Rap Culture

Let us discuss the tropes and mentalities associated with the genre. Can that even be called "music"? As Encyclopaedia Dramatica put it in their mercilessly caustic commentary

Crap, also known as hippity hop, Retards Attempting Poetry, and sometimes rap, started out as music made by black person specifically for consumption by the hip black community. Ironically (thanks to MTV), wiggers, Puerto Ricans, Romanians, Asians and even Jews make up the majority of rap fans. Rap was taken over and revamped by the middle class, but this gradually changed. This is considered highly offensive by the black community, as blacks never steal anything from whites. Evar.

Though most people with any good taste at all find it an awful invention and example of the effects that artistic incestuousness, drug use, and culturally-ingrained inferiority complexes have on music, it has been lauded by some as an excellent method for minority control. It seeks to promote racial stereotypes so that dangerous social unity can be avoided by reinforcing the predominantly white-held stereotypes of the lazy, violent, ignorant, chimpanzee-esque, chicken-gobbling negroid.

So far it's working.

Edit: Please do not troll. I chose a trollful opening because I want to get to the heart of what bothers me about rap music as it exists currently in the english language without having to tone down the distance and mercilessness that my priviledged position usually forbid me due to N-Word Privileges and Political Correctness Gone Mad. Still, any help differenciating genuine criticism from mere priviledged putting-minorities-back-in-their-places is welcome: one might inadvertently slip up. One does not want to be unnecessarily hurtful.

edited 3rd Mar '11 11:10:27 AM by Ardiente

Fun Fact for those who are feeling judgmental: The term rap existing long before the rap movement. It's a subsection of music dedicated to percussion, you know, drums, which deals with what rhythm to tap at depending on the rest of the music. Thus why Rap music today is so much about beat and tempo, because it's core mechanic is rhythm.

Fo' shizzle bitch. Now to hang with mah homies.

Actually I heard even the noises made by ghosts in spritism were called "raps". "Rap" is simply rythmic percussion. That is as relevant to the subject of Rap Music as a genre as saying that "Rock And Roll" is slang for sex. I.e. not at all.

Haven't we had this thread three or four times.

Not that I'm aware of.

Rap music, or more properly hip hop, is a vast and diverse genre. I'm not really sure what you're getting at in the OP. That quote is obvious trolling. And of course it can be called music. Why wouldn't it be?

And we've had like a dozen threads like this one before, plus numerous derails to this effect.

edited 3rd Mar '11 11:17:16 AM by BobbyG

I'm inclined to disagree. If you study rap music, you'd find most songs defined as rap typically contain a very, very strong rhythmic beat throughout, something that most other genres don't stick to quite as hard. Thus why it's Rap, it's based on rapping.

edited 3rd Mar '11 11:17:32 AM by Usht

I usually hear "rap" used to mean rhymes, not beats.

That's due to usage evolution. Rapping now means to rhyme to a beat. Plus, the genre of rap music lent itself real well to rhyming due to that rhythm that helps the song writer rhyme in a manner that isn't off beat.

So yeah, that's how that happened.

Huh. That's pretty cool.

I probably should have known that.

Any rappers try to use classic meters, or do those really not lend themselves to this sort of beat correspondence? Is reclaiming classic modes of expression a laudable way of giving the genre a cachet of noblesse, or is it a lame attempt at currying favour with The Man by speaking the language of the establishment?

Gangsta rap is said to be more authentic, hence its early successes, but what did rap talk about before street life and gangs and pimping and thiggery? And why is rap music so male-centric? In the lyrical world of the typical rap song, it appears that women are little more than walking accessories and status symbols, and that they find contentment in that.

On the other hand, Hip Hop is often accused of being excessively sexualized, but the more I learn about music-hall art, the more I find that music of all sorts has been overflowing with sexual double-entendres, when they weren't single entendres and prod of it. Hence, I really think it's not exceptional in that specific sense.

Question: Is this the "Why I don't like these genres of music" topic or is this an actual discussion of the topic of rap music and culture?

According to your now editted opening post (which, I'll be blunt here, was a bad way to handle this), can we at least start on a single question about this culture and go from there?

edited 3rd Mar '11 11:37:26 AM by Usht

Of course I edited it a bit, otherwise that bullshit would be unpublishable. I mean, they really are offensive and confrontational for the sake of being like that. Even as a Devil's Advocate policy, there's better ways to go about it.

Fine. Now after all the documentaries and articles I read about the subject, this is the state of my knowledge. I'll write it as "the impression I was left with" and "what I read between the lines"/"what the journalists seemed to be implying".

In The Beginning, there was Africa Bambataa and some Zulu Movement that had tenents that really sounded more like an excuse for kids from depressed neighborhoods to avoid delinquency and drugs and stuff while retaining a hip, badass image.  ^*

Then it became the new hip thing with the "Pop Culture" MOMART-style artirsts of Big Applesauce, and money started flowing in. It's Popular, Now It Sucks!, and specifically "It practically prints cash and so it has been taken over by The Man" comes into play. But that's not the end of it. There's some sort of Fast Forward, and suddenly we are dealing with Gangsta Rap. Which supposedly appealed to people because it spoke of "their daily realities". Are you freaking telling me all the millions of people who bought gangsta rap songs had to deal with drugs and prostitution and police brutality on a daily basis?

