Bad Rap?

[re Pete]

I'm an old fart now, but I just never considered rap legit music when it gets so negative, especially the criminal element.

I just think it's foolish. But reading it's association with murders what can you say? Yeah, get off my lawn. 

 

 “These kids are bragging in songs about the people they killed,” said Assistant District Attorney Cydney Pope. “What’s one more person to them?”

 

https://www.inquirer.com/crime/a/philadelphia-gangs-witness-testimony-ybc-yfa-gun-violence-20240603.html

 

[Baldwin Funster]

Where is Tipper Gore when you need her?

[Stokely]

Never was much of a fan of most of it, and yeah mostly about the self-aggrandizing and hostile nature of a lot of it and not so much the music.  To fair there's music in other genres I dislike for the exact same reasons...we were asked by one corporate client to cover a particular Toby Keith song that I absolutely detested and not for musical reasons....  I also enjoy listening to actual singing more than talking/rapping so there's that.   And again, I can say the exact same thing about "growling" in heavier genres--it's just not something I care to listen to, no matter how skillful it is.

However, as a youngster working as an engineer in a so-called jingle studio I gained a new appreciation for the difficulty and skill involved in rapping.  Had a young group come in, two rappers and a turntable, to do a corporate spot.   Those kids were just so damn precise and good, they nailed it in very few takes.   

I know I'd suck at it.  I forget lyrics when there aren't that many, and sometimes breathe in the wrong spots and run out of breath!

Our old drummer would do a rapping medley in the middle of Funky Music...parts of rapper's delight, ice ice baby (aka fun and silly stuff) and people loved it.

[J.F.N.]

Redundant title...

[ProfD]

Beauty lies in the fact that there are several genres with different styles of music within it. 

 

Change the channel if the content is not your cup of tea. The music won't be offended.

 

When the business folks realized how much money they could make from rap music (Hip-Hop), they told E. Delores Tucker, Tipper Gore and every other snowflake to kick rocks.🤣

 

Over the past 50 years and counting, Hip-Hop has influenced other styles of music and fashion globally.  Follow the money.😎

[mauriziodececco]

Many years ago we went to see a concert in Paris/France without exactly knowing where we were going; it was this guy : https://youtu.be/AX0y5tkPHgM?feature=shared and we where very positively surprised . It actually more slam that rap (at least, this is name used in France)

[Docbop]

Any genre of music if you decide I don't want to like it you will find music and lyrics to point at as evil.   So it say more about the people writing the article and those not wanting to understand the topic.    Rap lyrics are no different than movie scripts some are loosely basic on something and others are just storytelling.   Then there's Kendrick Lamar whose lyrics won him a Pulitzer Prize. Kendrick has also been part of school programs teaching kids how to write lyrics, that writing lyric, poetry, stories as part of self expression and dealing with getting emotions out instead of keeping them in and building up.  Kendrick also had the kids read or rap their writing to the others to help them open up to others to discuss their issues.     A whole lot of positive came out getting people of learning to express themselves to them self and others. 

[J.F.N.]

It's kind of like Bob Dylan but for younger generations, a lot of ranting, and loathing expressed, with oftentimes questionable artistic qualities.

[EscapeRocks]

One of my all time favorite verses from Busta Rhymes

 

[SamuelBLupowitz]

I have a friend whose parent once complained about the overly sexual lyrics in the hip-hop she listened to. She countered with "The Lemon Song" from Led Zeppelin II. That ended that conversation.

 

Seriously, hip-hop is a 40-year-old art form at this point. It might be beneficial to look into some of the historical and cultural background of that music if it still feels alien or threatening to you! It isn't what I grew up listening to, but as a working musician, it's been crucial to my development to jettison the "rAp iSn't MuSiC" prejudice that my parents' generation tried to instill in me and my peers, which is no different from the "rock and roll will destroy our American values" diatribes leveled at Chuck Berry and Elvis and the Beatles and the Stones.

[GovernorSilver]

There was a time I didn't like any rap music just like the OP.

 

I also didn't like any country music.

 

My music world was enriched after I changed my attitudes about those genres over time.

[MathOfInsects]

50 years! That rec room party on Sedgwick Ave was in 1973. 

