Blanche_Minim

Those of you who are, as I am, regular listeners of the Need to Know with Mona Charen and Jay Nordlinger podcast will recently have heard Mark Steyn inveighing against rap music. “I do have a big problem with [rap], in that I think there’s an absence of human feeling in these songs,” Steyn said. “It’s not just that they’re explicit… the idea that rap is the authentic expression of black identity, which is what a lot of these people — the idea that Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald … the idea that any of these authentic black musicians would’ve thought that some guy doing some pneumatic laundry list of his hos is any kind of authentic expression of black culture or black identity is outrageous. Those guys wouldn’t have been on board for that.”

That may well be true, and for all I know, Mona’s right that rap portends the decline of Western civilization. (Whether it does or doesn’t, the certainty and regularity with which those kinds of sentiments are expressed by our side has inspired some commentary. Conor Friedersdorf, writing in The Atlantic, suggests that the refusal of many conservatives to engage with popular culture sufficiently to construct an informed opinion about it, while not hesitating to form an opinion anyway, will forever peg us as judgmental, out-of-touch sticks in the mud. But that’s a subject for another post.)

My question is more basic. Setting aside the problem of lyrical content, is rap or is rap not music?

Jay Nordlinger, who is an expert on classical music, seemed interested in the same question during the podcast. When Steyn first addressed the absence of human feeling in rap, Nordlinger said, “Of melody, of harmony? Of the fundamental elements of music…?” suggesting that to his mind, human feeling is conveyed by the mechanics of music as much as by the words that are spoken. (That argument would seem to be bolstered by an example like, say, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which I’d imagine even Snoop Dogg can’t listen to without emotion. It applies, indeed, to the vast universe of classical music and other music without lyrics.)

That’s not quite the question Steyn answered, though. He interpreted the question as referring not to those mechanics, but to fundamental emotions and terms of human interaction — the “fundamental things” that apply in As Time Goes By. Few would deny that those fundamentals are in short supply in most of the rap oeuvre. But the original question remains: is this stuff music or isn’t it? What is music anyway?

Musical Ricochetti, where do you come down on this? Factoring out the language and the woman-loathing, is there anything musically redeeming about rap? Is rap any more or less musical than, say, thrash metal, and is it more or less of an assault on the whole idea of music? Is it a denial of music? Are the rhythms in any way groundbreaking in musical terms? Is spoken music still music?

In short: is this stuff music or noise?

I am against rappers being considered artists and their so called music "rap" should not be considered art or music.

To begin I will define rap:
Slang . blame or punishment, especially for a crime.
Slang . a criminal charge: a murder rap.

So as you can see the word rap has a lot to do with crime and punishment and even murder, so why should this so called music made by "rappers" have such a word as this in there? It is also easy to see why the "rap music" has such things as gang violence, drug$, $ex, alcohol, and pretty much every curse word imagined including not so appropriate nicknames for the female gender and also the now popular and inappropriate word for dark-skinned people (I believe everyone knows what I refer too) are uttered constantly.

Here is a piece of the lyrics for one of these "rap" songs:

Lil Wayne's She Will

I tell her now gon' pop that pu$$y for a real n!gga
I already know that life is deep, but I still dig her
N!ggas is jealous, but really I could care less
I'm in Hell's Kitchen with an apron and a hairnet
Devil on my shoulder, the Lord as my witness
So on my Libra scale, I'm weighing sins and forgiveness
What goes around comes around like a hula hoop
Karma is a b!tch? Well just make sure that b!tch is beautiful
Life on the edge, I'm dangling my feet
I tried to pay attention but attention paid me
Haters can't see me: nose-bleed seats
And today I went shopping and talk is still cheap
I rock to the beat of my drum set
I been at the top for a while and I ain't jump yet
But I'm Ray Charles to the bull$h*t
Now jump up on that d!ck and do a full split!

You can see the sexual sense of this song in just the first verse. The first line and last line are extraordinarily dirty as you can see, "pop that pu$$y for a real n!gga" and "now jump on that d!ck and do a full split".

Do we really want to consider this art and music for the children of our nation to freely listen to as they wish? This song is dirty and that is only the first verse as i said before. There are plenty more verses to this song that i wouldnt even consider reading or even glancing at. The teens and other kids around me in schools listen to this "music" 24/7 and they act like they are going to go join a gang as soon as they are out of high school. some of them dont even think about going to college. The generation i now live in is'nt as respectable as it should have been. todays influences are strong on these kids, and so far good influences have been lacking.

Rap is a bad influence and todays kids have been raised to it. The mentioning of gang's being all that and violence being an everyday thing it is no wonder gang violence has increased dramatically. Rap could even be considered the gangs new recruiter. Here are some statistics of gang violence in 2011:

1.Approximately 772,500 people in the United States belong to gangs. This number tends to grow every year, especially in those cities that have more than 25,000 people living in them. Some statistics have shown that there was an 8% drop between 1999 and 2000 but overall gang violence continues to grow.
2.In Los Angeles 59% of all homicides are gang related. This is true of 53% of all homicides in Chicago. Last year, there were 698 gang related homicides in just these two cities alone. In 130 other cities that have a population of at least 100,000 people there were only 637 homicides.3.More than 24,500 gangs are currently active within the United States. This is a 5% decrease in the number of gangs that were in existence in 1999. However, cities who have a population of more than 25,000 people have reported a small increase in the number of gangs that are causing gang violence within their cities.
4.Forty-five percent of cities that have a population of at least 25,000 people have seen an increase in gang violence over the past two years. In cities with a population of between 50,000 and 99,999 people, there has been a 37% increase in gang violence. Those cities with a population of 100,000 people have reported a 69% increase in gang violence.
5.Approximately 47% of gang members are Hispanic, 31% are African American, 13% are white and 7% are Asian. This is one of the few statistics that seemingly remains fairly steady over the years regardless of the rise and fall in the other statistics about gang violence.

So as you can see gang violence is a big problem right now, and with the amount of rappers singing about it and how its "bad@ss" its no wonder the crime rates and gang activity have increased. We need to make a stand against this supposed form of music! It will be hard but worth it!

Urban Hat€monger ?

Stop trolling please.

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Janszoon

Not only is trolling against our rules, but plagiarizing writing from another site is as well. Don't do either one again.

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