I can listen to all of JD’s songs, and the overall quality is quite high - but that probably has a lot to do with the fact that they recorded just two albums (and yes, they have more songs that came out on compilations like Still).
I’m not sure why I took the bait, er, responded, though. There’s nothing to debate or discuss here. Rap-hater says he hates rap. No more interesting than country- or classical- or prog rock-hater doing the same.
Now if a sincere OP came to be enlightened about what might be some rap artists one might enjoy if they like a certain genre of music, etc. that would be different.
I am a 40 year old white guy and I do think that most rap produced today is absolute crap. I am amazed some of it get produced at all and has commercial backing because the production values sound incredibly low. I am sure some of it is intentional. Sometimes I accidentally tune to the local rap or hip-hop station and wonder how they even differentiate between the shit they put on. It sounds like they just caught someone making play music in their bedroom and put it on the air as a joke.
However, there is some rap and hip-hop music that is truly good. The Beastie Boys are awesome for example. License to ill is a brilliant piece of music history and they even evolved from there. Eminem isn’t exactly my thing but he is undeniably talented as well. The black rappers seemed to have peaked in the 80’s and early 90’s for my tastes. I love NWA and Easy-E in particular. They are the best of the ganster rap genre. Will Smith and DJ Jazzy JefF were good too before Will became a superstar actor and they had mainstream success. The Sugar Hill Gang started much of commercial rap on their own with the song Rapper’s Delight and it is still popular even on movie soundtracks.
For my money though, Sir-Mix-Alot is the absolute and undisputed king of popular rap. You can’t tell me that everyone hates rap when ‘Baby Got Back’ from the early 90’s is still hugely popular and even gets used as a wedding song for white people sometimes. You like it too, just admit it. They did a lot more than that before and after however and much of that is equally as impressive and catchy.
I can’t deny that there is a ton of bad rap and hip hop these days so much that I have no idea how they even choose what crap effort they choose to back commercially but it isn’t all like that and it used to be much better.
I’m curious who people are talking about when they say “rap sucks”?
Kanye? Jay Z? Nas? Eminem? I think they’re all pretty good.
As are new artists like Macklemore.
I can see how more dance oriented pop rap like Nicki Minaj or Jason Durulo might rub people the wrong way.
A lot of Southern Rap falls into the “dumbasses rappin’ bout their bling and hos” variety. (I’m looking at you Ja Rule)
I get that people have certain genres they like or dislike. But to me when people are THAT adamant about hating rap that they need to post a thread titled “rap sucks” as if rap personally did something to offend them, there’s often racist overtones.
I wouldn’t necessarily say racist, but their ideas of what constitutes ‘real music’ are stubbornly Eurocentric. Meanwhile, rap is a child of African tradition. Drums, syncopation, repetition, call and response, etc.
I never really got how rap isn’t “real music”, are drumline solos also “not music”? It’s just rhythm focused more than melody focused, and IMO rap and its influences sound closer to western music than a lot of the really slow, plodding, meandering traditional far eastern music.
Exactly. People who say rap “isn’t music” generally come to that conclusion from a perspective of music where melody is emphasized. “Good music” has a “good melody” that sticks with you. Rap and other hip-hop musical forms are largely rhythm-centered, often interspersed with snippets of melody, so judging it by these standards is of course going to lead to frustration.
And anyone who thinks it doesn’t take talent to rap well has never been to a karaoke bar and listened to someone rap karaoke. It’s every bit as awful as a song being sung out of tune. For myself, I’d find it easier to learn to sing in tune than to rap convincingly.
Yeah, I’m not even concerned with performance. Look, I’m an instrumentalist. I like playing things. Keyboards are my primary instruments, but I also like to screw around with guitar, bass, drums, and harmonica. But it’s also fun to sit at the computer and splice music together or piece together a track bit by bit very precisely using whatever means you have at your disposal. How is creating a song by layering tracks and sounds within a computer any less “music” than playing a guitar? They’re different kinds of music, but they are all music. If I’m at a concert, I generally prefer to watch live, performed music, but sitting at home listening to the radio or iTunes, I could(n’t) care less whether the music was played by a human or completely constructed inside a computer.
