Muthaeffing Bootylicious Blah Goes Blat
Rap music sales are in the toilet – the very place where the often violent and misogynistic practitioners of this musical genre happily excrete their pearls of wisdom – and all I can say is that it’s about muthaeffing time.
The Telegraph of London reports that rap music sales have dropped more than twice as fast as overall sales in a profit-hungry industry that is pretty much on its knees – and deservedly so – because it has clung to the good old days when CDs ruled and refused to acknowledge that the future is here.
I am a music lover’s music lover and there isn’t a genre that I don’t enjoy listening to. Except rap. (Okay, a half hour or so of polkas a year is enough and I never got behind disco.) But I can listen to soul, bluegrass, rock, hip-hop, folk, R&B, reggae, classical and jazz of all kinds forever.
Rap has been a conspicuous exception. Even understanding its anger-driven ghetto roots, it seemed hopelessly and boringly one dimensional to me from the first time I heard it and nothing over the last decade or so has changed my mind.
For the life of me I can’t understand why it has been so wildly popular among whites and middle-class blacks. But then I didn’t think that the sport utility vehicle boom would last so long, so what do I know?
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15 Responses to “Muthaeffing Bootylicious Blah Goes Blat”
There’s a lot of stuff in rap not revealed in this post. First up, it’s a music style just like country and rock and all else, and, as such, comes in a whole host of varieties. You can find the sort of gangsta pop rap you are alluding to, but you can also find religious rap, smooth stying rap, social commentary rap, etc. As for its musical offering, the focus is of course on rhythm. In a sense, you reduce the direct lead melody to a large degree so that all attention is on both the rhythm of the words and their content. Of course, much of the content is meaningless, like all pop music, but some of it is not.
Many forms of rap also have a similarity to jazz in that it is fundamentally improvisational. A good rapper has a set of rhymes and rhythms which he or she knows how to combine and modify to compose on the fly. It’s what James Brown pioneered in the early 70s where he set the band up on a repetitive phrase and then made up lyrics as he went. Of course, most James Brown lyrics aren’t particularly stunning. Or perhaps it’s more like old blues musicians who used the old, “set up, repeat the set up, new line” verse structure so that they could improv new lyrics while playing. Except that many rappers are creating entire verses on the fly. As always, only some can do it truly creatively, just as only some guitar soloists can. And, like in all commercial pop, often the bling can take over and the meat that made everyone pop their ears up in the first place is forgotten.
A couple other things are interesting about rap from a social or musicalogical perspective. First, rap and hip hop are both on the frontier of exploring what musical creation is with digital sampling and the like. Same debate is taking off now for video with YouTube and such. The second thing is how much of a social event the creation of much rap music and hip hop is. For people of one musical generation, the epitome of music creation is the genius singer songwriter who can sit alone in his room and create a powerful song. Of course, this is not the only way to understand musical creativity. Neither Elvis nor Aretha Franklin wrote most of their tunes and yet they are both musical beacons. Often when you look at the credits for a rap tune, there could be 5, 6, even more, names listed as the authors of the tune, when this is supposed to be a “solo” album. And this social creation can continue on the stage in performance where you’ve got 4 different people all trading lyrics, 3 people laying down tracks, 5 dancers, and 16 other hangers on all going at it at once.
In short, there’s a lot more going on in rap than saying f-you, ho, and flashing a pimp sign. There’s also a lot of that too.
As for why people who have no direct contact with the culture that created rap would have gone haywire for it? Can’t really answer, other than the fact that it’s the one music their parents hate the most and therefore works perfectly to set off your generation from the last one. But it always seemed the same to me as people of my generation (30s) singing “Satan’s gonna get you” along with AC/DC, pretending to chomp the head off a bat, and then hopping in the car so your mom can take you to the chess club meeting.
pacatrue:
A great and informative response, especially your reflections on why people who have no direct contact with a culture go nuts over it.
Thank you so much.
There is good rap out there. Rap with a positive message.
I think you need to make the distinction between Rap and Gangsta Rap.
Don’t feel bad. About 15 years ago I bravely prounounced to my 13 year old daughter that Rap was already on the way out because Saturday Night Live was making fun of it.
It seems that whenever SNL makes fun of stuff its doomed. Well We were both wrong.
I am however at a loss as to why each recording studio that owns the rights to this music has not taken upon themselves the notion of their own version of ITUNES or Rhapsody or Napster STores and get ALL the profits instead of just a small percent of each song.
Rap lost it’s edge when it became a commercial success. Much of the excess is do to profit and the bottom line. Remember the 80′s and heavy metal and hair bands. Much of those lyrics were just as “bad” as gangsta rap. PBS had an excellent docu-show about rap in the recent past.
Shaun, would you say the same about C&W and root music by lumping in Marty Stuart, Jonny Cash and Allison Kraus with American Idol country and Shania?
There is no need to make a distinction between rap and gansta rap. Shaun already hit the nail on the head with Rap vs Hip-hop.
I really don’t see the difference with Hip-hop and Rap.
It doesn’t even qualify as poetry (accompanied by noise).
think pop vs underground. Rap is uber commercial and meant to sell, whereas Hip-Hop is done for the art. The lyrics have meaning, or at least tell a decent story. Also, the production tends to be more thorough and less dumbed down. An example of a successful hip hop artist IMO would be Mos Def. COmpare him with say, lil’ John and the disticntion becomes quite clear.
The only thing to say that is non-negative about rap (or hip-hop) is that the non-singing is now done in other nation’s music, which also features singing and real music, such as timba in Cuba. (One timba artist who was asked why he introduced the rap style of non-singing into his songs was honest: “It’s because I can’t sing well.”) Having both sung and non-sung verses of songs in timba is interesting, at least once in a while.
DLS – If you want singing I suggest opera or Broadway show tunes.
How many R&& and C&W singers can actually carry a tune?
Lets face it, its just gotten stale. Eminem was the last nail in the coffin and the best thing to hit rap for a long time and he’s white. The rest of the industry has been bringin up repetative talent mostly(cept for Ludacris). Even Snoop’s recent stuff is pretty weak. Tupac is still turning out records, that tells you a bit about how much innovation the genre has seen.
When it gave voice to those without the power to do so in the socio-political arena it was great. PE, Grand Master Flash’s The Message, Run DMC those guys actually had something to say. But when you repeat the mantra of how much bling you have, what you drive, and how many (excuse my language) bitches you have, it becomes nothing but empty bragging. It’s dying because few have anything to say anymore outside of Nas declaring hip hop is dead LOL.
Ha, ha, ha. The young rap punks are getting old!
So say I, who can master the “art” of rap:
“Don’t need no gun go a-rat-a-tat-tat,
Gonna kill da M-F- wit’ a base-ball bat.”
I hate gangster rap. I especially hate it at 150+ decibels. Our small office building is right next to a Taco Bell. I mean right next to it. There is about 15 feet of space and a row of offices separating the main room my cubicle is in from the drive thru lane. Some of these idiots come through there with their stereos cranked so loud that it causes our building to vibrate. I also had someone like that behind me when I was going through a drive thru one time and my rear view mirror was vibrating so much from the sound that the image of the car using its sonic weapon on us all was “quivering”. Is it possible that this is just a continuing conspiracy (that began with heavy metal rock) on the part of the hearing aid manufacturers?
And while I am not especially offended by “bad” language I try to respect those who might be bothered. So I do wonder how parents who might not like their children exposed to Carlin’s 7 words plus some more feel about gangster rap blasting out of vehicles in public.