Bill Hatcher wrote:...I did not see much about the social aspects of using music or "organized sound" to spread a cultural idea. Rap is just that. It is a culture being spread using rhythms and tones. When I hear a track talking about bitches and Ho's and killing police officers and humping your mother and griping about the evil white man, it does not matter to me if it is being done with angelic harp background. It is vile and dispicable and worse for your spirit as any other form of hate dialog you could listen to.
Rap is nothing but street thug mentality.
Well, yeah, a lot of it is. There is a lot of controversy about it in the black community. But there is also anti-gansta rap, and even Christian rap. Even the worse stuff in rap is the no worse than a lot of other stuff out of Hollywood, on TV, talk shows, and in print. I'm not even sure why we are discussing rap here. There is no steel guitar in rap that I know of.
But as long as we are discussing rap, I might as well quote myself about it from the other current post where it is being discussed.
David Doggett wrote:...seems like what you are not considering is that rap doesn't come from the European tradition you are talking about. It comes from an older, unwritten, oral tradition that goes back millennia in Africa. This tradition has different rules. In that tradition, chanting to rhythm is considered valuable music, even in the absence of melody. People dance to it.
Also, braggadocio, threats, and earthy talk about sex, in other words "attitude," is part of that tradition. That's not to say it is all good. But it is a part of the tradition, and not against its rules. There is a kind of cultural warfare going on both within the African-American community, and with the white community. Rap is a kind of public discourse about that, put to rhythm. Some of the guys doing rap claim they are just describing what they see on the streets around them. Others are exploiting it for excitement and for fame and fortune, the same way Hollywood makes movies about sex and violence.
There are other elements of black culture that feed into rap. There is an old rural southern tradition called "the dozens," where guys swap wild insults with each other, sometimes in short verses and rhymes. I remember white football players doing this to pass the time on the bus coming back from out-of-town games when I was growing up in North Mississippi.
In the '50s we would listen not only to the white country and rock'n'roll stations, but also the black stations out of Memphis and Nashville. There is a thing black preachers do where their sermon gradually develops a rhythm and basically becomes rap. And gradually the choir and congregation will interject shouts and chants and begin humming and singing. Eventually the piano, organ or praise band begins to play along and gradually the whole thing evolves into full on praise music. It might take 30 minutes to go from the plain spoken beginning of the sermon, to the rap, to the chanting, to the singing and the instruments. It is a beautiful, breathtaking thing.
When I first heard black street kids rapping, I was pretty amazed. It wasn’t as mean and nasty back then. But here were these young ghetto kids, some of them school dropouts, and they were reciting lines and lines of memorized verse and rhymes. And furthermore, they could begin making it up on the spot, and go on indefinitely. There was a heck of a lot of work and practice and skill development involved. And the rhythm was infectious.
So there is a whole different set of rules and customs involved. The whole history of American music, from ragtime and jazz, to Gershwin, to rock’n’roll - it’s all an interplay between European traditions and African traditions and Latin traditions and Native American traditions. And country music has been affected too. There are blue notes, and jazz chords, and syncopation and rhythm, and attitudes in the lyrics and vocals, that would not have been there from the European tradition alone.
Nobody has to like or listen to stuff they don’t care for. But the idea that rap is just “noise” is just wrong. It may sound like just noise to some people. But to others there is a lot in it. It's not from the European tradition, but neither is a lot of other stuff in American music.
Seems like rap might be getting a bad rap.
