I've thought about writing this for a long time. It started with a telegram post by Bronze Age Pervert. I don't follow BAP but I saw Zero HP Lovecraft mention the post in a tweet so I found the telegram and read it. I also don't follow ZHP but I'm not saying that to get ahead of anything, I don't dislike him and his "she could lose weight" bit is pretty funny. This is BAP's post:
That is poltard "take your meds schizo" rambling that I won't talk a bit about other than how reading it made me realize the animosity BAP has toward eminently black music would spread through his devotees into the rightist sphere. It has, now it's at a simmer.
I'll give a bit of a primer but I figure a lot of you have some familiarity with Hip-Hop. It's more than just music, it's a subculture of fashion, art, music and dance, but I'm only talking about the music. As the genre developed, inside baseball is its variation into East Coast and West Coast Hip-Hop. East Coast where emphasis is on hard lyricism: artists like Biggie, Jay-Z and Run The Jewels. West Coast where emphasis is on the vibe: Dr. Dre, Tyler the Creator, Anderson .Paak. Subgenres people should be familiar with conceptually are Alternative and Progressive. Alternative about deviating from mainstream sound: A Tribe Called Quest, the Roots, BROCKHAMPTON. Progressive, about incorporating whatever sounds good as complexity is developed within the form: Outkast, Kanye, Kendrick Lamar.
I think most people I see in those threads who criticize "Rap"--and some elaboration will follow--don't really know it. They haven't listened to much and what they have is the weakest examples of the genre in performers like Drake and Jack Harlow. In polite terms they call it Rap. Rap isn't wrong but it's imprecise, rapping is what the vocalist does on the track, Hip-Hop is the rap-to-and-the-beat, and the production is equally if not more important. I'm not doing a pedantic gotcha thing, if you respond to this by calling it Rap I'll know what you mean, and when I call it Hip-Hop you can mentally shortcut Rap if it's easier.
I think most of those Xers would enjoy it if they were shown its best, but there is the minority. Those who didn't originate the thought but they are its loud propagators, so BAP, who are filled with the kind of racial hate where they dislike Hip-Hop solely because of its blackness. I know they'd yeschad me calling them racist but that's not my angle. I'm not criticizing them for being racist, I'm criticizing them for allowing their supposedly great intellects to be subjugated by their racism; to be made retarded by hate as they showboat their inability to appreciate beauty. A failing never more obvious than when they inevitably cope with their flaw unrealizing by saying "No, it really is bad."
I try not to call music bad, it's too subjective. I'll happily comment to the side, like Jack Antonoff probably does all the real work in his collabs with Taylor Swift, Swift's popularity is far more memetic than musical, and/also for Olivia Rodrigo who is a stunningly obvious industry plant; Jack Harlow grew up on a horse ranch, enough said. I still won't call their work bad. I have friends who love their music, why would I want to diminish that? But if I called Swift or Rodrigo or especially Harlow, or pulling back to the albums out of pop, rock and alt-rock of the last 25 years (country ignored for obvious reasons), with few exceptions--Viva La Vida counts and it's pretty good but a lot of its strength is the title track and I like X&Y more; Toxicity is superb; In Rainbows likewise--if I called the best of those genres bad relative to Hip-Hop's best, I would be right.
The best writers of lyrics is a long list of black artists. Ed Sheeran, who seems like a right proper lad, had song of the year 2017 with Shape of You (the link is the lyrics.) It might seem unfair to compare it to Outkast's Bombs Over Baghdad as it's the song of the millennia so far, but it is fair because BOB came out about 17 years earlier, as in pre-Iraq, pre-9/11. This is also where production matters so much, the lyrics are good but made best in context of hearing them in the song. So production, the best producers are many of those same lyricists--Kanye, Jay-Z, Pharrell Williams--or they work with those black artists. Nolan's Oppenheimer was beautifully scored by Ludwig Gorranson, Gorranson broke out on the strength of his production work with Donald Glover/Childish Gambino. He could do things he couldn't anywhere else because there is no genre that allows creativity to flourish like Hip-Hop. Shit Kanye was figuring out 25 years ago dominates the sound of modern pop. I anticipate a certain cope: "Yeah, because it's 2024 and we worship blacks." There is sardonic truth in ascribing a religious reverence to some of the leftist establishment's treatment of blacks but production techniques made prominent by Hip-Hop are now in pop because it makes it better. Carly Rae Jepsen's Emotion (2015) is one of the best pop albums ever recorded and it could hardly be more white. White girl from Canada spending 25 tracks (super-deluxe + B-Side EP) singing about her broken heart. Its production techniques, the samples, the synths, yeah that's the stuff Kanye was doing over a decade before, reaching a degree of culmination in his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak. Easily the most influential album since its release, past all the Hip-Hop it impacted, down the line we have Scooter Braun and Jepsen, we have Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Dua Lipa, Rina Sawayama, Spellling (though The Turning Wheel calls way harder to Kate Bush's The Hounds of Love), Billie Eilish and the biggest and whitest T-Swift.
The only genre with that level of willingness and brilliance in total experimentation by arena acts, aside from the artist-that-is-the-genre of Tyler Joseph's Twenty One Pilots, is electronic music. Those Frenchies dominate it, and you know what? Game recognizes game. Daft Punk working with Kanye and then Pharrell, then later coming out of their soft retirement to work with the Weeknd. Outside of France there's Ratatat and MGMT with Kid Cudi, Moby with Public Enemy, DJ Shadow with Run The Jewels, and Calvin Harris with a bunch of artists.
Funny, I never see the righties complaining about what should surely be "height-of-degeneracy" raves. Heavy light shows where white girls take molly and get fucked by strangers in bathroom stalls. What, do they see blond blue-eyed DJs and it's easy to ignore? Must be they see a white girl dancing to a good beat with a black guy rapping and their miscgenic hackles raise. Funnier still since I'm certain those guys know by heart or else have desktop folders with charts of online dating message/response rates-by-demographic just ready to slam on a /pol/ troll's slide thread.
A tangent, but it follows. I watched Demolition Man a few nights ago. I'd seen pieces over the years but never watched it start-to-finish and it's free on Sling. Sly Stallone as the classic 80s (though 1993 release) action hero cop and the fantastic Wesley Snipes as the villain. After Snipes' big plot at the opening, he and Sly are cryo-imprisoned for decades, during which their "destructive behavioral patterns" will be conditioned away. When Snipes is revived for his parole hearing and jailbreaks, he emerges in an idyllic but Huxleyan-dystopic society. The cops are totally unprepared for a man of Snipes' criminality and martial prowess. Sly is revived to stop him; action comedy ensues. A recurring joke is in the control of language, Sly's frequent profanity is met with computer chime, chastisement and fine for violating the "verbal morality statute."
Control of language is a serious problem in modern discourse. It puts on the veneer with lies and thought-terminating clichés, it makes our speech inauthentic and our way of living becomes inauthentic in turn. I don't know if I'd give the film points for directional correctness, I will give it points for the crass, man's-man-at-the-time Stallone solving all his problems with a hammer. It's that language control--inauthentic discourse--has been a problem for this country since before cinema existed. Early American political discourse had a viciousness to it: Jefferson against Adams is the famous example, where Adams was described as with "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman," while Jefferson was described as a "mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw sired by a Virginia mulatto father." (There is some contention about whether these were actually said, I believe firmly they were.)
What changed? Elite WASPs, Boston Brahman and the like. Their values, their etiquette of "modesty" and "restraint" dominated elite institutions and those values trickled down, being inculcated in the masses and where we once had politicians showing their authentic animosity toward one another, now even lefties calling Trump "fascist Drumpfler" or whatever is somehow still only the patina over authenticity. Imagine that level of candor today: Trump calling Biden a "braindead retard whose only good son is dead" and Harris a "marabou cocksucker" while they retort by calling him a "smalldicked whorefucking bankrupt wannabe wop."
It'd be great. I love boisterous and loud, the most obnoxious political characters on all sides. We know you're thinking it, be authentic and say it! Who cares about pretense? whose standards are you appealing to? Yeah, WASPs from 150 years ago. Fuck off, it's a lie, it's the most inauthentic behavior. Trump will sometimes lie in really bad and obvious ways yet his character remains wholly more authentic than anybody else in politics. That fucking is Trump, that's the man himself, and I think it's a mark of great merit, in itself. I'd think every bit the same if AOC came out being her true self. I know there's a lot of digs at her actual competence vs if she's just a mouthpiece, I think she's probably more than competent enough to be a house rep, low bar as that is. I'd love it if she said what she actually thinks, authentic, absolutely no pretense (and to be appropriately crass, in a push-up bra with a tasteful top to show the goods.)
