I’m going to forego the usual florid Pit rhetoric and simply point y’all to the relevant quotes. From the deeply embarrassing Will Rap music EVER go away? thread:
Mmhmm.
Yup.
Very nice. If you’d’ve included something about perfumed crotches, it would be a perfect Serlin pastiche. As it is, it’s just sad.
(And I’m not even going to get into Tarkus’s comparison of rap music to AIDS on the same thread.)
Hey, I bet he’s not a racist. I bet some of his best friends are black!
::shudder::
If you don’t mind, I’d like to go take a bath now.
I don’t see the problem. His issue with rap is that it takes a culture he doesn’t like and holds it up as not only respectable, but desirable. He’s not attacking blacks per se, and I’m not convinced that he’s attacking the culture either; merely pointing out that it’s not a good life, that “all they are doing is promoting ghetto life, abject poverty and gangs as being cool”. I’m not convinced that that’s what rap is about, though I don’t like it myself, but I didn’t see anything racist in the quotes given.
Perhaps it will come as a surprise to you that not every black person in the world lives in a ghetto and in abject poverty.
Also, not all rap is about ghetto life. And how about songs like Gangsta’s Paradise which in fact BEMOAN ghetto life?
And Sixth and lastly, not all rap is created by african americans. The Beastie Boys, Eminem, 3rd Bass right off the top of my head are white rap groups.
EXACTLY!!! These rap advocates are just waiting for someone to say the “N” word and all hell is going to break lose. Race was never the issue. I think the guy who stared the thread said he was black at some point.
Brief hijack
What do soul singers have to with rap? I was pretty sure that they were completely different genres. I saw that quote in the original thread and it has been bugging me for a while.
end hijack.
back to your regularly scheduled rant and flame fest
Their skin color, which I suspect was his target, and not rap itself.
I’m going to work with the assumption that you haven’t just accused me of racism, since that would be both impolite and unsubstantiated.
As for the rest…how is a white guy glorifying ghetto life any better than a black guy glorifying ghetto life? I can understand his point there, and I’d be interested to know what he thinks of “Gangster’s Paradise”, which I remember vaguely from my elementary school days.
I still don’t see how what he wrote focuses on race. Seediness, yes. Poverty, yes. Brutality, yes. But race?
“Not when you pay $50 for a set of ghetto pants that mimic the hand-me-downs found in poor black families or the oversized shirts from bigger brothers.”
"You know, the kind of place that if you white and you get dumped off in the middle of, you might not make it out in one piece at night, though in the day time you have a fair chance.
"
“waiting area full of heavy black and Hispanic women”
These are about race, sure, but racist? I don’t think that he’s making the assumption you accuse him of, ie that all black people live in ghettos. The central message that I got was, “Emulating poverty and raising drug selling, abuse and smacking women around to a high art form in song is not cool. Nor is promoting racial separation or hatred.” It could be argued that many people relate those things to “black culture”, but in the quotes given, LongRoad didn’t. AFAICT.
Taran: I dunno; one of my personal rules is that anyone who uses the word “jibbering” in that context has automatically lost any benefit of the doubt. Dig?
IANAL but I believe that Truth is a defense to a charge of slander. Similarly, if Tarkus’s unlovely description of a certain culture is true to life, does Truth refute the charge of racism? Or, is is automatically racist to criticize certain groups, even when that criticism is accurate?
From my POV the description unfortunately does fit the Newark, NJ neighborhood where my wife works. And Prof. december’s description of the ER at her hospital is also pretty close to the OP as well…
I have to chime in. I don’t see him being racist, tactless and insencitive yes, but not really racist.
He’s blathering about his distaste for rap, poverty, gangs, etc…of which none are race specific issues. Ghetto glorification is always pretty distasteful I’d say, and that has nothing to do with skin color.
Rap, eh, matter of taste, I’m not a big fan either. I like R&B better.
Rail on him for being an insensitive jerk if you want, but I don’t see the frothy mouthed race screaming here.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t mention “slander” anywhere in the OP. Lemme check. …pausing for station identification… Nope, I’m clean! Besides, if I said I didn’t like Jewish culture because of “penny-pinching bastards like Shylock, Jack Benny, and this guy I once knew,” does that make me anti-semitic? The quote, though “unlovely,” is true as far as you know, isn’t it?
Anyway, anyone know where I can get me some of those “ghetto pants”? :rolleyes:
I was NOT trying to do that, and I apologize for that last post of mine being all but completely incoherent.
The point is that not all rap music emulates poverty and drug selling, and in fact a great deal of rap that I listened to (back in the day, early nineties) dealt with trying to promote UNITY and rising out of poverty. Nor did the rap I listened to promote racial separation.
And I DO THINK that many people, LongRoad included, think that Black Culture is naught but violence and poverty, when it most certainly is not. AFAICT.
Could you elaborate on that, please? I don’t seem to have been issued a shovel 
Thank you; I appreciate that, and please don’t think I’m slamming you with what follows, but I still don’t see where you get:
What in particular make you think that he believes that? He comments on the place that he lived, but I don’t see him trying to generalize to all black communities, or all poor communities, or anything else. He then says that rap promotes the kind of poor community that he lived in, which is logically sketchy, IMHO, but not racist since, as you pointed out, poverty and rap both cross racial lines.
