…and show me where I said I’ve heard all the good stuff? I don’t care for the style. DEAL WITH IT.
I think rap just barely squeeks under the low point of the definition of music. If a drum solo can be music, then rap can be music. But you could also argue that air horns that fans use at sporting events also are music – it’s a horn. It hits a note.
The air horns, though, have a major purpose besides music: it’s used to establish a tone, a mood, an attitude. It’s meant to get people riled up. And so is rap. Blast an air horn to get people excited. Blast rap music to get a party going. Or blast it to strike an attitude. Or blast it from your car for the very same reason that teenagers like to do lots of other things – for the express purpose of being rebellious and doing annoying things. In that sense, rap isn’t used for its musical qualities – it’s an expression. Unfortunately, it invites people to express the lowest and ugliest aspects of human behavior.
How can rap be music? Music has a melody and it sounds nice. Rap is - well, rap. Blecch!
I had to laugh when I saw the post about not having heard the “good” stuff. I remember what rap sounded like in the '80s and it wasn’t any better than what’s out there now, IMO.
Ahnd yeu sye yeu duynt spake with un accent?
I think everybody has an accent - it’s just a matter of whether or not the people around you have the same one. And that goes for everybody, even the blacks.
Opal, I can’t speak for anyone else in this thread, but I can perfectly understand that you don’t like the style. That’s fine. I don’t like metal, much. Yet I don’t try to claim metal is not music or that it does not require some musical talent to make. I have not seen you claim such things about rap in this thread, either. But other people have. It seems amazing to me that some people could be so arrogant to declare that just because they do not share an appreciation for a style of music, that the style is simply not musical.
You don’t have an accent? What the hell are you talking about? You’re info says you’re from Washington, and I’m guessing that means the U.S., and hence you have an accent! Is your world seriously so insular that you do not understand that there’s some people, like, say, myself, who do not come from America and do not have your accent? If my Australian ears were to hear your accent (italicised to emphasise its existence) I would recognise you as being American. YOU HAVE AN ACCENT.
I don’t pronounce the r on the end of ‘there’ like you or Chingy does. I can’t think how I can spell out how I pronounce “right there,” except to say that I don’t pronounce the r. Unlike me, Chingy does say “Right thurr,” though. You might notice that both Chingy (Right Thurr) and Nelly (Hot in Herre) are from St Louis. The extra emphasis on the r appears to be a regionalism. Or, don’t tell me, Missouri residents don’t have accents either? :rolleyes:
And, oddly enough, I haven’t heard your critique of Mark Twain’s phonetic writing yet.
So, when ?uestlove (drummer for the Roots) does the same thing live as someone else does on a computer, then it’s music? Look, I’ve programmed beats, including rap beats. It’s very difficult to make something good. I also play guitar, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to come up with a good punk riff than a decent hip hop beat.
Are you serious? Randomly generated beats? Your moniker is truly a misnomer. Have a listen to any Neptunes track. Any Timbaland track. These guys program the beats themselves (as does nearly everyone else these days, though I consider sampling just as artistic) and every beat is arranged perfectly. A random generator could not come up with the pop perfection of something like Ol Dirty Bastard’s Got Your Money or Missy Elliot’s Pass the Dutch.
I do know that you can buy loops programs that come with pre-packaged loops. You don’t hear a whole lot of it in rap - that’s why producers are such a big part of commercial rap music: they’re the guys doing the beats.
However, even when creating music with loops, an understanding of dynamics is required. Sticking one prepackaged bassline over another set of prepackaged beats still requires musical talent.
Rock music is so terrible, I remember this song called Cherry Pie by Warrant and there was this idiot screeching some dumb sex innuendo over wanking guitars. :smack:
Why on earth do people pull out that Puffy shit everyone time they want to criticise rap? Is it ignorance? This is not representative of rap, good or otherwise. It’s akin to trying to criticise rock by talking about the merits of Creed and Godsmack.
So you claim that rap isn’t music. How about we go even further than “My Sharona” to something like Queen’s We Will Rock You? The whole point of the song is the beat. The vocalist chants and “sings” with no more melody than your average rapper (which is not to say that there is no melody there; just that it is not the focus of the song). Is We Will Rock You music? When does it become music? When the vocals start? When the guitars come in? For the first 20 seconds of WWRY, are you thinking “this isn’t music” and then some non-rhythmic element kicks in and the whole thing suddenly morphs into music?