Would this cause future trouble? Would we move even closer to President Mountain Dew Camacho? I dunno, where's the impact? You're telling me American politicians have yet more character to sell? Or do you fear politics transforming into the final show, where the people are all but entirely removed from changing who stands at the levers of real power? Well I think the evidence is pretty good Biden isn't entirely running the operations of the executive so . . . who's there when he isn't?
Pretense, decorum, expected behavior; these are arbitrary and often worthless. Note often, not worthless for being arbitrary, worthless where they only exist to delineate class. Talk more properly, dress more properly, behave more properly, again I ask whose fucking properness? The culture-progeny of the blooded aristocracy we killed out of this country 250 years ago. That's who the WASPs were. They deserve credit for the spread of meritocracy America benefited from for so long, but they deserve scorn for that etiquette pushed post-war to post-war and then inertia did the rest. Profanity is nothing, it's sounds, use it or don't. (I do hate the thankfully unsuccessful practice of naming in things like "Slutty Cookie" recipes or putting "FUCK" very large on the cover of books.) Restraint is good to a point, modesty to a point, to speak in circles, restraint and modesty are good when they are good, but they are not good in themselves. "Modesty is a virtue" as it goes but I disagree, rather as with the proper understanding of "meekness", it is not modesty that is the virtue but knowing when to be modest that is the indicator of character. Frank Lloyd Wright said "Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change." As the greatest American architect and the greatest in the world since the Imperial Hotel or Fallingwater, were he to practice "hypocritical humility" it would only serve to assuage those who correctly appraised themselves as inferior to him and lacked the character to persist. It's not like he could design every building.
Not only Wright; the most effective wielders of power in this country's history dropped decorum wherever possible. Big Johnson, back to Teddy Roosevelt, whom I particularly like in this context because as the best member of the Roosevelt family his behavior spurned the etiquette of that mighty WASP dynasty. Back to Lincoln and of course Jefferson and Adams (Adams, whose descendants swiftly forgot the lessons of their sire.) Hate these figures if you want and where appropriate, their high effectiveness as political actors is not up for debate.
So Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop is more authentic to the founding spirit of this country than any other music. I don't mean it in the Project 1619 "blacks-built-literally-everything" pseudoacademic bullshit. I mean in its content, its lyrics, its successes. These are the most American stories. So hating on a guy rapping about all the bitches he fucks? It's called bragging, it's where the eponym "Casanova" comes from. Bragging about gang violence? To the Romanophiles (guilty), you've surely heard of Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Odds are good Ceasar made some of that up or at least embellished to boost his image but that reinforces the point.
Not that I'm comparing Jay-Z rapping about hoes or about his life in the hood to Caesar, but a man famously talking about his wealth or his women or the horde he reduced unto the slaughter, the idea of these as in any way novel, which is necessary for saying Hip-Hop is uniquely degradative, is comical. As long as humans have told stories men have talked about rape, pillage and plunder. Thus authenticity.
Success stories are obvious. Yeah there are guys like Drake who have a negative amount of street cred but Jay-Z was selling crack, now he's worth billions and married to Beyoncé. (And second pic so you can see how little help she needs from staged shots.) There's a lot just there, the pathetic racists who would deny, or maybe really are so tragically incapable of recognizing beauty they miss that Beyoncé is one of the most beautiful women alive just as they miss the beauty of Hip-Hop.
I've talked so much about it, I should really talk about it. If you're unlearned, here's a progress in tracks.
I start with Mark Ronson's cover with Daniel Merriweather singing of the Smith's Stop Me that incorporates parts of the Supremes You Keep Me Hangin' On. This is Neo Soul, Merriweather's soulful singing with modern production techniques: synths, drum machine.
Next is Gnarls Barkley's Smiley Faces. At release, Crazy was the massive single off the album St. Elsewhere but the rest of the album had a sharp falloff in listening. As with Stop Me it's Neo Soul, but with Danger Mouse's production we're getting closer to a beat to be rapped to.
That's Madcon's Beggin. Pure Hip-Hop, not Sugarhill Gang pure, but pure. Taking The Four Seasons' Beggin' as the hook to follow into Tshawe's sing-rap verse, to Yosef's pure rap verse.
Next is the Pharcyde's Runnin' as remixed by electronic duo Philippians. The original is closer to Sugarhill Gang purity vs Madcon, in part of course because Pharcyde is old school. Their sample of Saudade Vem Correndo as the guitar riff is the big feel of the song, gets you that instant West Coast vibe. The Philippians remix preserves the sample, keeps the rapping at the front, and is an example, insofar as it's DJs remix, of Progressive Hip-Hop. Developing complexity within the form. If you haven't listened to much but you enjoy what I've listed and you're interested in more, the original is just as good but I'd say Pharcyde's Passin Me By, which is probably their most well-known track, is the next step.
Last is Kanye, Heaven and Hell. Ye starting off as usual with a sample he's put his spin on from the beginning of 20th Century Steel Band's Heaven and Hell is on Earth, and he also incorporates the refrain from the song as backing on his verse. I'd say this is pure progressive Hip-Hop, it would have been at the start of his career, but now this is just standard work for him.
Can't ignore Ye. Continued below.
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Notes -
Neither left nor right nor black nor white nor lyrics nor beat shall move me - your essay has no impact on the likes of me.
I ask of music but one thing: give me a pleasing and memorable melody or leave my ears in peace. Hip hop seems disinclined to provide, so into the trash it goes.
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Your essay is way too long for how little point you are deriving. I read four paragraphs before deciding it’s more efficient if I just briefly argue why hip hop is harmful in a comment, than divining what your argument is.
Music is about producing a spirit in a person, a social emotional-behavioral orientation. Music can produce approximately any emotional space, from the felt sense of eeriness, to grief, even to tones that connote honor, duty, profundity, you name it. We do not need to prove how it does this, as we all agree it does this. This means we can judge music not just by how well it accomplishes its intended emotional result (its technical skill), but whether the resultant emotional space is beneficial or harmful to social life.
Rap, a normal selection of popular rap, focuses on self-aggrandizement, pride, antisociality, and lust. If you were to literally ask yourself, “what is the worst emotional orientation to promote in the youth?”, you would come up with a litany of themes that occur in rap. What would be worse for the youth than to hyper-focus on lust, consumerism, killing people who slight you, and narcissism? Okay, well that’s most popular rap songs. Were satanists to be producing good music (again), it would probably wind up more prosocial than hip hop.
But don’t take my word for it. If you had a teenage daughter this month there’s a good chance has heard
You haven’t “discovered” anything special when you notice that your most debased and primitive animal self enjoys the fantasy of power and sex. Every 10 year old can imagine this. Someone who thinks this music is good is as tasteless as a foodie who tells you sugar is the most exquisite because it makes his mouth feel the best. The music is bad, because the spirit it produces is bad. Yes, it may be pleasurable, but you wouldn’t say the best medicine is heroin, would you?
The lyrics are only one aspect of music. The BPM and rhythm can also induce in a person a sense of patient thought or a sense of urgency. Rap combines sin with urgency.
An unwise person may reply, “okay, but like, The Beach Boys also sang about hooking up with girls…”
In a totally different phenomenological space that promotes delicate emotion, love, fidelity, and not lust, which is communicated via the slow beat, the instrumentation, and vocals.
It is a bad idea generally but especially in this place to speak confidently while betraying such ignorance on a matter. How do we have discourse on a topic you show you know nothing about?
Your pissant bit of writing was addressed in full in the essay, read it or don't, I wasn't addressing you. I understand your being and I know what's above can't crack your animus. You hate jews and viewing Hip-Hop as a tool of jews--it's been one moneymaking tool of many in the legendarily corrupt profiteering of the jew-dominated record industry, certainly--you hate Hip-Hop.
