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| ...because I'm a teenager, with a little gold... |
I used to be a punk in spirit and from high school a fan of industrial music (we used to call it "synthare" = EBM-head) but what I carried with me from the punk days is an enthusiasm for anything that comes from the cracks in the side-walk and out of the ordinary.
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Going back in time, this means that even though I never really got the point of hip-hop I really liked the message that NWA and Public Enemy were sending when they got political (which wasn't enough if you ask me...).
As I liked, and still like, aggressive music, I always felt that it would be great to have the hip-hop revolutionary guys take one step further from the mainstream and just launch into the counter-culture, but instead they became the mainstream... This is not as much of a point as it is a reflection as there are few songs that I love as much as "Straight outta Compton", just that the revolution got kinda lost... In any case, the whole point of this post is that we recently had the whole senior management over here in Japan and they made a big deal out of it with fancy videos and stuff...
The thing was that in one of the videos presenting the senior management they had the whole hip-hop thing going, with scratching and everything, while presenting a couple of middle-aged white dudes... At that precise moment I felt that hip-hop, as any form of social commentary was dead... When a few middle-aged white dudes at an american medical device company thinks it's "cool" to have a soundtrack of hip-hop beats and scratching, that means that the whole thing is dead...
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I still kind of cross my eyes every time you (infrequently) mention EBM.
synthetic.org
You hit the vain with that post. Anything worthwhile these days is all self-promoted. Skinny Puppy started out that way...though I was more of a NoMeansNo listener myself, but that's neither here nor there.
Not to mention that Japanese hip hop was never any good, and corporate from the start (isn't all music that gets heard here?). Besides, this language doesn't rhyme and hardly has rhythm: just like Japanese dancers.
They went from "Ghetto" N.W.A/Ghetto Boys to Jay-Z and Kanye...who are the 1%ers of the 1%ers...the only thing street about them is their million dollar cars drive on them...or they fly in private jets everywhere?
I'm an Olde and a teenager when the whole New York City Renaissance of art/dance/fashion/music that was graffiti, break dance, hip-hop style, rap, was going on, the Golden Age: a burst of creative energy, everybody wanting to be different, creating something out of nothing. It was new. Rap to me will always be "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugarhill Gang, Curtis Blow's "The Breaks," Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Afrika Bambaataa, the funk of Parliament. Then something happened and it was like corporations swept everything up and packaged it for sale and you were in or out. What's really new since then? It's all recycled. How many more years do we have to see sixties and seventies fashions yet again? I cringe at the phony hip hop all over the place. And get off my lawn or I'm calling the police.
White middle-aged men are just the kiss of death to any kind of counter-culture. I don't know why kids' parents try to prevent them listening to certain types of music, when the easiest way to totally destroy any credibility it had is simply to say how much you 'dig' it.
It's one of the few things I'm looking forward to about my son's teenage years, to be honest.
wow, wow, and wow,
i cant believe you guys who know little about hiphop and yet thinking that hip hop is dead..
that's because if all you know are what comes out from tv/mtv or radio then you pretty much are really just at the tip of the hip hop iceberg.
and from your comments, it's just sad that you look like you havent really done much research on the music genre before commenting as such
to start things off,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Tongues
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_hip_hop
happy exploring.
I just listened to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and I think that was the first hip-hop.
RSA - EBM is the shit, always was, always will be! Nothing like a sequencer, heavy dance beat and rough vocals!
Will - Yeah, it's a bit sad how the revolution got lost in all the confusion...
asdahoudha - Yep, Japanese hip-hop I have even less love for, never was anywhere near the underground at any point...
Chris - Yeah, they all got rich... Hey, whatever happened to 2-live crew btw ;)
Theresa - I agree, something like that... All of that "do it yourself" punk-attitude with the whole culture just gone nowadays from hip hop...
Kamo - Indeed! You can go on about how "Daddy can shake his booty with the best of them", but then there's probably some new fad that we'll never be able to understand...
Ike - Sure, I know that there's some people trying to keep it real, but the fact is that musically it's not that different from the mainstream hip-hop, if it would, it would be a separate music genre... I used to like some of the cross-genre stuff until it all turned into nu-metal... I even tried so hard to like Ice-T's metal project but couldn't really take it...
Theresa - Didn't Stravinsky sample "The Robots" from Kraftwerk too ;)
i'm responding to your suggestion that hip hop is dead, and it is not.
if you're referring cross-genre hiphop, of coz, there're many fine examples, hip hop with jazz, even hip hop with punk rock..
the point is if you dont explore and do some research on your own , then no one can save you from your mistaken view that hip hop is dead, which you conclude only by knowing some mainstream hiphop music.
need some hints??
allmusic.com/explore/genre/rap-d1
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_rap
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