GuitarBizarre

So, I pretty much hate most hip-hop. I can appreciate Busta Rhymes doing his million-miles-an-hour thing, I loved and still love Eminem up to and including Eminem show, I love Professor Elemental, K.Flay is receiving my interest, and Deltron is one of my favourite things ever. Will Smith makes me smile when he shakes the room because he's funny and makes you grin, and Sway and Roots manuva have my eternal respect.

But beyond that, I really don't have a rosy view of the genre. Dre's rapping comes off as clumsy at best, and his subject matter is asinine. I can't listen to NWA without just wondering what the point is behind the bravado and self-aggrandisement, Kreayshawn screams vapid and featureless to me through a megaphone capable of levelling cities, Canibus is thematically interesting at first but its a swift movement from first listen, to the realisation that for all he crows about his intellect, he's unable to string together a coherent story or dialogue, so his intelligence marketing comes off as uninspired, like he's chucking in random words from a textbook to try and sound academic. Snoop Dogg bores me to tears and its subject matter has never been interesting enough to bother with.

Cypress Hill make a good stab at having a running theme with interesting music, but really its just a vocal style and beyond that there isn't much to recommend it to me.

And yet, the type of rap that recieves the most critical acclaim is the above, the dehumanising, the self aggrandising, the drug-driven, that which glorifies violence, reduces other human beings to nothing, which makes its progenitor appear nothing less of a caricature than a photoshopped bodybuilder, too large for life, too unreal, too perfect within their own mind to be taken seriously. To listen to most rappers and rap fans, you'd get the impression that their lives consist entirely of toking up, drivebys, champagne, blowjobs and being rich but doing nothing except the aforementioned with the money. Why? WHY? What about that subject matter appeals to people? Where is the dialogue, the story, the artistic representation, the movement of the listener to any position OTHER than baseless endless hero worship?

What, in short, is the POINT of all the posturing, drug use, and self-aggrandisement in rap?
For every concept album where Deltron details the struggles of humanity versus an overminded corporation, there are ten, twenty, a hundred rappers ballin mad honeys and drinking champagne. For every Professor elemental, rapping with characters and telling interesting stories, creating fantasy worlds and smiling along with the listener, there are dozens, scores, thousands of rappers toking up at home and shooting at the neighbours.

Its gone beyond the point of caricature, for every rapper who treats their subject matter as being 'the streets' or 'the lifestyle' to be telling anything like the truth, you'd expect an urban apocalypse to be occuring every time you stepped outside your door in america! You'd expect it to look like Biff Tannen was running the casino in 1985 to hear most rappers talk, if you assumed they were all telling the truth!


What am I missing? Where is the interesting rap, the stuff that broaches new subjects, new topics, the rap that creates characters and places them in situations the listener KNOWS can't be real? Where is the rap that tells STORIES? Where is the rap that makes the listener smile at ideas more complex, more interesting than pussy and weed? Where is the rap that treats debauchery and a captive audience, as more than a license to make out as if they're god? WHERE IS IT? TELL ME!

As examples, where are the rap songs about racing cars? Prog Rock, Space Rock, Surf, even jazz has songs about this most fundamental, common experience, yet I've never heard a rapper describe an engine roar, let alone a battle of man and machine! What about rap songs about mythology, gods, monsters, the unknown, the ethereal, the alien, the spiritual? I've heard some terrible attempts at broaching these subjects from all manner of genres including rap, but I've never heard rap make these themes work when its bothered to try, whereas rock and roll has Black Dog for starters, and only gets BETTER, if more outlandish, when it starts singing about Thor, and starts yelling about folk legend!

__________________