If you actually understood the problems of today you would laugh at calling Hip-Hop a problem. You bring up the Beach Boys? They were unique in how they were fairly uncontroversial to the conservative establishment of their era but who do you think the hippies were listening to during the Summer of Love? Yeah I think Good Vibrations got bit of airtime. Shit man, seems like their music wasn't particularly edifying after all. But you should know this, you see through the excess of modernity, you're not unimpacted because it impacts us all, but you remain yourself. You are authentic, and my respect for authenticity is a major theme of the essay.
The spirit is sick and there are places the music certainly reflects it; music as symptomatic would be fair so Hip-Hop as symptomatic is obviously fair. The disease is elsewhere, and this is what you surely understand. Like how these problems would still exist if Hip-Hop never emerged because the major points of shift in this country occurred long before Hip-Hop led in just black culture. The great disaster of our age is social medial and veritable epochs in internet time passed between [epoch] Facebook/Twitter, [epoch]Instagram/Twitter, [epoch]the preeminence of smartphones, [epoch] the explosion in Hip-Hop's popularity. Without Hip-Hop's dominance TikTok would still exist and still fill the internet with the shittiest, most cognitively degradative content yet devised and the laziest rap wouldn't be clipped a million times but there'd still be the million clips of the laziest rock and pop and country. Videos would still be plentiful of shitty shows where hundreds of girls dance while being recorded for their instagrams by others and righty commentators would still bemoan the state of the western woman. Even if you weren't wrong about the quality, on this matter you still would only be decrying the trappings rather than the thing itself: a thing that existed before ¥ was even born.
My children will be homeschooled and I will curate their exposure to culture but I will eventually show them everything--given, with my description and guidance on certain subjects rather than graphic depiction---because I will not be able to to guide my children at every moment in their lives, nor should I want to (beyond the father's healthy wish to always be there for his children). They will need to become adults and make good judgments on their own, so if my daughter at any time in her life were at risk in being negatively affected by hearing that music I will have failed as a father. This is something modern fatherhood has failed at and continues to fail at so often, but even recognizing that as an issue I'm still in the trappings. Far closer to the source, but still the trappings.
Cool it with the personal attacks. Even when you disagree with someone, you need to remain civil while you make your points.
WTF are you even talking about here? I don't like (post Y2K) rap very much either, but I read the above post several times searching for a personal attack and didn't see one -- other than accusing coffee of not knowing anything about rap, which is, like -- probably true and not much of an insult?
To the extent that politeness norms encourage good discussion I can understand you guys modhatting/warning/banning some stuff that I would rather you didn't -- but politely expressing that c.e. isn't making great points (for instance: "Your essay is way too long for how little point you are deriving" -- which is kind of an ironic one given the norms being enforced a.t.m. -- but also objectively not a great contribution) is just not a personal attack?
WTH man.
“Betraying such ignorance,” “pissant bit of writing,” “if you actually understood”…these are all attacking the character and competence of the OP. The sarcasm doesn’t help either.
There’s a lot of good substance in Jake’s rebuttal, and I’m not objecting to that.
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I assume its in reference to this
That you didn't see it after rereading the post several times is a bit strange to me.
That is not a personal attack, it's an attack on c.e.'s writing. (in response to an attack by c.e. on OPs writing)
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@ZorbaTHut
Why are you responding to the volume of reports from the black-and-jew-haters I have correctly identified and criticized in this essay? @coffee_enjoyer, after the jew-hate he doesn't remotely hide in his commenting here, has shown an astonishing lack of knowledge given the arrogance with which he writes; he doesn't know a goddamn thing about Hip-Hop or clearly anything more than some very basic sociology of black culture yet he gets no ding for making this discussion immeasurably worse. Every comment he has on this post is immediately disprovable and he started off with "Too long didn't read lol."
Why shouldn't I respond?
Let's say you're correct, and your post was exclusively reported by racists and anti-semites. They would be right to do so, because your response breaks several of our rules. It doesn't matter to whom you're writing; you must be polite. Civil. The better person, even. This forum is founded on the idea of engaging with your bitterest enemies rather than falling back on suppression.
For what it's worth, I think there are several non-identitarian reasons why your original essay received criticism. It comes across as kind of smug, which basically guarantees that people are going to come in and nitpick regardless of subject. In my opinion, it would have benefited from some aggressive editing, too--as much as I like the ideas, you spent too many words on tangents. You could have made the point with, like, three paragraphs plus the progress-in-tracks.
But I digress.
You wrote this post expecting to draw out some race warriors. At least, I hope you did, because that's what this place is all about: engaging. Encountering arguments that one would never have seen in one's own bubble, and taking them seriously rather than flinching away. Do it right, and you can expect to see some nonsense. Some degenerate fools who don't recognize the truth of [insert belief here]. So if you think you've found one, help him understand. One of you will learn something.
I don't pay attention to admin actions here, I think you all do a good job, I say that because I don't know and I'm not suggesting you only replied because of reports. But if you did--someone downvoting these comments is hitting the user and not the substance. They are here in bad faith; if they report, they report in bad faith. They should be ignored.
But also, someone who reports because they care about this place and they're following the spirit of this place, they would have reported coffee. "I didn't read that but you're wrong" is the antithesis of the Motte. It's a violation so apparent it needs no context, but given context they might also note how his arguments were at best contrived and detached from my essay and at worst asked and answered by my essay. Such a user would have also seen how after my initial harshness I praised him and even agreed with him on certain points. I engaged, he didn't, but he's not here to engage. He saw "On Hip-Hop" and thought it would be a good place to opine, began reading my essay and realized he was profoundly out of depth but rather than the healthy behavior, not responding, he charged ahead to betray his ignorance; to act like he understands subjects he clearly doesn't. I think my essay should be treated as adequate support for my labeling someone in this manner.
As for "pissant": If someone new to this place came in and gave loud and wrong opinions it's possible they could be swayed from their arrogance by a particularly thorough teardown. A user who's been here for years and has over a thousand comments knows better than to respond how he did. It's a bad debt for the spirit of this place when the long-present, loudly wrong but ostensibly properly spoken can escape the criticism they deserve and need. Discourse cannot be good if it refuses to include just rebuke and I'm not talking about a modded "Don't do this."
The person who has succumbed to extreme hatred of jews isn't going to be swayed with even the greatest of otherwise and only tone-neutral arguments. Hard antisemitism is the final deviation from thought norms and it requires strong emotional impetus. They don't believe any experts or evidence against them; they're prepared for those arguments anyway and they have their "experts" and "evidence" to fall back to if their preparation fails. They become walking confirmation bias feedback loops and it's all cemented with hate. BAP's gotta be pretty smart but the rant I linked shows the guy operating multiple sigmas below his actual intellect as he expresses his hate. It makes him dumber, it makes them dumber. You have to engage and give good arguments, absolutely. You must also absolutely target them in the same place their hate dwells, and that means making them feel shame--the shame from recognition of the deep iniquity within themselves.
But for your purposes, I can say I don't anticipate responding to a user like I did to coffee again.
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I don't think we all agree it does this, at least not in the way you seem to claim. Music can temporarily evoke an emotion, in much the way a movie can, but the idea that music changes people's actual beliefs or actions seems like a very strong and unsubstantiated claim.
I enjoy Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon and Maxwell's Silver Hammer by the Beatles. Both songs basically celebrate deranged serial killers. Neither has made me want to kill anyone to even the slightest degree.
There is an element of behavior and not just emotion because dance is universal. The music can literally compel us to perform a repetitive physical action. And there are clearly natural physical responses, like if you were to slow dance to techno you’d actually be doing something wrong, and if you were to jumpstyle to an slow piano etude you’d be responding unnaturally. I don’t mean that music is going to make you want to do specific behaviors like fold your laundry, but that it infects our physical bodies and begs us to respond with our bodies. And music can then be seen to promote urgency and low-impulse via quick actions, or longmindedness and thoughtfulness. So when you pair pro-drug visual media/lyricism with a low-impulse rhythm, that’s a recipe for immorality.
That’s because you have the social intelligence to understand that the Beatles are not extolling murder. The music behind the lyrics is upbeat and devoid of anger. The juxtaposition was chosen to make a humorous and interesting song. This is different from hip hop, with some of the artists having genuinely murdered people and then gaining respect from other artists in the genre.
Music changes something more significant than beliefs, it changes a person’s focal emotions. What emotions they can more readily access, appreciate, and pursue. This may be temporary or it may be lasting depending on how often the music is consumed. Psychology tells us that repeating the same neurological patterns creates a mental habit, leading to easier and access / recall. This is why you might hear a phrase and suddenly remember a song, or might have a song stuck in your head due to some emotional problem you are dealing with.
