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Originally Posted by Surell
Even if Gil-Scott denies it out of his own displeasure with the genre, the beginnings of Hip Hop, especially with Spoken Word and other forms of post-beat poetry (which may be an incorrect term but they share similarities to me), are pretty well traced to him. I'm sure many people in early Hip Hop saw the same people and places as Heron did, and shared a similar disdain, so the roots aren't that far off.
And you keep bringing up Kanye, but he wasn't at the beginning of Hip Hop, he didn't create it. He is a significant part of today's rap culture, for sure, but, as recent an invention as it is, it has evolved rapidly. It's not nearly as sample based as it was, but it's revised its own conceptions of dance and rhythm. Basically, it's beyond where it started in the popular sense, but that doesn't mean the roots aren't still there, and that some people put emphasis on them more than others.
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All that says to me is that it has lost touch with its origins. In that sense, rap too is dead. And with all the glorification of violence, pimping, pushing, killing and prison life it has preached to young black men, maybe that's a good thing.
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Very interesting points about mass media. It's definitely a qualifier for much of today's popular music (Hip Hop not excluded), but still, the earliest form, which developed closely to Punk (literally and figuratively), doesn't fall entirely into that trap.
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Then rap better get back to that because I see it as responsible for a whole lost generation of blacks. Whites too but not as severely.