I notice a lot of times when your post makes it to the bottom of the page on an active discussion, 50% of the time it doesn't get seen.

I addressed this theory in the original post, but here:

Just posted this:
http://www.musicbanter.com/general-m...ml#post1085760

GB, most hip hop has different stories to them.

Sometimes they are reflecting about "the lifestyle" they have went through but not necessarily all the time, there are two threads that we've had around here that list off some stories all in one thread.

http://www.musicbanter.com/rap-hip-h...tory-raps.html

http://www.musicbanter.com/rap-hip-h...ing-songs.html

Have you ever been to Oakland? Or even heard about how Oakland and the Bay Area is?

nah he thinks it's all over exaggerated and things like that don't go on in urban areas.

I'm from the Bay Area. It's 75% talk.

In my area it's not talk.....well about 50% is but stupid crap happens when dudes are all talk and then it really happens to them.

Just two weeks ago this guy died because he was talking shit and didn't want to give up his chain so the stick up kid shot him and took his chain anyways.

I doubt your calculation, sir.
I've never seen Kirby post anything even slightly negative about anything / anybody so we should listen to him.

I know you live there. And I, myself, know some people who live in Oakland who are far from poor / ghetto / etc.
And if you live there then you must know that the 'gangsta ****' going on in east Oakland is not "75% talk."

Kirby: please take the floor - if you want it... I'm listening.

It would be cool to do a geographic map that had an icon for each rapper and where their origin was, with local statistics like "average income/crime rates/prostitution/drug traffic" posted next to them. Just so we could have a quick go-to-guide for which rappers have genuine "street cred".

Then put it all in an aggregate meter. I'd say the total % of genuine "gangster" rappers is 57.94

This would actually be a pretty simple statistical study to conduct. Are you schooled in basic empirical research? I am so I can help if you actually wanna do that.

And .. if you're fucking with me then I know you don't live in the US (y'know .. gangstaland?), you asshole :p:

I've read up on it some, but never actually been so take it with a grain of salt.

I've seen documentaries and read news and what not from the bay area (I frequent a gangster rap forum that was originated in the Bay Area, also).

I know for a fact that murder, assault, and gang related activity around the bay area are pretty high. Oakland alone has 3.5 times murder than the national average.

It's perfectly reasonable to believe that there ARE gangster rappers that ARE doing what they say they do.


Not dealing with the bay area, but for an example, two rappers "Bird" and "Black Walt" from Kansas City were arrested and charged with running one of the biggest cocaine trafficking rings in Kansas City.


Long story short, there are people that put a facade of being gang related and don't really live the life, but it's not fair to rule out that they're all fake. Plenty of rappers die/go to jail every year doing what they rap about.

Mac Dre for example was more or less famous for doing a lot of the crazy **** he rapped about, but who knows how true any of it is.

East Oakland, Richmond, parts of SF, are dicey. Richmond and Oakland were trying to outdo each other on homicides a year back in '03... It was retarded. It was some odd 120 or so homicides in one year, and they were neck and neck. Richmond finally passed Oakland in like '05 or '06 and things took a backseat. Local papers had/have been noting the decrease in violence and how they thought it would increase with the stale economy and it's really not as bad as a decade ago.

But hell, 75% is a ballpark guess. I don't live in East Oakland, or Richmond. I lived nearby, but its a different game I know. Point is, though, is rappers spice up their **** most of the time. I think 25% truth is reasonable when it comes to the gangster ****.

Now we talk about The Grouch, that's like 80-99% truth right there, in my opinion. Del, speaking truth - sittin around, getting high, thinking, stayin out of trouble - something like 80% truth level. Ballpark estimates in my opinion, that's all.

whatever bruh, im dodging and weaving bullets every morning on my way to cereal.

79.6% of all statistics are made up.

Having been to Richmond, Oakland, and some of the dicier areas of SF- Hunter's Point, etc... much of the "Yay Area" stuff is true.

I mean, that's isolated ****. I'm glad on your pass through some of these happy places you noticed some **** go down, but you don't live here. Most people in the Bay are good. That's my underlying point. There's ****-head hoods everywhere stirring up ****. True. There's rappers claiming this and that went down. Maybe. Who knows. But it's not like it's armageddon on the streets. It's been pretty civil the last few years. Only recently has crime started to spike again.

I live 45 minutes from SF. You don't have to explain things to me.

Just to throw in my two cents, when I lived in the Bay Area a couple years ago it seemed quite gentrified and pretty safe basically everywhere I went, including SF and Oakland. It's not that there's no crime or anything but compared to other metro areas it's pretty mild.

Most crime ridden neighborhoods are in the nicest of places. And isolated. That doesn't verify the claim that some outrageous number of gangster rappers are fake. For as delightful as the Bay Area is as a whole, there are some of the most dangerous areas in the U.S. scattered amongst it. Therefore it would not surprise me if more than a small fraction of gangster rappers who have come out of said areas have at least seen or been involved with some gangster ass shit.

