Quote:
Originally Posted by Surell
Anything mainstream is mainstream. A whole genre isn't mainstream, there are still people working underground. I don't think you know quite enough about the genre to say every aspect of it is mainstream. There are rappers past and present as punk or more so than a lot of punk.
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This sentiment is undermined by the fact that punk never went mainstream in any meaningful way. Punk was not the music of the everyman and never tried to be. Punk was the music of the freethinker, the radical thinker, the social activist. The everyman to punk was a lost cause--sheep, follower, automaton who bows to authority, conditioned by religion. Rap IS the music of the everyman. They are not the same, they are opposites. In areas where rap can be said to be radical, it's largely due, once again, to dada as I will explain shortly.
Example:
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Gil Scott-Heron was NOT rap. He was a jazz poet. In interviews, he rejected the idea that he was in any way responsible for rap or that he was its "godfather" as he was called. He considered himself jazz--which he definitely was. His hero was Langston Hughes--the true inventor of jazz poetry--whom I doubt most rappers have ever heard of much less read.
Guys like Kanye West claim to have been influenced by Gil Scott-Heron but did he understand him?? Does he know what Scott-Heron meant when he said the revolution will not be televised? Scott-Heron spent much of his time railing against mass media regarding it as a mental poison. Yet West seems to revel in the spotlight of the mass media--everything from his embarrassing gaffe with Taylor Swift to his marriage to Kim Kardashian. Would Heron have ever done anything like that? Hell, no!
West has become the very thing Heron warns us against, something I think he got from the Situationists--the dadaist political philosophers--or he hit on the same idea independently (but being a very intelligent man probably encountered it by reading philosophical and political treatises). They warned us of mass media. Mass media can be summed up in a phrase: The Spectacle, i.e. a social relationship mediated by images. The spectacle thrives in mass media. Though it, the spectacle broadcasts images that turn us into consumers and, as consumers. we can then be controlled. Life then becomes not about living but rather about having.
Our religious fervor is transformed from the spiritual realm to an economic one. Commodities became as religious fetishes. A fetish is a little doll or figurine held by certain people to be a representation of a god and therefore imbued with certain powers. In a consumerist society, we hold commodities in a similar reverence. So religion is part of the spectacle. The more a person has, the more respect he or she is given. The more expensive their toys, the more we are awed. No thought is given to the ordinary workers who produce those commodities. it's not even the person we really respect, it's their toys. If he didn't have them, we could care less about him. It's as though the toys, the commodities, are imbued with a special, captivating power.
The images fed to us by the spectacle replace true human interaction. Everything becomes merely a representation, an image, a masking of reality.
So the revolution will not be televised. It can't be. True revolution would mean everybody is in the streets fighting the good fight. Were this televised, it would mean the corporations are still in control, still functioning, even orchestrating the whole thing. It would mean there is an audience watching and so are not participating and therefore not living and therefore no revolution. The spectacle would win.
But Kanye West has become a tool of the spectacle willingly and so it does not seem he understands a thing Gil Scott-Heron said. If you doubt that jazz could ever get that radical, check out the writings of Leroi Jones.