The fact that certain types of music promotes certain types of dancing does not imply that it promotes specific types of behavior off the dance floor. You haven't provided any evidence of this and it certainly contradicts my experiences.
You claim this based on what evidence? It sounds like in your worldview music is almost a hypnotizing force, something that changes people subconsciously, but then you contradict yourself with statements like:
It sounds like you think Maxwell's Silver Hammer is fine because if you intellectually analyze it you realize it's not pro-murder. But if it's just a hypnotic or automatic response to lyrics + rhythm, why should this matter? I can tell a just-so story about how pairing an "upbeat and devoid of anger" melody with lyrics about serial killing actually conditions people to thinking killing isn't a big deal. But that story would have as little evidentiary basis as yours does.
Also you seem to be claiming that if Paul McCartney turned out to be a serial killer, and stated that Maxwell was meant unironically, this would transform it from a "good" song to a "bad" one?
I should probably also note that Charles Mansion credited Beatles songs as inspiring his murders. How do you square that with your claims?
Any evidence for this claim? In my experience the songs that get stuck in my head are random and have no connection with my emotional state.
let me clarify as much as possible, just using the song I included in my original reply. We have:
Memorable music with memorable lyrics, which teens will lip-sync on tik tok,
paired with an emotional state of urgency, pleasure, and power (this is communicated via the music, lyrics aside),
with lyrics designed to be catchy that extol drug use in a non-satirical, non-sarcastic, non-fantastical way,
associated together with the imagery of high status symbols, both within the song and in the culture of the rapper — you see teens with posters of their favorite rappers whom they idolize on their walls
Now, what motivates all teen behavior is the prospect of status and sex. (No, you will not get a source for that, don’t ask). This is mediated by looking upward toward those of high status. Hip hop is prepackaged odes to status and its rewards. We already know that fans of hip hop will imitate their favorite rappers, sometimes how they speak but also how they dress. If Kanye comes out with a new shoe, a fan will buy it to imitate who they see as high status. Given that we know fans will imitate rappers already, it is rational to conclude that they are also imitating what the rapper extols in their lyrics — like drugs. All of the fans? No one has ever alleged that. Rap is harmful if even 1% of the fans are more likely to do drugs after hearing a literal ode to drug use by their literal idol.
You should actually be able to understand this intuitively, no intellectualizing required. On the one hand, you have an upbeat narrative song about someone else, sung by some hippie British guys, and the musical feeling is entirely non-aggressive. On the other hand, you have an aggressive song written by a rapper who sings about his own life, who is gang affiliated, whose peers are murderers and who has probably spoken out against snitching.
It is the adolescent imitation of idols believed to have high status, not hypnotism. If you’re a kid in the ghetto, and you see a guy getting respect and women and money and later learn he runs a gang, will this make you more likely to join a gang? Common sense says yes, and hip hop is merely the packaging of this experience into a commodity to be sold to those outside the ghetto.
The emotion of anger leads to murder, and this emotion isn’t in the song. It’s peaceful, frolicking, almost joyful in musicality. You literally have a “doo doo doo doo, doo” background vocal. No one is entering into a murderous mood listening to this song and no one with a modicum of social intelligence would mistake the Beatles for promoting serial killing. In contrast, rappers are known to go to jail for killings and to carry guns.
Well I suppose it’s funny to know that he is still successfully trolling after all these decades
My interest in continuing this conversation is waning given your unwillingness to present even a shred of evidence to substantiate your rather strong claims.
It seems to me that all your arguments are fundamentally the same arguments that people in the 60s advanced as evidence of the Beatles corrupting the youth. Run for Your Life is a song about beating or killing a woman for infidelity, written and sung by John Lennon who literally beat his wife. Got to Get you Into My Life and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds are about how great LSD is. Many Harrison songs promote Hinduism like My Sweet Lord. Polythene Pam promotes drag and crossdressing. Not to mention the countless songs that promote premarital sex.
The Beatles were as high-status and looked up to by teenagers as any band in history, arguably far more so than any hip hop act ever. You haven't given any principled reasons why your critique of hip hop wouldn't apply equally to the Beatles. By your logic they clearly and unironically promoted abusing women, doing drugs, leaving Christianity, and wearing drag. Other than wearing drag, these were all things members of the Beatles actually did and unironically supported in their own lives. Clearly you would agree that Beatles songs are harmful if even only 1% of the fans are more likely to do drugs after hearing a literal ode to drug use by their literal idols.
Do you have any evidence of people "outside the ghetto" joining gangs because of hip hop? Even one anecdote? It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely.
The Manson murderers literally wrote "Helter Skelter" and "Piggies" in blood on the walls. You're saying that was trolling?
My interest is less than existent and I am participating out of charity. You are asking for a peer-reviewed longterm study proving that a statistically significant amount of at-risk hip hop listeners will go on to try drugs relative to controls — yes, I would also like that study. But you understand that they haven’t done this study, right? There’s nothing I can do about that, which means we have to arrive at conclusions by reasoning (at least in my case).
Is it your opinion that the 60s and 70s did not see an increase in both LSD and eastern spirituality? If you asked a poll of teens who tried LSD in ‘69, how many of their favorite musicians would be Stevie Wonder versus Janis Joplin? Don’t we know that the teens all went to Woodstock to see their favorite musicians, then did the drugs of their favorite musicians?
“If you cheat on me I kill you” is not exhorting people to beat their wives, it’s a song from the perspective of an obsessive male partner that should be interpreted with exaggeration in mind. “If I catch you with another girl you’re a dead man” is an age-old exaggeration that a woman might tell a man, vice versa. That’s this song.
Qualitatively different as I explained in my last comment. You’ve ignored everything from the publicized lifestyles of the artists, to the visual culture (guns), to the aggression embedded in the actual musicality.
If Lucy in the Sky was about fentanyl, that would be horrible and the song should probably be banned. I would prefer that they not sing about drugs, yeah. Unlike hip hop, they actually sing about things unrelated to vice and pride, which redeems them. And do I blame them for getting impressionable teens to do LSD? Yes!
Youve misunderstood thr metaphor. Black gangs don’t recruit white suburban kids, they just sell them drugs
Manson was motivated by a bizarro eschatological race war ideology that he retcon’d into the Beatles. Where do you think the Beatles sang about that, the while album?
No, I am asking for literally any evidence at all. Even an anecdotal story of a middle class kid joining a gang because of hip hop would at least be a data point. Or a study suggesting that certain types of musical structures produce aggression. Anything at all besides your own opinion, really.
Is it your opinion that this was causally related to the music of the 60s? If so, why do you single out hip hop as special and different in its influence?
This is special pleading. Lennon beat his wife and wrote a song about beating or killing a woman. If you want to argue this isn't meant to be taken seriously, you have to be willing to say the same about hip hop lyrics about killing written by murderers.
The publicized lifestyles of the Beatles included infidelity, heroin use, beating women, leaving Christianity, etc. Appeals to "the aggression embedded in the actual musicality" is special pleading. You're just saying hip hop is different because it feels different to you.
But surely the violent lyrics and "aggressive" music should be inducing suburban kids to violence too, right? Why are they magically immune to this?
Does anyone dispute that drug use in the late 60s did not rise because of music culture? It was the access point for finding drugs, and probably the only way a middle class person learned about psychoactive drugs. If music compelled some to move to San Francisco and change their life philosophy then yes, it must have also compelled them to do drugs.
Because a hippie doing LSD is not morally commensurate to getting hooked on codeine or opiates. And because psychedelic rock is not shilled by large music corporations to the youth today, like Travis Scott performing in Fortnite to a crowd of tens of millions of kids (hit song titled: “drugs you should try it”). It’s a difference both in qualitative moral harm, and quantity of moral harm. Not to mention, it’s a difference in mood as well — exploring your psychology through ayahuasca is much different than plying a girl with “nose candy”.
The popular conception of Lennon was not one of a wife-beater, and social perception involves what can be perceived. The rappers don’t just talk about their crimes, they broadcast it on instagram. Lennon did not present a public persona of beating his wife. And again, your understanding of the lyrics lacks nuance: consider that the song is spoken to the girl, not bragging to the audience about keeping his bitches in line.
