Quote:
Originally Posted by Lucem Ferre
No, because the idiocy took my by surprise.
Even those rappers that tHe MeDiA promotes have more depth than what they're presented as. I have no clue why hip hop has to jump through higher standards than we hold for any other genre.
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Very true. "The Media" was a poor choice of words. I think it would be more accurate to say that record companies promoted them, and the media at the time (MTV, radio stations, etc.) would play what was being promoted. I think there are some people (i.e. people who are ignorant of rap) who, when you bring up rap, they have this view of rap as just being this one-dimensional gangsta gangsta sort of thing, which just isn't true.
Listen to any early Ice Cube solo album, or Raekwon's first album, or Jay-Z's first album and yeah, you get insight into their world via raps about crime and drugs, but there's a whole hell of a lot more happening there. And you don't need to get into stuff like conscious rap or backpacker rap to get meaningful lyrics.
It's an interesting question about whether or not there's a different standard for rap/hip-hop compared to other genres. I've known some people that are just straight-up prejudiced against rap because they don't qualify it as "real music" because most of it isn't created with live instruments (these are the kinds of people that begrudgingly came to accept synths in rock music). Of course, these people have little to no understanding of how rap music is/was made, the work and time that went into breakbeats and sampling, and spending day after day digging through crates to find that gem that no other producer had yet found.