How about Gilbert and Sullivan’s I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major General? is that music? How is that music, and an Eminem track not?
Sorry - the unattributed quotes in my post above are by musicguy.
gex gex, you’re being entirely too sensible. See, rap is bad. Once they’ve decided on and fortified that position, then they have to come up with reasons for it. Like the bad grammar it teaches.
gex gex, you’re being entirely too sensible. See, rap is bad. Once they’ve decided on and fortified that position, then they have to come up with reasons for it. Like the bad grammar it teaches.
Man, this thread takes me back. Me and my kewl metalhead (rawk!) friends had the same conversations (with the same arguments, even) 10 years ago.
No, it’s not really that difficult. You just need to have an understanding of the instrument and rhythm in general. As a drummer, I find it very easy to program beats. And if you don’t, then loops are your best buddy.
Are you even aware of how popular random generators are becoming? They are being used by “composers” all the time, who have neither the time or creativity to come up with an original idea. And as far as “perfectly arranged” goes, that is called quantization, and it can be done automatically through the software. Thanks for the insults though, not that it surprises me.
And packing the heat. Seriously though, if you don’t hear the loops in the music, you have very selective hearing.
Not really. I used to have a roommate that played with Acid all the time. He had no prior musical knowledge and yet he could make things that sounded interesting, just through trial and error. The musical talent is in those that recorded those looped parts. Pointing and clicking doesn’t involve much musical talent, as far as I can tell. I will grant you that if you have a musical background, your stuff will probably sound more musical in the long run.
Ah yes, because we all know that this is the only rap track that has ever lifted music from an established song. I guess those are the bad rap tracks and the ones that don’t do this are the good ones. Got it now. It makes a lot more sense.
No, it doesn’t become music at some magical moment in the song. If you look at the entire composition as a whole, it contain all of the essential elements of music. These elements don’t have to occur simultaneously for it to be music. And there is a melody in WWRY that can easily be transcribed into notation form. Simple? Of course. But nobody ever said that music had to be complicated. Punk is a great example of that. I’m not a fan of that type of music but I absolutely consider it music. That pretty much blows a hole in your theory that I must like something for it to be musical.
Rap, on the other hand, is boring as hell in a musical context, because of the loops. You really only need to hear two bars and you get the gist, because it is just going to repeat anyway. That leaves the “vocals”, which aren’t really singing any particular notes at all. You could be tone deaf and be a rapper, never having to worry if you are going to sing something that is sharp or flat.
I absolutely respect rap as a valid artform. It communicates a message through audio tracks that causes others to connect to it. Thats terrific. It just isn’t very musical, IMO.
Hey Opalcat,
OK, if you want to play the semantics game, so can I. Here’s where you implied you’d heard all the good stuff:
And as far as this goes:
I will try, with the aid of extensive therapy.
-Apoptosis
Guess I’ll cast my vote for “Rap really sucks the big one!!!”
It isn’t music. It doesn’t require talent. When rock and roll started out, people from the “old school” complained that it wasn’t music. But rock IS music. It uses chords, melodies, musical structrures that have been around for centuries. Granted, rock is sometimes not as complex as other mucial forms - but it IS a musical form.
Rap is what? And Eminem’s special talent is? I will admit I have NOT listened to the “good rap” because there’s no such thing.
Ok, musicguy, I think I see where you’re coming from. You make a bunch of wild, unsupported assertions, and suddenly hip hop is not musical.
I didn’t insult you, unless you count doubting the aptness of your screen name. That’s not an insult, that’s simply saying that you don’t know as much as you seem to think you do.
And now I’d like a cite for the extensive use of random generators in creating hip hop music.
I’m also wondering why producers such as Dre or the Neptunes somehow manage to maintain such a recognisable sound when all they’re doing is getting computers to write the songs for them. And why artists are willing to pay so high to get these guys to write for them, when all they need to buy is their computer.
It’s one of the rare hip hop songs that do so without originality. Sampling is a valid musical artform. Listen to something like De La Soul’s ‘Eye Know,’ from their 3 Feet High and Rising album, which takes a guitar line from Steely’s Dan’s ‘Peg’ but uses it in a completely different way, marries it to the whistling from Otis Redding’s ‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay* and a whole heap of other stuff.
