Poptarts that don’t deserve to listen to rap
faux_rillz
14,343 Posts
Swiped from another board:i don't post much in general and even less in The Lesson. But I thought this post might fit in here. Lately, over the past 3 or four years I've been doing alot of soul searching, trying to get to some of the roots of my suffering and my discontent with life in general. I've moved across the country, quit smoking, started yoga, seen a shrink and some other stuff to try and clear my head. Today, I'm sitting at my computer doing some work when I find myself fighting this anxious headache, the same headache that I've had for as long as I can remember. I noticed that it has intensified ever since I started listening to hip-hop consistently which was about five or six years ago.Don't get me wrong, I used to love listening to hip-hop. It's been with me through some of the most memorable times in my life. Redman, the Wu, ATCQ, oh man. that's taking me back. the Beasties (more so with my older siblings), Snoop, Dr. Dre, the Dogg Pound, DJ Quick, 2pac, Gangstarr, Mos Def, Hammer, KRS-ONE. I always thought I 'got' hip-hop. I always used to argue with my friends about Bad Boy vs. Death Row. Nas vs Jay-Z. Tribe vs. Gangsta. 2pac vs. the police. I liked the diversity of opinions and politics and hip-hop's ability to have ideas and options that were completely in conflict with the status quo and to a certain degree seemed more thought out than attitudes taken up by more intelllectual minded people. I liked the musicality, or the challenge of hip-hop. to take a tradtional song and make something so visceral that you can almost taste it, that you start to live it.But then I went to college and started buying cd's on my own. some out of a defiance for responsibility but also to listen to the stuff that I couldn't have listened to at home. I started getting more and more into hardcore stuff. but there was also this part of me that rejected the music. My background is religious/protestant. so there was always a conflict between the music and my thoughts about the world. Hip-hop, more than any other culture, represented the place in the world that wasn't supposed to be there, that was caught in a blind spot in God's eye. I never really was 'down' with the attitudes in hip-hop, but I always tried to understand, to see life from someone's eye that really needed to connect to people, by any means necessary. I'm older still now, and am at a cross-roads. I had a severe quarter-life crisis (turns out I was suffering from a mental illness) and it really forced me to sort out some stuff in my life. So out went the hard core stuff, the irresponsible stuff. But even that's not good enough now. It's like I'm finally waking up to the fact that I used hip-hop. To try to fit in, to seem cooler than I was, to seem black, to appear worldly, to seem hip. I liked everything about hip-hop except the aspect of sitting in your room, reciting rhymes to pass time. I never got into the aspect of just wildin' out, which is alot of what hip-hop is, no matter how you slice it. Of taking the climax of a moment and extending it for beat after beat after beat.For the longest, the people in hip-hop were my idols. I looked up to them and tried to think like they thought, wishing I was as smart and as worldly and as aware of life as they were. But now, they appear tragically mortal, caught in between the hype needed to adopt a persona to be accepted and the peace needed to just be.I'm still gonna listen to music, although I don't have a clue what that would be, but I'm gonna delete most of the music I have on my computer. I think I'm finally getting a glimpse of who I was underneath the armor of baggy clothes and headphones. He has a big heart.
Comments
I look at that board now and then for anthropological research purposes, in order to observe the poptart in his natural habitat... and it was a slow day on SoulStrut.
Haha! I was thinking exactly the same thing...What kind of herb reads "The Lesson?" Keep it GDR (General Discussion Related).
"actually, that's pretty modern" (no pomo)
i kinda just stopped reading at this point
I guess it's a toss-up between uninformed music discussion (The Lesson) and unappetizing attempts to holler (General Discussion)... I gather the latter is more your speed?
true, I'm making do since we don't have a "modern" graemlin yet, lol
NO, NO POSTMODERNISM
i wonder if he seriously thinks other music forms are full of well adjusted artists who do no wrong and spend their free time sipping herbal tea while release white doves into a flowery feild full of fuzzy bunnies.
Oh man, that's takin' me back.
I always thought I 'got' hip-hop.
I felt sorry for the dude but realized you can be crazy and still not be a douche bug like this fucking cornball (with a variety of racial issues).
This is what white people do to music. They did it to jazz, they did it to rock n roll, and they're going to do it to hip hop.
Future hip hop star:
*cue Beatnuts* "I WANNA FUCK, DRINK BEER AND SMOKE SOME SHIT! I WANNA SMOKE DRINK BEER AND SMOKE SOME SHIT!"
haha, i can't front though i check out okayplayer AND post there too
true this, way to over-intellectualize
In another 5 or 6 years hiphop might be dead, at least the hiphop I grew up on in the 90's. I don't see too many ATCQs, Pharoah Monchs or even Skeezos. And I don't care what anybody says Dipset and Jeezy ain't bringing back that golden age hiphop.
I didn't really read this because it sucks so much ass, but I wish the powers of the moderators on soulstrut extended to other boards so that they could delete such posts in their places of origin.
XOXOXO
h
Portrait of a dude who FELL THE FUCK OFF!
While it's true that most of the hiphop I listen to is what we now call "golden age", and it's tough to dispute that the hiphop we know might already be dead. I'd just argue that might just be the way musical genres progress (or digress as the case may be). Dizzy Gillespie hated Coltrane, most early jazz cats probably weren't too fond of funk. Maybe we're all meant to stop accepting fluxuations of musical genres around our mid-twenties, from then on saying, "You know back in the day..." Basically every older (50 and on) person I know is like this. I'm sure I'll fall into this catagory.
Then again most of the music I listen to was made before I was born so maybe everything's just becoming shittier.
COSIGN!!!!!!!!!
"Welcome to my congregation, young one. We've got a long fight ahead of us."
*I typed in "face punch" and this came up.
NSFW[/b] below...
I'm moving
sorry homee, but you can NOT compare jazz and hip hop. Nothing even close. I know people wil argue this to their death, but the two, regardless of slight similarities with politics, cannot be compared to each other as a likeness.