I don’t think you know what “publicized lifestyle” means. Lennon did heroin in secret around 1969, well after Beatles peak fame. The newspapers were not writing about his heroin addiction until much after, unlike their marijuana use which was actually common knowledge.
I do believe they are, yes. That does not mean white kids get a magic pass to join the crips.
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I love me some Beach Boys (Good Vibrations is a work of art), but I'm gonna need some evidence that Barbara Ann is about love or fidelity.
I’m being subjective now, but I think what people like most about that song is the melody line where the vocalist yearns for Barbara Ann. There is a yearning, crying plea, which connotes the emotional space of youthful puppy love rather than lust. Remember that we can’t trust the text exclusively for what a song is about, the actual music comes first. Radiohead’s True Love Waits may be titled as such but its music paints a deep, despair-ful sadness.
For an example of pure lust in rock, see “hungry like the wolf”. There’s no element of any romance, just the lustful chase for a woman. (Yet even then, it’s not as prideful or low-impulse as lots of hip hop). Then you have examples of forceful love but which are not lustful, like the Proclaimer’s I’m Gonna Be…
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Years ago, I mentioned to a friend of mine that one of the advantages of living in a country that's 98,5% monoethnic (and with most of the 1,5% being virtually indistinguishable) is that cultural tastes don't break down along ethnic lines (as the latter don't exist) and so I can safely dislike whatever the fuck I want without people trying to tar me as a racist. I still stand by that opinion.
I disliked Peja and Liroy and what-have-you back when I was a teenager, and judging from what I hear on the radio when I go to the barber, the condition of Polish hiphop has only gotten worse in the next 20 years. The beats are slower and more repetitive, the lyrics are uninspired and more repetitive, and it's hard to treat boys two thirds my age rapping about their gangsta exploits when the only actual dealer I know is a deeply pathetic person.
Saying that contemporary pop owes its style to hiphop may be a bit of an own goal, as I haven't heard a pop song released in the past decade that I would call "good". There are some passable ones i.e. I won't wince when I hear them on the radio, but my threshold for "good" is that I would like to listen to them on my own, and the last album to clear that bar was Gaga's Artpop, so 2013. There's nothing released that's catchy on the level of Song 2 or Rockafeller Skank. There are even no popstars - Taylor is the last remaining one, and this is why her fanbase is so psychotic sometimes. In better times, all this fan energy would be diffused between multiple artists.
I was clear. I don't consider the average Hip-Hop "unenjoyer" racist. I know for a good number of them they haven't listened to good Hip-Hop and they would like it if they did, I know for another good number of them it's just not their taste, like yourself and that is the most fair, I would never criticize anyone for simply not liking a kind of music. I also specifically said I'm not criticizing BAP and those like him for racism itself, I consider his transgression becoming a fool for his racism. Hating Hip-Hop because he hates blacks and jews is fucking stupid.
If you enjoyed Lady Gaga then I have no doubt there are albums released after ARTPOP you would enjoy. I think you may underestimate and definitely limit yourself, there's a world of wonderful recently-released music. On the other hand you could choose to only listen to stuff released before 2000 and you'd never run dry for incredible music, so maybe I'm being a bit unfair.
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I don't think this is a good steelman of why the DR types wouldn't grok onto hiphop. Hiphop is, as a cultural shibboleth, nearly unequaled in the catch 22 it places white people in. And the defining feature of white-identitarians on the dissident right isn't their racism, its their conspicuous sensitivity to racial slights against them. Hip hop's place in culture would be an ulcer for them, not because hip hop is Black, but because Hip Hop goes out of its way to degrade white people involved with it.
It doesn't happen every time, by any means, but I've heard each of these responses to the question "do you like Hip Hop?" called racist:
-- "Yes, I love Hip Hop, I'm super into it, I know everything about it." Ewwww, wigger, cultural appopriation, etc etc. And God forbid you sing along to the lyrics! You're not allowed to say nigger, they are.
Ok, so listening to Hip Hop as a white person is racist, the right answer must be:
-- "I don't listen to Hip Hop, I only listen to [other music]." Obvious racist, denying Black excellence, made retarded by hate, yadda yadda. No, it doesn't matter that you love Bad Brains or Charlie Pride or Mingus.
Ok, so I have to listen to Hip Hop, but it's bad if I appropriate Black culture, and I can't sing along to songs with Nigger in them, which is basically every rap by a Black artist, I should listen to white rappers.
-- "I like Hip Hop, but really only like Eminem and El-P and stuff like that, their lyrics speak more to me personally." How racist do you have to be to only listen to white guys and not the many great Black rappers?
The status of white rappers is itself an obvious inequity. A true case of having to be twice as good to get half as much credibility!
Now, of course, that isn't the standard outcome. Most white people like rap and it's just fine. But DR types are often defined by their strong sensitivity to racial slights, they are people who really suffer from that kind of thing psychically, who Notice. They hate being in a position where a vague and byzantine social code defines the statements they are "allowed" to make without being accused of something. Less charitably, they're often people who don't have the social know-how to navigate these situations successfully.* Hip hop gives them an ulcer.
Semi related, because you seem to be an enthusiast of hip hop culture and history: why did rap rock fail? I've been listening to a lot of Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine, Time Zone, Public Enemy's album with Anthrax. Up to 2000, you see a lot of crossover. Beastie Boys were one of the most important groups in bringing hip hop to the mainstream, but that was a sterile evolutionary line for some reason. Ice Cube had a punk rock group, Body Count. Rock and punk bands frequently included a bit of record scratching or hip-hop production. Then like Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit happened, and it was so lame it killed it? But that seems like a weak explanation though. In many ways, it feels like Rap/Hip Hop wasn't really solidified as a Black cultural patrimony until much later in the game, white rappers adopted it rarely but unselfconsciously in the 80s and 90s, while after 2000 white rappers were required to pay tribute to Black culture in a way that earlier artists didn't; and in turn Black rappers in the 80s and 90s recognized punk rock and metal as interrelated genres they were interested in, similarly rebellious youth music, which naturally interacted. The split in 2005 when I was a kid, seems to be much harder than it was in 1985. Am I off base here?
*All this applies equally, if not moreso, to race-warriors on the left. The same thing that gets a Slate thinkpiece about "microagressions" from one overeducated Black author is "just joking around" or "literally what are you talking about" to another Black guy. Something I've been thinking about a lot is the way that pushes for group rights are oriented around differentials in group identification and sensitivity. For one man, second class citizenship status is just fine as long as his life is ok; for another anything but perfect equality for his racial group is experienced as a constant open sore. I'm not sure all of this is downstream of culture, some of it feels like a personal predilection, genetic or otherwise, towards offense taking.
I was gonna say, while I admire the OP's passionate argument about the artistic merit of rap, I think they missed that, for all its merits, rap as we first knew it was incubated in the oppositional culture of post-Civil-Rights-era Black American culture. Sure, every notable artist from the 90's and early 2000's at the calibre of the N.W.A. became rich as fuck in the decades that followed, and commensurately adorned with celebrity status, but I think our own 2rafa would argue that this does not at all erase where these people came from. It is the oppositional culture that the right has the biggest beef with. Paeans to authenticity are nice and good, but the argument from the right is about the culture war and which one gets to be dominant, and authenticity is kind of orthogonal to that.
Also, yeah, it is weird how stillborn the crossover of rap and rock has seemingly been.
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Hybrid Theory and Meteora are masterpieces, I won't tolerate this slander.
I love hip-hop, rap, and R&B. I think your points here about how annoying it is to be a fan of these genres is spot on.
Donald Glover touched on how often he was treated as an Uncle Tom early on in his career. Eventually, though, he fell in line - "This is America" was a tarted-up whypepo bad anthem. I more closely identify with black masculinity than the average moustache-and-plaid barista, but it's always strange to hear about how someone would fuck my bitch.
There's a maximum amount of anti-white sentiment I can handle in order to pay to music and go to shows. If I know someone has complained about certain people singing their lyrics, it's off to the high seas for the album.
Unfortunately in life there are many products made by people who actively hate me. The average coffee roaster, bike shop, or beer brewer spits in my face just as much.
Is also a great example of how a Black rapper who is obviously from money and grew up "soft" can still access credibility and be taken seriously as a rapper in a way that, say, Mac Miller has to try much harder to reach if he ever could. Drake is allowed to fake being a tough guy in ways Aesop Rock isn't.