Ja Rule is a downright academic compared to truly ignorant souther rappers. Even Lil’ Jon and Luda know that their schtick is a means to a very lucrative end. You want sheer ignorance you should look to Soulja Boi and Ying Yang Twins.
I LIKE rap. I’m not a connoisseur or anything but I definitely appreciate it. Everything from the intellectual stuff to the downright stupid. It’s not all about bitches and ho’s. Some of them paint a very sad tail of drugs, violence, and woe. The subject matter is a little narrow compared to other genres and I think there’s an untapped market of story-telling in rap (something in the Lonely Island vein but in earnest rather than satire).
I think it’s intellectually lazy to just dismiss something wholesale. Given the situation, country music hits the spot. Other times, just vocal-less instrumental. Other times dubstep. It’s part of the human experience and our wide gambit of emotions lends itself to these different genres.
Working with samples is just such a different beast from composition. I took an audio class once and one of the projects was making incidental music for different genres (like “horror movie” “quirky romance” etc) by using samples. We had a large number of samples to work with. I came from a background in classical composition, I’m no Mozart, but I have a rather solid understanding of non-chord tones, modulating into different modes, and so on. I was not prepared.
I could make this a very long rant, but the short version is that with samples there’s a lot of problems that you’re stuck with what you have. You want to use this clip but it’s slightly off tempo? Have fun spending an hour massaging it so that you can get it right without borking the pitch too much. Or maybe the sample is in the wrong key. You can deal with that with editing, but now you have to smooth out some artifacts.
Sure, big name mixers have a lot of perks I don’t have – they usually have access to pre-mixdown samples so they don’t have to spend an hour trying to isolate vocals. And they can usually write or commission new samples at the appropriate tempo or key, or with the right instruments. Even so, sampling is a beast.
And even most of your rock gods only have an intuitive understanding of music, a lot of them can’t read music and come up with it by screwing around in their instruments. That’s not to demean their music, or suggest it’s less than that of composers who can read/write sheet music, but in light of that I don’t think it gives them any special status above people who spend all day screwing with turntables or staring at spectrograms in Audacity.
I generally don’t like rap and the subject matter is a large part of it. It generally takes some pretty epic wordplay or really good flow to distract me from the lyrical content. In my experience the intersection of good flow and good lyrics is really small, usually they write something with ridiculous lyrics and good flow, or try to be “serious” or “deep” and end up writing a boring song with a boring beat. I generally like the sillier less mainstream rap. Shit like MC Frontalot or Epic Rap Battles of History. Sure, they’re corny, and from a technical perspective they’re probably not Snoop Dogg* or Eminem but I’ll take narm over trying-too-hard vulgar gangsta strutting any day.
Well, except for that time when Snoop Dogg was on Epic Rap Battles I guess.
Sure, I’m fine with allowing a rapping/singing distinction. I think they’re qualitatively different enough. Even most rap fans I know seem to make a distinction (often talking about the “rapping” and “singing” sections of songs when there’s a collaboration between a rapper and a singer).
I’m always curious about how people who hate rap feel about Once in a Lifetime by The Talking Heads. Once in a Lifetime (or rather, the whole album “Remain in Light” but Once in a Lifetime is the best known song from there) is a mess of sampling, polyrhythms, chanting, call/response experimenting and so on. For the most part it’s even weirder than rap, musically, it’s like avant garde experimental rap.
This isn’t a “gotcha” or some weird “HA! You like white people when they do the same thing, RACIST!” thing. I legitimately wonder how people feel about it any why, if they like it more (or dislike it more) they feel it’s significantly different or “more musiclike” or whatever.
I do like it when he dubsteps, though!