Re: Hiphop

[bon moun <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

At 07:27 PM 6/22/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Stan, yes, most rap is bought by whites -- as you say,partly because
>whites outnumber nonwhites by so much. Even if every single black person
>bought rap, which of course they don't, that is only 12 percent of the
>pop. But you know even really well off white kids go for rap and the
>whole hiphop thing.  My cousin's son, who is twelve, showed up at my
>dad's 80th birthday outfitted entirely in tommy Hilfiger -- huge falling
>off pants, the whole bit. anmd don't foget eminem -- the white guy who
>likes to rap about killing his girlfriend.

Gosh, I don't want to get into an endless set of comparables.  "I killed my
love today, will you cry for me?"  Rock lyrics from today, among many
others.  All I'm saying is that this stuff, where it is as excreble as some
is, is not a reflection of one genre, but of the general jadedness of youth
and the escalating threshhold to shock and titillate and find new ways to
inappropriately express anger.

>  As for rap not being worse than rock and roll -- well, much of rock
>and roll was pretty macho, and I'm no rock scholar,but i can think of
>only a few songs that were openly contemptuous of women ("Yakkety yak,
>Don't Talk Back'which was just a novelty song), or that glorified male
>violence ("Johnny get Angry," "He Hit me and it Felt Like a Kiss"). The
>rolling Stones were about as far as it got in the crude sexual
>objectification line -- remember how shocking that album cover with Mich
>Jagger's zipper was considered at the time? But -- correct me if I'm
>wrong -- rock and roll--not to mention Motown, my personal favorite pop
>genre, although I also like country music -- also had lots of really
>romantic songs, full of vulnerable male swooning for girls and vice
>versa. the dominant mood wasn't hostility at all! Rap doesn't seem to
>have many songs in which men express affection or admiration for women,
>or vulnerability, or longing for more than a blow job from a woman.

Again, I would hesitate to pin the rap on rap (-:  Doesn't Aerosmith
celebrate this level of relationship just as much as Snoop Doggy Dogg?  And
many female artists are just as forthcoming in their lyrics... which isn't
necessarily a bad thing, depending on the contest of the whole tune, given
that women's lyrics are no longer roped out of portraying physical
desire... something that used to be forbidden.

>  What do your kids and their friends like about it?

The same thing everyone likes about music.  The interesting and patterned
production of sound, the social activities that grow up around music, and
the (often imperfect) expression (call it objective correlative, if you
like) of things they feel.

and how do you feel
>about it?

Some of it I like, some of it I fnd tolerable, and some of it doen't do
anything for me.  But it wasn't imprinted on me like Temptations, Carole
King, Doors, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, James Brown, Aretha, et al.

I'm way past the age when kid's pop music speaks to me. so
>maybe I'm missing the point. I miss melody, though, and people who can
>actually play an instrument other than the tape recorder.

I spend a lot of time in Haiti, where the hip-hop sounds are being very
creatively blended with Voudon rhythms and Rara, and it's very good stuff.
All I'm saying is I wouldn't be too generally dismissive.  Though
commercialized and distorted by many of the dominant values, this music
came from urban streets, and is an expression of incredible creativity on
the part of its originators.  It doesn't displace melody and instruments,
which are both creeping back into hip-hop as it becomes blended into newer
music--a truly dialectical process (-:

I would never ask someone else to share my aesthetic values.  You don't
have to like rap/HH.  But don't judge the entire phenomenon by some bad
lyrics.

Take care.

Stan




"If insurrection is an art, its main content is to know how to give the
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			-Vo Nguyen Giap



"Rather than seeking comparabilities in statistical terms among what are
all too often superficial features of different situations, comparabilities
must be sought at the level of determinate mechanisms, at the level of
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