I don't really have much trouble with race stuff and rap music, but I also don't really listen to my own music in public. It's always in my car, in my basement weight dungeon, in my headphones cleaning the house. It doesn't really muss my hair to listen to Immortal Technique rap "you got beef with niggas, I got beef with Aryans", anymore than I don't sing along to Endicott because I'm a really good Husband, or to any other song making fun of people like me in other ways.
Just a small thing, Donald Glover was poor growing up. Not quite hard poverty but poor, he had both parents in the home, no gang shit, theatre magnet program in high school and from there New York. What hurt his cred more than anything was 30 Rock and Community, not his upbringing, and he still definitely has more cred than Canadian-child-actor Aubrey Graham.
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You had an entire essay on hip-hop, racism and /pol/ but didn't mention Moonman? Shameful!
OK, now you're just trolling. She's in her forties. No woman in her forties is going to compete with a top 1% 20 year old, it's all surgery and makeup. Who masturbates to images of Beyonce?
Furthermore, there's a key difference between The Gallic Wars and US gang violence: sovereignty. Julius Caesar conquered huge swathes of territory, defeated armies, captured cities. He conquered. Gangsters and drug-dealers don't conquer, they squabble pathetically with eachother beneath the shield of the ever-tolerant government. The moment a real leader shows up, they'd be whisked away, chained, prostrate and naked like the losers in Bukele's prisons. That's what they are, losers playing a game. It's offensive for these people to boast as though they're tough, manly, conquerors with deeds worthy of song.
Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar and Alexander actually achieved greatness, there was nobody above them tolerating their tantrums. They fought like real men at the front. No ill-aimed drive-by shootings, they didn't back down until the job was done. They deserve alpha-male status, American gangsters should be meek - they live at the mercy of society.
BAP's description of Kanye is apt. What kind of man has his wife wearing a whorish 'outfit' like this, out in public for the world to see?
https://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/kanye-wests-wife-bianca-censori-shocks-with-near-naked-super-bowl-outfit-044730180.html
Who in this coomer era jacks off to images of any celebrity but teen boys who somehow can't access internet porn? Sure, I'd imagine not many guys jack off to Beyoncé, I'd imagine not many jack it to Sydney Sweeney either relative to the eyes on endless free porn. Also it's not top 1%, it's top <.0001%, and here you may find a useful rule: most of the women in that top .0001% have remarkably few Instagram followers.
Ah man, if Caesar looked at the United States, he would be most confused by the "sovereign" and least confused by the gangs. Gangs occupy the exact social niche once filled by the warlord and his brigands; modern organized and disorganized gang crime is just modernized brigandage. It's actually a perfect example, we think there's something strange or novel about this crime, the tolerance of it is, but its existence runs deep in our history. Caesar would instantly recognize the phenomenon and understand exactly the gang's cause and purpose. Caesar would also get the incredible things Bukele has achieved, though he would wonder why Bukele didn't just kill every Salvadoran with MS-13 tattoos.
I don't attribute honor or anything else admirable to the gang, but I also wouldn't to raider bands of Vikings. Nevertheless I understand why these groups exist and existed. Violence is our history, we became "more civilized" but we didn't change. In many ways the peak of civilization, certainly at its time, was the tremendous effort American men spent to incinerate 100,000 Japanese civilians. The bombings were in equal parts absolutely necessary and the least honorable actions ever committed by man. It would have been honorable to march on Honshu and pile their bodies in the millions. Some honor.
Clearly a guy who gets to fuck women like that, ie Kanye and never BAP.
The civilized part of violence is its organization, discipline and grandeur.
Caesar's legions and the USAF were highly organized, well-disciplined and achieved terrible but great things. Gangs are poorly organized, undisciplined and extremely petty. There was no siege where the gangsters grimly held out against Bukele's forces, they weren't loyal to a cause or a king. There was no kind of even battle. He just swept them away at will.
The Vikings at least had grandeur in their raiding, they settled new lands and fought wars with entire states. They were worthy opponents, real protagonists depending on nobody for tolerance.
Or a guy who wants to look like he fucks women like that, a guy desperate to look like he has lots of sex. Arab princes (and many billionaires I imagine) do all kinds of things but don't feel the need to publicly announce it like it's some great achievement.
Speculating on whether Kanye really does fuck his wife is veering quite close to the realm of cope. As for the Arab princes, the first 2 things I recall about them are their golden cars and the Dubai skyscrapers. If the Arabs have a reputation for asceticism and humbleness even at the highest echelons of their society, I have not heard of it.
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The purpose of a revealing outfit is to entice. The difference between a woman who's a whore and a woman who isn't is whether she accepts transactions.
Ascribing puritan religious morality to it that demands a man to keep his wife visibly chaste-loosing (as opposed to flaunting what he has, allowing others to look without seeing all of it, not to mention not touch) doesn't sound very Bronze Age.
I don't follow BAP, I think he's wrong about many things and nigh-incomprehensible about many more. Nevertheless, he and I are both repulsed by Kanye's crassness, his general attitude.
What about wearing a classy dress that accentuates beauty? It's the difference between having a fancy car and bragging about it constantly like Tate does. It's the difference between using make-up tastefully and these plastic Kardashian faces that scream fakeness. If his wife isn't a literal whore, she's certainly a whore for attention along with Kanye.
From what I heard about BAP's persona, he isn't one to bash crassness. Pot, kettle. Besides, the defining trait of upper class, as put forward by the countersignal theory, is that they can afford to look trashy - it's their immediate lowers who have to keep it classy to avoid being mistaken for actually trashy trashy.
This is also why if a regular man's wife dresses like a whore, calling his status into question sounds credible. If the man is high enough, he doesn' t have a status-based reason to care whether his wife dresses like a whore. What are you gonna do, buy a night with her?
This strikes me as a conflation of wealth and class, which I don't particularly agree with. "High enough" here seems to mean "rich enough." I would argue that's not an issue of class. You even use the financial term in your phrase "afford to look trashy." If I'm not getting your point fine. You may be correct that the upper class can get away with behavior that, say, middle class would not dare trying, but I think of that more in terms of say, ordering at a restaurant. The rube from West Blocton may just ask for whatever he wants instead of perusing the menu, but so would someone raised in great wealth. The middle class customer would be appalled. I'm not sure this applies to wearing a thong in public.
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Is this really true? I haven't heard anything in Kanye that wasn't already done in the 90s or earlier.
I can't help but feel that this perspective is, for lack of a better word, basic. Who cares about arena acts? In a previous era what you described would be called "selling out" (when is the last time you heard someone complain about that? Makes you think). I have nothing inherently against selling out, but you can't sell out and keep pretending to be avante garde and brilliant. You can make a lot of money, you can draw big crowds, but to a large extent you are painting by numbers. Perhaps on the margin you can be different, but you are largely repackaging innovations pioneered by true heads.
Kanye's sampling and genre-bending. Acts were doing these in pieces, ATCQ, De La Soul, J Dilla (Ye fav) and Outkast among them. Kanye brought everything together, he was the fusion point. College Dropout showed the sampling all across the album, Jesus Walks as the notable genre bend with Southern Gospel. Late Registration with the incorporation of a full orchestra. Graduation with its use of electronic. Daft Punk-sampling Stronger was a huge hit, but Flashing Lights is also very good and prominently features electronic and it also had several violinists play on the production. And 808s is the reason most people, directly or by-effect, know what autotune is. It's trite now, it didn't start trite.
It wasn't an appeal to popularity. For artists in most genres, when they achieve the level of success where they can do arena shows, they lock-in, their sound at that point is their sound from then-on. Multiple Hip-Hop artists have reached that level but have continued to deeply experiment as they search for new and better sound. It would be a mind-blowing difference to go from a Kanye Graduation concert to one of the concerts Kanye put on for Donda. Elsewhere, unless Taylor Swift takes a hard genre pivot into more experimental work, I doubt there will be a meaningful difference between a 1989 concert and whatever her album concert is in 2027. It's that drive and willingness to change in pursuit of greatness I find so admirable, it's part of why I love Twenty One Pilots. Through Scaled & Icy every TOP album has been a different dominant genre. There is a core sound, but take a dozen of their songs at random and there's a pretty good chance you'll find those songs belong to a dozen different genres. Hip-Hop most definitely included.
Kanye put out College Dropout eight years after Endtroducing, one of the pinnacles of plunderphonics to this very day.