Also, that form of rap, from the fragments I could hear, were all about rappers stating repeatedly how badass and dangerous they were, rather than having any actual political ambitions. It is also said that political rap was never popular in English-speaking media, unlike, say, in France. (In Spain, AFAIK. Rap is about personal, intimate ballad-like stories, left-wing politics are covered by Ska) Perhpas this is because political rap would be inevitably left-wing, and the left in the USA is so stigmatized and slandered and discredited it's just plain not viable as a musical choice.

Then, well, there was Glam Rap ("My car my hoes my people my shoes my house my BAAAABE"... in other words, glorification of a certain form of Conspicious Consumption while systematically avoiding any mention of how the heroes of those stories, who seems to be invariably uneducated and borderline Fashion-Victim Villain, have achieved such a ludicrous lifestyle). And there was White Rap, Jew Rap, Nerd Rap (there's a group that raps about Transformers for chrissakes), and no-one is sure which were the Genre-Killer, if any, but apparently Rap right now is a kind of a joke.

So. I'm not an exceptional follower of rap. But this is the impression that the mainstream press has left in me. I want to fill the gaps. Perhaps even with firsthand knowledge. This is not an attempt at trollish sneering. I genuinely like rap. I like the power those songs can have. When I was a teenager, I even tried to start a band in Arabic. Don't ask. So, I want to find out the truth. I apologize in advance if I anger anyone along the way, but I want to know, and I want to get to the point. Again, I know it's easier to say "no offense meant" than to actually avoid offending. It is much easier. And faster.

And I don't require every single person who knows about this stuff here to personally educate me. It's not their responsibility. But I'd like some linkage to resources I can browse that can actually help me understand how rap was actually born. what happened to it. and where it's going.

edited 3rd Mar '11 12:54:24 PM by Ardiente

Rap drifted to mean the rhyming because the real beats moved to drum corps.

edited 3rd Mar '11 12:55:56 PM by Pykrete

I'm sick of these nonsensical stereotypes about rap music. It's one thing to call it non-music because it's spoken instead of sung, another to call it non-music for what happens to be associated with its genre. It's unfair to more intellectual rappers like Lupe Fiasco to lump rap as a whole in with the more vulgar varieties of it.

Perhpas this is because political rap would be inevitably left-wing, and the left in the USA is so stigmatized and slandered and discredited it's just plain not viable as a musical choice.

lol no the original base of rap would not have fallen for that bullshit, as the hard left/black nationalists would have given a 'fuck you' to that.

Political rap is underground because rap got coopted by the man. and even the internet limits that.

Gangsta rap is said to be more authentic, hence its early successes, but what did rap talk about before street life and gangs and pimping and thiggery?

It was more of a 'life's struggle in the ghetto' before then and it had political overtones then as well. Before then it stops being 'rap' and turns back into R&B and other music (pre-1970s?)

And why is rap music so male-centric? In the lyrical world of the typical rap song, it appears that women are little more than walking accessories and status symbols, and that they find contentment in that.

The overlap with misogynist dickhead gang culture, due to historical factors. It also turned into pandering to young males of all genres. Also, the whole 'im better than you' dickwaving males like to do at time.

Females are more into R&B anyway so there isnt much of a push into rap, but there is a push in slightly.

Sort of like how most graffitti artists being mainly male, as itwas males expressing their angst/etc outward without killing each other?

edited 3rd Mar '11 1:19:43 PM by BalloonFleet

Notice how I never ever called it non-music. You start with rap, and next thing you know you're saying anything that isn't Mozart or Progressive Rock is barbaric noise.

The Man? Dude, would you say I would have something of a cause to ask you to Stop Being Stereotypical? I'm an Arab and an ex-Muslim and current Atheist. I know about discrimination and systematic disadvantage. About privilege. I also strongly believe blaming The Man, the Establishment, the Bourgeois or whatever isn't gonna help at all. We'd be better off applying Shounen Tropes to collective social strife(See what I did there?).

edited 3rd Mar '11 1:19:45 PM by Ardiente

Notice how I never ever called it non-music. You start with rap, and next thing you know you're saying anything that isn't Mozart or Progressive Rock is barbaric noise.

The fact that you put up a quote from ED and edited it to make it crypto-racist makes it seems that way.

Start talking about rap when you have to absorb it every school day, mmkay?

My point exactly: asking the question isn't defending the negative. Allow me to rephrase it an a more boring but efficient way.: How is "music" defined and why does rap fit in there? Or rather, which are the definitions of music that would exclude rap, and which are those that would include it? Where is the cutoff point, besides "I don't acknowledge your sound system because it clashes with my taste"?

Crypto-racist? You mean sort of like a racist who is in denial about it or in the closet or ashamed to admit it?

Me?

Maybe. I don't think so. Plus I don't think Rap is a a matter of race, and people who seem to believe rap should be exclusive to "black people" irritate me (a concept that is only able to function because of how incredibly white a large fraction of the American citizenry is and how little miscegenation there has been... in other American countries it's rather meaningless).

edited 3rd Mar '11 1:26:30 PM by Ardiente

Why wouldn't rap count? It's a really random question to ask if you're not trying to insinuate that rap is unmusical.

I mean, fuck, if Merzbow counts as music, why not rap?

Hahahaha wait, you actually made the ED quote worse?

edited 3rd Mar '11 1:26:02 PM by BobbyG

Merzbow

WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST HEAR?????????????

Something glorious.

I'd post a picture of KRS-One, but nobody would get it.