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~~Dirty~~ · 07-19-2011, 08:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GuitarBizarre

The issue wasn't that this **** doesn't happen. The thing I take issue with is that I simply don't believe the HUGE numbers of rappers that claim to have seen or done all of this crap, can possibly all be telling the truth.

Think of it this way. There is a HUGE amount of rap dealing with gangland or crime related subject matter. Hundreds, thousands of rappers.

Now, we know from it being goddamn obvious that not every person affected by gangland violence or crime is going to be a rapper.

That means that people who are affected by gang ****, as a group, contain a subset, a very, very small subset, of people who are rappers.

If we extrapolate from that, and assume every rapper is telling the truth about their gang exploits, then we necessarily assume that the proportion of people who are NOT rappers, being affected by the same stuff, increases in proportion to the number of rappers, yes?

Now, knowing how many rappers are out there rapping about this stuff, we have to judge for ourselves whether we believe that many people are actually that strongly affected by gangland violence. even if we assume 2/10 people in high-crime areas are rappers (A figure I would imagine to be an unrealistically high proportion), then for every 2000 rappers, we assume that 8000 other people are experiencing the same **** on a daily basis.

When you total up how many rappers there are, add onto their numbers the number of non-rappers who live the same sorts of lifestyles outside of that musical interest and creative outlet, in my mind, you rapidly reach strospherically high numbers of people that rappers are claiming implicitly live this sort of life. Unrealistically high numbers.

For that reason, I simply don't believe that every rapper, or even a significant minority of rappers, whose subject matter contains gang or drug references, can possibly be telling the truth, because if we were to assume that that many people live lives directly comparable to hip-hop lyrics, we would also have to assume that the areas where these people live are nigh on uninhabitable, human wastelands ruled by mobs and guns. It'd be like trying to back up a statement that said there are places in the US where life is literally like living in some kind of strange mad-max scenario.

Dude you have to be retarded to think all artists record music completely based off things that happened to them, and that goes for all genres. I believe most of the gangster rap is trying to capture a mindset or mentality of their area. A lot of these guys ARE from the hood, and even if there stories aren't exactly how they happened, it's the kinda stuff that happens where they grew up. Nobody listens to The Message by Nas and really thinks he started banging some chick who was cheating on her husband then killed her husband, took his money, and killed the girl too. Some of it is entirely fake, but so what? We base things largely on our perceived images of celebrities anyways even though we know they are probably false.

There's a lot of mainstream stuff that sounds good and that I can just casually listen to. But I like to listen to stuff I think sounds good AND impresses me with lyrics or delivery or whatever because I know how hard it is to put a full song together even though a lot of rock/metal/other genre fans don't recognize how hard it is.