 

People who mention the lyrics usually mean something else. No one seemed to mind Johnny Cash killing a man just to watch him die, or Eric Clapton shooting the sheriff that Bob Marley shot first, or Leroy Brown's .32 gun in his pocket full of fun, etc.

 

While pop has been eating itself alive in a cannibalistic buffet of same-sounding fast-food Happy Meals, hip-hop has been advancing every part of the form that we keyboard players would normally be interested in. They've elevated the studio to bona-fide instrument, used keyboards and software instruments almost exclusively, and found novel ways to make sounds that the rest of the industry still hasn't quite caught up with. I get that it pisses some people off, which is natural, but let's not be condescending. It has spent decades as the only new and original music coming out of our country, and if anything us keyboard nerds should be the ones most interested in the process. 

[jejefunkyman]

There are a lot of hip-hop acts with very musical beats and nice lyrics: A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, The Pharcyde, Slum Village, The Roots, Mos Def, Common, Digable Planets, Q-Tip, Arrested Development, Brand Nubian, Jurassic 5… just to name a few. 

[stoken6]

19 minutes ago, MathOfInsects said:

50 years! That rec room party on Sedgwick Ave was in 1973. 

 

People who mention the lyrics usually mean something else. No one seemed to mind Johnny Cash killing a man just to watch him die, or Eric Clapton shooting the sheriff that Bob Marley shot first, or Leroy Brown's .32 gun in his pocket full of fun, etc.

 

While pop has been eating itself alive in a cannibalistic buffet of same-sounding fast-food Happy Meals, hip-hop has been advancing every part of the form that we keyboard players would normally be interested in. They've elevated the studio to bona-fide instrument, used keyboards and software instruments almost exclusively, and found novel ways to make sounds that the rest of the industry still hasn't quite caught up with. I get that it pisses some people off, which is natural, but let's not be condescending. It has spent decades as the only new and original music coming out of our country, and if anything us keyboard nerds should be the ones most interested in the process. 

Agree with 99% of this. There's plenty of intelligent, articulate rap, and no end of misogynistic and violent rock'n'roll. On the 1%, I would counter that the Beatles used the studio as an instrument before 1973.

 

Cheers, Mike.

[MathOfInsects]

11 minutes ago, stoken6 said:

Agree with 99% of this. There's plenty of intelligent, articulate rap, and no end of misogynistic and violent rock'n'roll. On the 1%, I would counter that the Beatles used the studio as an instrument before 1973.

 

Cheers, Mike.

We do not disagree about that. Rap owes a debt to the Beatles that respect, and others before the Beatles doing experiments with sampling and tapes. But hip-hop turned it from a crazy thing a couple of crazy artists did, to a virtuosic instrument same as a violin or electric guitar. 

[Baldwin Funster]

I like melody, so a spoken word  style especially with a drum machine, especially with no groove or pocket to the rhythm is just irritating to me. Aretha, etta, paul rodgers ect is what I want to hear.

 

Kanye, Eminem ect makes me run for the off knob. If we're talking neo soul or neo whatever like say Deelites I can harbor a secret like for it. 

 

 

[ProfD]

43 minutes ago, Docbop said:

Rap lyrics are no different than movie scripts some are loosely basic on something and others are just storytelling.

Great analogy.

 

Hollywood never seems to catch the same rap.

 

*Negative* lyrics can be found in all types of music.😎

[re Pete]

I don't feel threatened by it at all. And I get the words can be compared to beatniks in the fifties. But I don't think any beatniks killed somebody and wrote a poem about it. That's the point I'm making and the violence goes beyond the article where it took place.

[BluMunk]

57 minutes ago, SamuelBLupowitz said:

She countered with "The Lemon Song" from Led Zeppelin II.

 

It's always The Lemon Song!

 

Not to argue or go on a tangent (and I 100% agree with @Docbop's post... hip hop contains multitudes, and focusing on one 'unsavory' aspect can say as much about the critic as the genre), but I often wonder where we'd be in these discussions without The Lemon Song to fall back on. Super explicit (though in metaphor) song by an incredibly influential band.

 

I was listening to music by Chappell Roan yesterday, and these exact thoughts went through my mind: "Wow, pop music these days is really just more sexually explicit and direct than I ever remember it being... no subtlety or delicacy (am I noticing this more because it's coming from women?)... but of course there's Led Zeppelin, so maybe things aren't different!"  That said, The Lemon Song is not my style for similar reasons. 