If someone made a scathing and detailed post regarding the quality of living in a trailer park likening all the “white trash rednecks” who live there to meth producers who marry their cousins would it be racist? Misguided? Probably. Stupid? Maybe, but not racist. I also failed to catch where LongRoad made the statement, “By the way, everyone, all black people live this way.”
No, what LongRoad did was color all blacks and Hispanics who live in poor neighborhoods as dirty, screaming, drugged out, thieves who he needs to protect himself from with a gun.
But that’s not racist. Noooo. He’s just stating facts. His depiction really is how poor people of color live, right Medea, Crunch and december?
By extension, since I grew up in “the ghetto” that means that I am a dirty, thieving and drugged out. Yes, he did make this huge and erroneous generalization. He did , in fact, state that this is the way blacks and Hispanics live in the ghetto, Chief Crunch.
Now, a question for all of you. When the problems inherent in living in an economically depressed area manifest themselves in non-brown-skinned neighborhoods, why is it that the dirty streets are blamed on sanitation. The drugs are blamed on the drug dealers and the crime blamed on the criminals, but when it happens in a predominatly minority neighborhood, it’s all about “the ghetto lifestyle”? When 3 or 4 old white guys play checkers under the old oak tree, passing the flask it’s a Norman Rockwell painting, but when its black and Hispanic people it’s a sign of degeneration?
Oh no! You all cry to yourselves. How can those statements be racist when they are true? Yea, well, it’s about as true as me saying that everyone who agrees with LongRoad’s assessment of living in “the ghetto” are obese, rabid Rush dittoheads who would rather poison the world than have a bad looking lawn and have sex once a month for procreation’s sake. I know because I work in suburbia, I’ve seen suburbia and this is what suburban life is like.
Sure. I’ve often seen “jibbering,” or “jibber-jabbering,” used as roughly synonymous with “behaving, either in speech or in action, in the manner of a monkey.” Does that clear it up?
I’m not sure I see any racism explicit in the use of the word “jibbering”. Sure, it evokes those old “jungle rythm” tirades folks of my generation and older used to hear about R&R, but in the context of the quote, I don’t see it as overtly racist.
However, as far as LongRoad’s overall message being racist, I gotta agree with Biggirl that such overblown hyperbole goes waaay beyond an accurate portrait of “ghetto life”. LR might not be a racist, but his screed certainly was.
But Gad, you’re on your own with the “jibber-jabber” connection… [sub]Does anyone else think of Mr. T here? “I pity the fool!”[/sub]
just wanted to highlight this.
THis is, IMHO, what happens quite a bit. A bunch of minority young men dressed alike carrying baseball bats = a gang, a bunch of white young men dressed alike carrying baseball bats = a baseball team on their way to/from a game.
I had a neighbor for a while, an older guy, yes, a minority, he was on disability and hung around all day, often on his porch, playing cards w/his friends. Many of my other neighbors asked me if I was afraid of them living next door. Why? I asked. “cause they’re dealing drugs”. News to me. They weren’t. They were my favorite neighbors, reasonably quiet (quite a bit less noisy than when ** Verve Pipe** lived/practiced in the same house), and they knew everything that went on in the neighborhood. No one was breakin’ in to my house 'cause they knew who should and shouldn’t be walking in.
Could be, though I know I’ve seen it in racial contexts before…or, at the very least, as suggestive of monkeys. Let’s see what Google’s got:
Merriam-Webster defines “gibber” as “to speak rapidly, inarticulately, and often foolishly,” and “jabber” as “to speak rapidly, indisctinctly, or unintelligibly.”
There are forty hits on Google for the phrase “gibbering ape.”
This website refers to “Simian jibber-jabber” when talking about monkey (sic) speech.
I don’t know what this page is, but it talks about “monkeys…jibbering, jabbering a song.” The song itself includes the phrase “Oh we clever monkey fellows with our jibber jabber ju.”
This appears, strangely, to be a story about the appendix. Here’s a couple sentences from it: “A long time ago, a million years BC … somewhere in the backstreets of the Amazonian rain forests, there lived a colony of monkeys. Thousands and thousands of them. All day long they jibber-jabber jibber-jabbered, threw coconuts at each other, and slipped around on their used banana skins.”
The September 15, 2001 entry of this WebJournal (I know, I know) is entitled “Crazy Monkey Jibber Jabber.”
This article talks about how most chimps “[jabber] incoherently.”
This one compares the “bickerings of Foreign Ministers” to “the jabbering on Monkey Hill.”
A section on this webpage is entitled, “News from the Jabbering Monkey.”
Here’s a passage from H.G. Wells: “The Monkey-man bored me, however; he assumed, on the strength of his five digits, that he was my equal, and was for ever jabbering at me,–jabbering the most arrant nonsense.”
This review of a solitaire game on the PCWorld website refers to “jabbering, comical apes.”
According to this art review, “[t]he Hindu symbol for the human mind is the jabbering monkey.”
Patrick McGoohan uses the phrase, “jeering and jabbering like a monkey.”
PrimateStore.com (“Everything for Primate Lovers”) pushes a plush squirrel monkey doll: “Antuco loves to gossip about the other monkeys, jabbering all day long about this one or that.”
From this page: “The monkey had ceased its defiant jabbering.”
On an episode of the X-Files, Detective John Munch (God love 'im) has the line, “Mulder? Is currently being held under five-point restraints and jabbering like a monkey.”
That’s enough to show, I think, that the association is at least somewhat common parlance. My apologies if LongRoad did not in fact have this comparison in mind, but, given his context, I thought of it immediately.