it is.
**Now, I’m just referring to the stuff you’ll hear more often than not. ** Ironically, the music traces it origins to punk. 15-20 years ago “emo” had a very different meaning.
Homages to Morrissey perhaps? I still don’t understand exactly what emo is, either. But I’ve never heard a positive word about it. It leads me to believe that, whether or not it started this way, it’s become a derogative term that bands and fans of that type of music don’t use. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression.
Man, talk about a tired old rap…
No one is forcing music down anybody’s throat. The record companies simply don’t have that kind of effective marketing muscle anymore. The high school kids I teach have and are well aware of a multitude of outlets from which to consume music that I at their age could only dream of. They are at least as cynical as you in terms of being marketed to. They listen to what they want to listen to and not one note more. And what they want to listen to is absolute crap.
Why do people listen to music you call shite and not the stuff you love? Because they don’t like the stuff you love. They like shite.
Teenagers don’t listen to atrocious music because someone is making them. They listen to it because, whatever you may think of it, it’s what they like to hear.
But that is exactly the problem that rap has created for itself. I don’t consider the music to be threatening or denounce the lifestyles of those who make it. I loath rap because it is tedious. The entire genre is built on plagerism. There are approximately three percussion lines in the entire genre. You hear the same cutsie “slang” in everybody’s work. They steal other artists tunes to play in the background.
What’s left? they are chanting other peaples words over other peoples tunes over other peoples prerecorded drums. The genre has been creatively bankrupt since the 80s.
Sure, there may be a few dozen tracks that got shoved into the rap stacks that are not tedious but I’m not going to spend the next year listening to tedious music just to find one song that I might like.
Rap is bad for the same reson disco was. After an initial period of innovation no one is making anything new they are just repeating the “sucessful” formula over and over and over agin.
And cutting their wrists.
I personally like rap music, just not the majority of stuff that is made today. If I have the chance, I’d much rather listen to the “classic” rap records like Illmatic, Ready to Die, Enter the 36 Chambers, etc. than anything from today. But in the same vane, I do the same thing with today’s rock music versus mid-90’s and classic rock radio.
One thing that I think gets over looked is the fact that a lot of people in music see their creativity decline over the years. They just wither away into more desperate attempts to stay relevant. A lot of the people in rap have been creating music for a long time and just can’t exactly cut it any more. So you have more of this new breed coming in making this tired derivative music with all the focus on cars, money and chanting. It makes it as unbearable as today’s awful modern rock radio. It’s rare to have a **Pearl Jam ** or Radiohead who can stay relevant and creative for any length of time just like it’s rare to have a Nas.
I think regionalism also has a lot to due with the problems in rap. When you have producers trying to create a distinctive sound for there city/region it can spur a lot of creativity. But once that becomes a hit, they keep going back to the same well over and over again until it gets really tired fast. I get it Little John, you like to get “crunk”, but do you have to keep telling us about it. It’s just like Kiss with “I wanna rock ‘n roll all night”, well you’re the guys with the instruments, what do you want me to do about YOU rocking and rolling? You could either rock ‘n roll or discuss how you’d really enjoy to rock ‘n roll.
One thing that I don’t understand is how people will shun rap artists for using samples but then acclaim someone like Beck for doing the same thing creatively. Obviously there are a lot of rap artists who just take a sample and don’t do anything creative with it, but don’t blame sampling, blame bad sampling. A good DJ is capable of making incredibly creative music by using two records that he had nothing to do with making. Who cares that they didn’t make the original source material? As long as it’s good and the owner of the rights got their piece of the action it’s fine by me.
But rap is definitely not going to go anywhere due to the fact that the only thing you need is a beat. A lot of kids growing up express themselves creatively through music. This expression comes through an organized school band/orchestra, garage bands, church choirs and so on. But a lot of people who grow up in urban environments can’t afford an instrument that costs hundreds of dollars. So instead, they can have there friend beat box all day long for free and have the chance to express themselves. The line between good rap music and poetry is slim at best. IMO
I’m no rap fan, but if their sales are off 21%, that probably means everyone else’s are off, as well, and that means fewer artists of any stripe are going to be signed/paid. There may be some instances where that’s a good thing, but overall, it’s probably not, at least right now. The paradigm has changed, and artists are finding other ways to make it besides the gig incessantly/get signed/record/gig incessantly/make no money even though you sell hundreds of thousands of CDs/get dropped cycle. The sooner the better, I say, but right now music and musicians will suffer during this paradigm shift until it settles and there’s some sort of stability established.