I don't even like gangster rap. Why am I defending it?... What is the topic here again? I was initially laughing about the claims in this thread. 23.9% of people would agree.

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.

you need your music to be honest and realistic in order to be taken seriously?

If they are able to sound better musically then real gangsters I would still perfer to listen to them. The subject matter doesn't have to be based on actual events, it just has to be interesting. Thats my biggest issue with it--that it is recycled.

I don't think this issue of authenticity should apply to hip hop solely.

Neither do I. But why do they have to be? I don't think Nick Cave is a murderer but it doesn't mean I don't enjoy his album Murder Ballads.

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.

Okay, so you said earlier that you wanted a story but this type of story doesn't interest you because there is no realism to it but it's a story based off of some things that may or may not have happened?

I believe you're wrong about this. Granted, I don't think I can list even one thousand rappers. Can you?

Anyway, here's what I mean. The areas you mention are not "uninhabitable wastelands" but they are a part of most major cities and medium and small cities. Often within blocks of "good" parts of the same cities.

I'm not gonna argue for the "thousands" of rappers that you take issue with but I'll fill you in on what I've seen. I'm going to mention race, people. Don't get offended.

I grew up in a white middle class suburb in USA - near Washington DC, for your reference.

In Washington, I was robbed by a man who displayed no weapons but did push me against a wall and indicate that he and his friends (he pointed out a bunch of black men sitting on a stoop about a half block away) would beat the living **** out of me if I didn't give him what he wanted. So I gave him money. A cop walked right by us and he quickly let me know that he was "just joking" and took off.

Then I went to Richmond, VA for college. Here's what happened there:
One of my friends was beaten to the point of major brain damage near a McDonalds (we all called it "CrackDonalds" cuz it was in "the hood" - a few blocks from where we all lived). Another friend of mine was pushed off of his bike as he was riding it and it was stolen. I worked in a touristy little cafe and I used to take food that would be thrown away to the stray cats in the vicinity. Once, about 3 blocks from this little cafe, I came upon a guy (black) who was dead, recently shot to death, sprawled out on the steps of some apartment building. I ran.

A friend of mine (white girl) asked me to accompany her while she bought cocaine (I later learned it was freebase) and we went to a housing project and went into a black family's home to buy this stuff. It was like a scene from that old Ice Cube song "once upon a time in the projects". Nobody threatened us but we didn't have to go far to get there.

My roommate encountered a small group of black kids beating up a homeless guy. He yelled at them. They ran. The victim died right there in front of my roommate.

Once I drove up to Philadelphia to see a band play and two guys (both middle aged white guys) got into some kind of traffic altercation. They both stopped their cars in the middle of the road and got out of theirs cars to yell at each other. Then one grabbed a baseball bat from his car and started hitting the other guy's car. Other guy quickly drove off.

My point is that we live in a violent world. Drugs and violence are all around us, always. I saw all of the above just by chance as a "regular middle-class American" and some people have to deal with this stuff daily.

That's why I believe almost all rappers are talking about something halfway true. They may not have experienced exactly what they rap about but it's totally believable that many have some knowledge of how it feels.

I'm not interested in someone bolstering themselves by lying about reality. I'm interested in fiction.

Stop replying to posts argumentatively and listen to the music man. So many good recommendations and they're falling on deaf ears. Rap like any genre is broad and far beyond a surface judgement. Try some alternative rap, you might find it more in you comfort zone, or even some indie hip hop:

Starting to think the same thing... let's get back on topic and drop this whole tangent. I think some people are arguing different things and that's why its not going anywhere, so let's just step back and recommend some songs that aren't about thug life.

GuitarBizarre - any comment on those recommendations with backing bands from back on the bottom of page 3? I was a bit excited to share because I think it might be up your alley, but I can't tell if you've had the time to check 'um. Let me know if you want some more song/artist suggestions...

I don't think GB really wants to find good rap, I think he just wants to complain and whine about why he hates rap.

Yay Philly!

For the record, anyone looking for post-apocalyptic looking parts of American cities really should take a little drive through north Philadelphia where you can find places that look like this all over the place:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/42/87...8624662790.jpg
http://benross.net/images/blog%20ima...13_trip/42.jpg

It's not a tangent, Dood. He asked the question.

Haha, yes, I was in south Philadelphia though. Creepy place.

That's the wonderful thing about Philly, you can find shitty neighborhoods everywhere: north, south, west and... well... east is Camden, NJ which is even worse.

Homey knows his shit.
:laughing:

there's no place like home, eh Jansz?

Heh. Seriously. I read an article a couple months ago that said that the estimated number of abandoned properties here is 40,000. It's crazy. I can think of at least three that I can walk to in under a minute from my house.

I can only think of The Wire when I see these pics!

That's not surprising. Baltimore isn't very far from Philly and they both share similar architecture and similar economic problems.

I admire anyone from media circles throwing out stills like these which completely blow away everyone else's view of the American Dream.

yeah, it's been getting better though, i'd say. I help my dad do construction/landlord work in North Philly, and the areas that looked like hell almost ten years ago are coming up now