Hybrid sampled Gorecki in 1995 in Finished Symphony and hit #12 in the British dance charts (just off the top of my head).
Massive attack, portishead, dj Shadow, rjd2... All this was done already ten years before Kanye was on the scene.
If it's a matter of a deep attribution of the pioneering of sound then we just fall back to Tomorrow Never Knows and A Day in the Life and Come Together and everything since 1966 is just riffing on the Beatles. Except, what about their inspirations? At what point are we just falling back to the guys who invented the piano, the guitar, the violin?
I didn't say Kanye invented it, I said "figured out," as in he figured out how to bring those techniques together in a way nobody had before him, or at least nobody since Lennon-McCartney. This is a fact, it's why everybody knows who Kanye is and the recognition falls precipitously for every artist you've named. Kanye knows them, surely loves their work, but the relationship is this: Kanye heard elements in songs he enjoyed, he put those elements in his music, and he experienced incomparably greater success than those who inspired him because he did it better than any of them. Kanye's peers and especially the young musically aspirant, heard what Kanye did and they wanted to do it too.
But you don't have to take my word for it, you can just look up all the artists who've named Kanye as their inspiration.
I'm not even talking about deep attribution. I'm just saying that Kanye didn't figure out any of the stuff you listed. Yes, there were people doing sampling with strings and electronics in the 90s. I don't know what Lennon and McCartney have to do with it, I don't think they did much sampling.
I am simply looking for an answer to the question of what exactly is his innovation, because none of the things you listed are actually his innovation.
What it sounds like you are saying is that he "figured it out" not because he actually pioneered anything but because he made it big. To which my answer is, to make it big you need to appeal to the least common denominator. I don't begrudge his success, but it's a real head-scratcher when people talk like Kanye invented sampling despite the fact that his only innovation was making it palatable for the masses. If that's what we're talking about, let's call it what it is rather than pretending he is sui generis.
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I think this essay fails as a defense of hip hop. You can't just go through a list of how cool this sample was or this lyric, or this genre fusion. I've listened to a lot of hip hop and explored the history, and there's a lot of complexity under the surface level "coolness" that is pretty compromising. There are plenty of intolerant or less informed ways to dismiss it, but the kind of over the top glorification you see here just doesn't move me.
There is talent in the genre, and it compares favorably in a lot of ways to the braindead pop today. But if you're talking about "black" music, it doesn't hold a candle to what black artists were doing in jazz, just nowhere close. And on the other hand I feel like the "blackness" of hip hop has been artificially maintained over time, whereas jazz was explicitly multi-cultural and that is one of its many better values as a genre.
I'm receptive to the brilliance of Jazz, I just don't know it well enough.
Otherwise I disagree, I think I can be simple, I think if anything I used too much detail.
What constitutes the (non-instrumental) "song"? Lyrics and production. What genre is most represented in interesting lyricism? Hip-Hop. What genre is most represented in brilliant production? Hip-Hop. Do you like Daft Punk? They love Hip-Hop. Do you like Trent Reznor? He loves Hip-Hop. Do you like The Mandalorian theme? That guy got the job because of his work in Hip-Hop. Do you like anything in modern pop? You know where so much of that sound came from? The producers having worked on or been inspired by Hip-Hop. Take it away and music would be immeasurably worse. Of course it's the same for Jazz, since what I do know is Jazz led to Disco led to Hip-Hop and Hip-Hop samples Jazz and completes the circle.
Timeframe also matters here, I'm not comparing Hip-Hop to all music ever made, but since its emergence its impact on music has been uniquely profound.
Lyrics are part of it (I'd argue not a particularly important part, but that's not really germane to my argument), but the overriding component for most people is melody, which hip-hop lacks nearly entirely.
As for production, it's a relatively recent concept; songs as we understand them today existed for hundreds of years before the idea of production existed. There was arrangement, but that referred more to live performance than anything. The song itself was just sheet music that could be performed by anyone. There were always people who performed their own music, but it wasn't until the 1960s when pop musicians (an I use that term to refer to anyone performing for a mass audience; i.e. as opposed to Classical music or other, more insular genres) were expected to write their own material. Frank Sinatra never wrote a song in his life. Even in rock music, the trend of groups writing their own songs got started in large part because the repetoire was so standardized that they didn't want to run the risk of the openers performing most of their setlist before they got a chance to play. Rock albums in the 60s had a much higher percentage of covers that would be normal today. Contrast that with hip-hop, where one of the defining characteristics is the dearth of covers at all.
This ties into the fact that recording, up until the late 1960s, was just a recorded performance. Bands would go into the studio, perform their songs as they normally would, and leave. In the 60s people like Phil Spector started experimenting with production techniques, the Beatles took the idea further on albums like Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, and by the 70s the idea of the production adding something to the performance became commonplace. Hip hop was developed in this milieu, and the studio is a more integral part of it than for other genres. Live performance isn't nearly as important in hip-hop as it is in most other genres; the fact that an acclaimed artist like Kendrick Lamar hasn't released any live album says a lot, and a rock musician as successful as Jay-Z having only released one would be unheard of in the rock world. I don't see hip-hop fans talking about concerts very much.
This is why a lot of people who don't like hip-hop try to say it isn't music. There's no melody, no harmony, no instruments (aside from the turntable, which is only viewed as an instrument now because of its use in hip-hop, and The Roots, who are notable because they're one of the few actual hip-hop bands). I'm not going to directly argue your main point because I don't necessarily disagree with it, but arguing about production probably isn't the best way to make it.
I'm not sure what you mean. My impression is you refer to the lack of singing; if someone said they found no melody in Hip-Hop I would think they had either truly never heard a single song from the genre and were describing only what others had told them, or they had some neurological inability to process melodies, or at worst they were being grossly reductive. The three tracks I linked from the genre should resolve that, as should literally any track with rapping unless it's purely verbal. And a lot of Hip-Hop includes singing, those three tracks being immediate examples. Same for harmonies, very present in those songs.
Melody and harmony aside, the idea of a lack of instruments is also curious; there is a lot of synth production involved, but these guys have musicians in the studios playing on their albums. Pharrell has been working with Brent Paschke, a phenomenal guitarist, for over 20 years. On Sooner or Later the last 2 minutes of the song is Paschke just wailing to Pharrell's occasional lyrics.
Maybe your angle is about the lack of bands when the artists perform live. I think this is about a half-fair criticism. Not having the musicians on stage who contributed to the tracks may give a false impression of the product and surely boosts the ego of the rappers, but lead singers of traditional bands are famously egomaniacal. To be "fair" to them, this no doubt has a lot to do with how fans of those bands give the singers most of the love and attention, but that just means if rappers had supporting musicians with them they'd still get all the real adoration.
There's also the idea of being a studio act. I think plenty of rappers would do this if they could, in that they would prefer to not be dependent on the tour, but that's the state of the record industry. Greed reduces royalties to such trivial amounts most bands and artists can only make money by touring. When a dozen musicians are credited on an album that's a hard group to tour with, though if those musicians are getting royalties from airtime they're generally getting royalties from their work being played at those concerts, so at most it's an image thing.
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It is funny. European culture shunned programmatic music let alone music with lyrics. The idea that great music is based on lyrics is not exactly settled.
I would add that I’ve never encountered lyrics in a rap song that quite move me like say Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen.
I can see how I came across as saying great music needs lyrics, but to clear that up I know it doesn't. Much as I like Hip-Hop, I listen to electronic more than anything, and of that I'd say half is pure instrumental. So if there's any bit of objectivity in music it's that music doesn't need lyrics to be good. The point I was working from is the idea of calling any music bad. Calling it bad invokes a standard, for lyrics and production.
But surely your point isn’t that all music is good. Are you saying there isn’t “bad” music?
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Well in a sense I agree you used too much detail, but I think a more succinct defense of hip hop that covers more ground is possible. Mostly I think the essay would be more convincing if it didn't read as such an apologetic and more directly addressed the issues conservatives have. I also find it annoying because I feel like I've seen hip hop described in this way to the point of cliche, it just seems to be the way hip hop fans speak about it as a kind of collective unconscious (and I implicate my former self in this as a once big hip hop fan).
If I were to summarize the analysis of the "dancing" tweet you posted, I'd say "hip-hop is decadent and conservatives don't like that." Then the response would either be hip-hop isn't so decadent or that actually decadence is okay, and you appear to argue the former.