Alternatively, a good rapper can loop a pop song but still make an original composition out of it, if they bring something new to the song - usually through changing the context. I can’t really think of anything at the moment, because it happens so rarely these days.
If it’s so easy go out and do it then. Come up with a great hip hop beat and sell it to Nelly or something.
The sad irony is that all this is exactly what people said about rock n roll artists when they first came out. People complained that it wasn’t musical and [insert popular star] had no talent. You’ll see that sort of thing on old music documentaries, often used for comic effect.
Mind you, similar things could be said about other forms of music. Blues is only the same 12 bars over and over again - and the first three lines are usually the same. Oh and Jazz! All they do there is make it up as they go along!
When Queen were writing the song, how far into it before it became music, then? Assuming the beat came first, was it only music once someone picked up a guitar, or when Freddy Mercury started singing. And I notice that you ignored the Gilbert and Sullivan example.
I think this is the bit I agree with (although not about the specific artists), and the source of most of the suckiness of today’s popular music is revealed.
I can remember back in 1990 when Mariah Carey first came out, she could actually sing, had what I thought was a pretty talented voice (for pop music anyways). Ever since then, they’ve just thrown a bunch of hard dance beats into all her music and took the emphasis off of melodic singing, and it went completely downhill. Whatever talent she had musically was completely smothered so her career naturally refocused on image alone, and she was turned into a prancing whore peddling sex appeal.
The insurgence of the dance-club culture into popular music has made it sound less melodic, and thus less interesting and innovative. I’m not saying it’s easy to mix an infectious dance beat, but it does wear thin after awhile simply because of how limiting the genre is. And for god’s sake, at least make the music about something, rather than just making a mix that repeats the same two or three phrases throughout the song. (*Around the world, around the wu-urld…around the world, around the wu-urld…)
Depeche Mode was probably the last great example of a band that could use dance-beats along with interesting lyrics and melodies and harmonies to craft a good sound. I also think Beck does a decent job of hybridizing those sounds on Midnite Vultures. But “hip hop” has become as predictable and stale as those songs from the 50’s that repeated G-C-F chord progressions for 2 minutes while the singer talked about his high school sweetheart.
Hmm. I was just listening to The Vines doing a cover of Outkast’s “Miss Jackson” and wondering if it was music. Since it WAS a rap song and therefore WASN’T music, did it become music once the Vines covered it?
Then my brain hurt and I laid down and it was all better.
I implied no such thing.
I have heard stuff that people have presented as “the good stuff”… not every single friggin song of it, no, but enough to know that even the less shitty stuff is still annoying to me 99% of the time. There are a few songs I enjoy, as I’ve said earlier, but I enjoy them despite their being rap, not because of it.
Let me make an analogy:
person 1: “I don’t like chocolate.”
person 1: “you just haven’t ever had good chocolate.”
person 1: “I have had the good stuff, I still don’t like it.”
Would you say that the person was implying they’d had every single flavor, every single brand of what is considered quality chocolate? And while we’re at it, would you still insist that they just hadn’t had the perfect chocolate that would change their whole worldview on chocolate?
In response to GMRyujin: your post reminded me of something! I totally love the Dynamite Hack cover of “Boyz N Tha Hood” (msp?*) … it cracks me up!!
*did I misspell that properly?
Hey Opalcat,
You meant to say, “I didn’t intend to imply such a thing.”
Hey GMRyujin,
[quote]
I was just listening to The Vines doing a cover of Outkast’s “Miss Jackson” and wondering if it was music. Since it WAS a rap song and therefore WASN’T music, did it become music once the Vines covered it?
[quote]
That boring peace of crap cover was performed by a band that dreams of being able to produce music of Outkast’s quality.
-Apoptosis
I think that you inferred, I did not imply.
OK OpalCat, here’s the breakdown:
This statement means that you don’t want me to say, for example, “well you haven’t heard the GOOD stuff, and by GOOD stuff I mean all of Outkast’s albums,” because you have already heard them. Whether you intended this meaning or not, I think you’ll agree with me that our argument will lead nowhere, and that we should both bow out.
-Apoptosis
…or maybe there is no good stuff and the whole argument is moot. :rolleyes:
Can’t this thread just be about hating rap? 