[GovernorSilver]

Check out murder ballads - Stagger Lee, Knoxville Girl, Cedartown Georgia, etc.  All songs in which the singer plots and executes a murder.  The music is traditionally country/folk - not rap actually.

 

Almost forgot about Hey Joe!  Registered for copyright by Billy Roberts in 1962, but actual authorship has been contested.  Made famous by a certain Army veteran turned rock star (not rapper).

[stoken6]

14 hours ago, Baldwin Funster said:

I like melody, so a spoken word  style especially with a drum machine, especially with no groove or pocket to the rhythm is just irritating to me. Aretha, etta, paul rodgers ect is what I want to hear.

I remember this topic coming up a few years ago (I sparred with MoI then as well - respectfully, I think/hope!). I enjoy the live-performance aspect of music as "creating art from nothing". So I find drum machines and 4-bar loops boring. The Roots (a live band creating hip-hop) I find compelling.

 

This argument is less powerful when it comes to listening to recorded music. There's no creation happening at that moment - the creation happened in the studio. Which reinforces MoI's point about the studio being a new instrument. 

 

Cheers, Mike.

[J.F.N.]

I was a huge Run D.M.C. and LL Cool J fan as a youngster, now that was great stuff!!

[J.F.N.]

14 hours ago, Baldwin Funster said:

I like melody, so a spoken word  style especially with a drum machine, especially with no groove or pocket to the rhythm is just irritating to me. Aretha, etta, paul rodgers ect is what I want to hear.

 

Kanye, Eminem ect makes me run for the off knob. If we're talking neo soul or neo whatever like say Deelites I can harbor a secret like for it. 

 

 

 

Urban street kids stuttering angry words to a beat or a drum machine is definitely an acquired taste (and imnsbho has a very short expiry date)..

 

[ProfD]

1 hour ago, J.F.N. said:

Urban street kids stuttering angry words to a beat or a drum machine is definitely an acquired taste (and imnsbho has a very short expiry date)..

It bears repeating that Hip-Hop has been around 50 years and counting and it's a multi-billion dollar industry. That's more than an acquired taste with a short shelf life.😎

[My Keys And Me Are Vintage]

I may have not been paying a lot of attention to hip-hop back when it started growing. But it seems hip-hop artists were responsible for the crazy popularity of the old Roland drum machines and that lo-fi, 8-bit sound. Perhaps the premium prices with collecting old gear can be credited to hip-hop artists finding new uses for that old gear. I don’t think they used those machines out of nostalgia, which seems to me the main motivator of the collectors now. So I blame hip-hop for the insane prices we see today!

 

(Love hip-hop or hate it, I bet we all had fun with those record-scratching sound effects popular in the drum-kit presets of the 90’s!). 

[Adan]

Wait, Johnny Cash wrote a song about killing someone? That's it, he's off my list.

[Lou Gehrig Charles]

22 minutes ago, Adan said:

Wait, Johnny Cash wrote a song about killing someone? That's it, he's off my list.

Just to watch him die!  How mean-spirited!

[K K]

 

[Cliffk]

2 hours ago, ProfD said:

It bears repeating that Hip-Hop has been around 50 years and counting and it's a multi-billion dollar industry. That's more than an acquired taste with a short shelf life.😎

Agreed. My theory is that rap (accompanied with heavily rhythmic music) has tapped into and made commercially viable that unique and most nuanced mode of communication we humans have: the spoken word. Perhaps that’s the basic reason for how widespread it’s become? What brought that home to me, already over 20 years ago now, was seeing Polish kids rapping over NWA hits (complete with West Coast finger signs!) in  a village square near Krakow.

 

Which brings me to another thing related to linguistics: even if kids like those didn’t know a single English word or American cultural reference, just the verbal attack, cadence, and rhyming patterns of rap by artists like Eminem and (post-NWA) Ice Cube are intuitively accessible - and therefore irresistible - to young, receptive ears. More than the verbal content, I’d argue it’s these phonetic elements and devices that continue to make rap internationally ‘translatable’. 

[SamuelBLupowitz]

18 hours ago, BluMunk said:

I often wonder where we'd be in these discussions without The Lemon Song to fall back on.