For me, the sampling, often from somewhat unrelated genres, is a redeeming factor that can make it interesting. I couldn’t tell you what song it was, but recently at the gym I heard a rap song that had sample in bits of Ray Charles’ “I Got A Woman”, and it was fascinating how well an old R&B classic from the early 1950s worked with this new rap song. Maybe it’s because there’s always been a tradition of “talk songs” in R&B. Even Chuck Berry did a few.
This would be my problem too. I’ve been known to hear a rap song somewhere and think, “I like that!”, but I don’t want to sift through all the other stuff.
I hate to break it to you, but there’s a big folk revival happening similar to the swing revival of a few years ago. Of course, it remains to be seen how long it’ll last.
I’m 32 and am a big fan of rap. I grew up alongside it and have been a fan as long as I can remember. I find it hard to sit at a table and NOT drum out the beat with my hands when I’m listening to rap.
To me, hearing rap artists sampling each other is a pleasure. For instance there is a new song out by i-forget-who which keeps repeating the phrase “getting jiggy with it”. That’s a title and hook of a song from the late 90’s by Will Smith, a rapper who has been disrespected a bit because he refuses to curse in his music. This new song, by a more gangsta style rapper says to me that maybe he gets more respect in that community than I thought. So it’s a pleasure to hear.
I think it’s cool and fun when you have songs that are obviously inspired by or written to respond to something that is currently being played on the radio. It reminds me of freestyle competitions where people would incorporate someone else’s theme in their rhyme, but twist it around. I love that artists feed off each other.
Similar to how people who are very well read find little references to other literary works and writings that remind them of other earlier authors, I get that type of association when I listen to rap. Especially the more subtle sampling. You can enjoy the songs on so many different levels.
There are a few rap songs I quite like, for various reasons.
I actually like the STYLE of rap – the rhythmic spoken word that sometimes sounds halfway stream-of-consciousness yet with elegant rhythm. I guess it’s not as cool if people call it “beat poetry” anymore. 
But I tend to hate the subject matter of the stuff I hear on the radio and like other people have said, hunting down the great stuff you occasionally hear is going to send you through a minefield of the stuff you really don’t like. Similarly, I don’t listen to country music because many of the themes – I grew up in a rural area so I’m better than you, my values are more honest than yours because I have a simpler outlook, and there’s nothing better than getting stupid drunk and embarrassing people who think they’re more cultured and refined just 'cuz they take the dishes out of the sink afore they piss in it. And yes, I HAVE listened to a lot of country. There’s plenty else out there, but I don’t listen to country stations because I don’t like those songs in particular and I don’t own many country CDs because there’s other artists I tend to like better.
The theory that some form of latent racism lies deep within my soul to the point that I despise a type of music because predominantly black people sing it is frankly insulting and unworthy of debate.
You’ll have to be patient, I pretty much lost touch with current bands in 1995. What about the Verve? From what I’ve read here they would seem to fit somewhere on the emo spectrum, but again I’m thinking more sonically than lyrically.
The nights must just fly by at your house.
MiM
Before you say that hip-hop is all about plagiarizing and stealing other people’s beats you need to understand how hip-hip started.
<snip>During the early 1970s, it came to the attention of DJs that the percussion parts of music; the break-beat; were most popular for dancing. DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash both independently isolated and repeated these parts of the music for the purpose of all-night dance parties.
Rapping then developed as MCs would talk over the music to promote their DJ, other dance parties, or take light-hearted jabs at other lyricists. This soon developed into the rapping that appears on earlier basic hip-hop singles, with MCs talking about problems in their areas and issues facing the community as a whole. </snip> from wikipedia
Thank you jali and Hippy Hollow (and anyone else I missed 
)for pointing out that you can’t define an entire genre based on the mainstream representations of it. Radio hip-hop is crap IMHO (at least it is where I live) and it IS repetitive and I don’t like a lot if it so if its *that * subset of hip-hop that went down in sales, then YAY! But 90% of the great hop hop artists don’t get radio play. A perfect example is The Roots.
I can understand not caring for the style of hip-hop. Country isn’t my bag, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate its purpose or what the artists are trying to do and since it isn’t my favorite I know that I haven’t heard enough of it to make judgement on the entire genre.
I’m not a musicologist, but that basic idea is closer to the roots of the blues than anything that’s called blues today. And oddly enough, I don’t know anybody who hates rap more than some blues fans, even though the style and subject matter can be indistinguishable.