One issue I have is that I see most modern music as decadent, and so arguing that hip hop influenced modern music doesn't move me. But I lean more towards decadence is fine, and it's just a kind of natural part of culture, and you basically need to navigate it for yourself with a measure of stoicism. But also, as a multi-culturalist liberal, I think a lot of the "Black" construction around hip-hop and in general is unhelpful when it's bought into by the right or the left. Anyone I meet who has "Blackness" as a sticking point, either way, is someone I would hope that introducing Jazz to would help loosen that and help one move towards common humanistic values.
I would recommend listening to A Love Supreme and reading the liner notes if you haven't. It's something to really think about, and I think could alter your view towards what the components of a song are/can be.
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The people who are blaming hip-hop for cultural decay would have blamed jazz for the same 70 years ago, and now jazz is probably the second most "respectable" high brow musical genre after classical.
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For your consideration, you forgot one genre...The murder confessional.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=14WE3A0PwVs?si=SWV37NVjt9_6wEM3
I shot Darnell with a long ass gun and I tossed it in to the a-quar-ium.
Consider this my confession, admissible in court
I killed Darnell Simmons for Sport!
This is such a phenomenon that various legal systems have passed laws expressly accepting or forbidding the admission of rap lyrics as evidence. It is an ongoing legal hot spot https://www.americanbar.org/groups/young_lawyers/resources/tyl/practice-areas/rap-music-trial-art-or-confession/
MF DOOM has a funny song about that: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gQtKJbptcns
There's also the I'm literally on the run for murder confessional.
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To look at this point a bit, these things are absolutely not arbitrary and worthless. Manners, expected behavior, et cetera are highly refined social technologies that teach people how to socialize in expected manners and not have to figure it all out on their own.
To your examples about leaders dropping decorum, there's a difference between an in control man dropping decorum occasionally for emphasis, and destroying decorum entirely as a concept. Also, mass manipulation of public opinion via inauthentic markers of 'realness' is not a good development, in my personal opinion.
Part of the breakdown we're seeing in community and romantic relationships comes from this attitude of destruction towards all social convention, which rap absolutely pushes as you admit. On a higher level, I think many people on the right dislike rap because it is explicitly about tearing down these old Western ideals and virtues, which you seem to see as a good thing if it's clever and sounds cool.
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I know there are people on the right who enjoy Hip-Hop, plenty of them. Kanye was pretty much unpersoned for so typically being ahead of the curve in voicing views he'd probably skate by voicing now, views those sufficiently familiar with Hip-Hop will know range from being the norm among black artists to comparatively tame. That's part of why what BAP wrote came across to me as so laughable, BAP, man, blacks really don't like jews. They just know better than saying it outside of friendly confines, they don't have Kanye's instability, they also don't have his genius.
The King of Hip-Hop released in summer 2021 Donda, what I would argue is not only his best record but one of the greatest ever produced. As-released Donda is 27 tracks running 109 minutes, the last 4 are alternate versions of previous songs on the record so ignoring those it's 87 minutes (if you're going to listen, change it to play Jail pt 2 instead of Jail as track 2). It's a record where the many artists Kanye featured included profanity in their verses, but in final editing the profanity is censored and there is no explicit variant of the album. There is no fucking hoes content and no shooting thugs content, in part because the album's tribute and namesake is Kanye's mother Donda West. Because of her, appropriately its genre is in fact primarily Gospel (And while Heaven and Hell is not progressive Hip-Hop, multiple other tracks show Kanye's continuing prog innovativeness.) Its religious genre is not something read into it by fans, not like Christians once arguing U2 is secretly religious, not Tyler Joseph where he's open about his faith and has spoken of Christian themes in his songwriting. Donda is purposefully Gospel. The most influential musician since Michael Jackson released an album that is arguably his best, and it's Gospel. I said it already, Kanye's a genius.
Music has been subject to repeated moral panics. There are targets of justified moral concern that were and are deliberately slandered as moral panics, but not music. There were panics about the Beatles and the Stones, Marilyn Manson and "Satanic Death Metal" and Hip-Hop and "Rap." Suburban mom WASPs blaming ills again and again on the Other rather than grappling with their inability to raise their children. Physician, heal thyself.
When the clueless blame Hip-Hop for hood culture, they are blaming rock for the decline in lasting relationships and the rise in casual sex and they are blaming GTA and Call of Duty and 2A for Sandy Hook. In Hip-Hop it is that most classic mistaking of cause for effect: Hip-Hop didn't cause hood culture, hood culture caused Hip-Hop. If it never emerged, black musicians would be singing about money, women and gang violence in Rock & Roll. If Rock never emerged and the most popular music in the ghetto was Yo-Yo Ma on Bach there'd still be drugs, tricks and drivebys. If that slice of ability in the community suddenly lost or never had that outlet, do you think those communities would be better or worse? Worse, obviously. Some of those artists, the few who did grow up in the shit, who do have a real brilliance, they'd have fallen into crime and not gotten out. They would have done very well. More crime, more violence, more kids, more deaths.
"That's their problem"? No shit, it's their problem right now. One of the reasons Kanye turned so hard, after either his instability or the people around him who actually seem to have been handlers and controllers engaged in constant psychic sabotage, is because he had so much hope for Obama helping Chicago and it didn't fucking happen. The hood already suffers in silence. What'd BLM do? Yeah, Black Lives really fucking Matter to the the movement that resulted in so sharp a spike upward in post-Floyd homicides and premature deaths.
Hip-Hop, good? I said I don't call music bad, so should I call it good? I enjoy it, I think its best has beauty in a way precious little other music captures. And I like that the best rappers and best producers are known. There's this French DJ who goes by Thylacine, he just released an album called "and 74 musicians", so it's "Thylacine and 74 musicians" (Spotify). It's an album of wonderful electronic-orchestral arrangements by an artist with under 80K subscribers on YouTube and not even an English Wikipedia page. How many of you have heard of him? People know Kanye, people know Jay-Z, people know Pharrell. I love Pharrell, for a decade before he made it as a white American household name he was doing some of the best production work in the business with Chad Hugo as The Neptunes. Then Daft Punk. I also love saying this in the rare times I get the chance: The song everybody knows by Pharrell called Happy isn't his best song called Happy. Seeing Sounds drags at points but Happy, Sooner or Later, and You Know What are phenomenal. It might seem like I'm arguing against my own point by highlighting obscurities of Pharrell's discography but no this guy is one of the best, and people know him, and he puts his best in the music he brings to them. The guys who break in and last make the music they want to make, they don't stay still, they're always moving. That is admirable.
And while Hip-Hop itself being good music I won't "answer" (I spent several thousand words saying it is). I will say with moral certainty the world would be less and worse without it. It is a good thing that Hip-Hop exists. It uplifts more than it degrades.
Except soft power matters. Hip hop may not have created gangs but it provided prestige to, for example, California gang culture which everyone around the world knows of for a reason.
Not only do we see this mystique ruin rappers who are from the hood but refuse to stay out of it once they make it, we see people who are not (Chris Brown) get entangled with gangsters because of the cultural cachet it possesses (Tupac is probably the ur-example of this, and should be in Wikipedia under "when keeping it real goes wrong").
If rich people who have every incentive to avoid this are falling victim to the allure of this stuff, I don't think marginal youths in weak communities are going to be less susceptible. That, imo, is the difference between rap and CoD: neurotic suburban mothers who don't have real problems and so have to manufacture a panic are not in the same boat as people whose children actually are at huge risk. They don't need additional cultural pressure pushing in the direction of hedonism and violence.
What about all the cases where hip hop money was essentially used to fuel gang beefs? The whole Tupac/Biggie beef was made infinitely worse by drawing in gang members who were looking for money. Both died (it almost sparked a war between gangs), the artform was weaker for it and the community hardly benefited when Death Row folded and even the hyenas soon went hungry again
In places like Chicago drill only seemed to feed the cycle of violence. It was bad enough, people making songs insulting dead enemies didn't help. Lots of people - including rappers - died as a result.
And, of course, Young Thug who was apparently using his money and cachet to get involved in all sorts of organized crime in Atlanta - beware any man who can maintain street cred after dressing like a woman in the most homophobic genre ever - allegedly almost leading to the death of Lil Wayne, another rap potentate.
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