I mean, so much from the Zeppelin canon -- Whole Lotta Love, Sick Again, You Shook Me, Black Dog. Plenty of the old blues songs they swiped from, too (the "squeeze my lemon" stuff is lifted from Robert Johnson, and there's plenty more where that came from). Chuck Berry had "Reelin' and Rockin'," Ray Charles had "What'd I Say" receiving intense pushback. A huge swath of classic soul and R&B from the 50s through now is about sex, variously coded to make it past the censors and arbiters of what was appropriate (especially around race) of their day. There's so much of the Stones catalog in this category (Let It Bleed, Stray Cat Blues, Sweet Black Angel, Brown Sugar). And I mean, even Paul McCartney gave us "Hi Hi Hi," "The Back Seat of My Car," and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road."

 

Meanwhile, I think what you're noticing in mainstream pop is a freedom and a sense of rebellion that was missing from that very heavily controlled genre 30 years ago. I'm honestly loving this era of pop that's more open and direct about sexuality (and not just heterosexuality), which was something that was constantly signaled to be deviant and impure in my post-Reagan suburban upbringing. Sure, plenty of very young female pop stars were given very sexual lyrics to sing and outfits to wear by their powers-that-be, but shamed in the media as Setting a Bad Example. Today there are a lot more pop stars who are more in control of their image and their songwriting, and not all of them feel beholden to the Madonna/whore dichotomy we used to see. There was so much "I'm a virgin" purity culture surrounding the Mickey-Mouse-Club-turned-sex-symbol public figures, even as their images relied on sexuality as a taboo to sell records. Consequently, I would argue that the "delicacy" you're missing is an honesty and openness that would have been inconceivable in the 90s, when Clear Channel had a death grip on anything on the airwaves. Even in the more rebellious classic rock era, you did not have Bowie and Elton John and Mick Jagger singing or even speaking openly about their same-gender relationships until at least the 80s (someone can check me on that, but I think the exception would prove the rule). Chappell Roan gets to sing about relationships with multiple genders on the same record. She gets to drive home the pain of feeling used by someone you have feelings for in "Casual" expressly *because* she's not romanticizing their physical relationship, she gets to sing "I'm just a girl that you bang on your couch." The frankness of it is incredibly powerful, in my opinion. And she has *families* at her concerts! I think that's incredible, and very important at a time when there is a LOT of political movement to punish and shame people around their sexuality, as it's become less shrouded in mystery, shame, and control over the past few decades.

 

And sure, is there still a place for more artful lyrics, and could we argue that we're in a cultural moment where nuance and the ability to pay attention and close-read our media is sorely lacking? I'd agree with all of that, but I'd be careful about placing the blame on the artists or their fans, as opposed to the bigger industrial forces involved in "popularity" in the media.

 

All that said, the OP wasn't really talking about sexuality in his distaste for hip-hop; he referenced the violence and criminality, which we can once again ascribe to The Rolling Stones (Street Fighting Man, Gimme Shelter, Sympathy for the Devil, Sister Morphine, Monkey Man) and plenty of punk rock (much of the Dead Kennedys' oeuvre, satire or not). In folk music, Pete Seeger saw a sign that said "private property" in "This Land is Your Land" and said "but on the other side, it didn't say nothin'." Woody Guthrie's machine killed fascists (and the fascists he was referring to were generally "lawful" -- they were businessmen and home-grown politicians as well as European dictators). And of course, his son Arlo got that citation for dumping that garbage, and it, to his delight, kept him out of a very legal war. 😉 

 

Anyway, my point is prescribing amorality to a whole genre of music is reactionary, as well as lacking in cultural and historical understanding. Plenty of hip-hop is violent and even seemingly apolitical in that violence, but the same could be said of plenty of songs by Johnny Cash or Waylon Jennings. Never mind that a look into the social issues underpinning the communities where this music comes from can be incredibly revelatory.

 

Music has long been a vehicle to express revolutionary and counter-cultural ideas, and expose ugly or hidden parts of society and force us to engage with them. That's a big part of what makes AI music-making so convenient for talentless corporate types who see art as one more thing they can control and bleed of its significance in order to more efficiently extract profit, regardless of the negative impact on people. That's much more interesting and important to me than "some of these artists live violent lives and write lyrics about it, so their whole genre must be worthless."

 

So there's my soapbox for this morning!