19 November 2008

musical chairs

stuffwhitepeoplelike

I was informed, somewhat jokingly I presume, that I am in fact a black man by music affiliations. That I listen to rap, jazz, or R&B is the cause of this jest (one I was not at all offended to receive). So it was not to my surprise to read this humorous article on a general tendency to like ancient or abandoned black music (jazz, blues, or old-school rap). I am not certain that my interest is any different, but then again I rarely see a need to express to other people that I've been listening to the Birdman or Nas in the past hour (and for myself prefer doing so to watching TV, which genuinely destroys my ability to ruminate and bores me to no end). I do agree with the sentiment of commercialized rap music being usually crap music. I can recall the ironic scene in "Crash" where Ludacris' character decries the mumbling nonsense of today's radio rappers (a charge he himself is often guilty of) and find fervent agreement in that problem. At some point hip-hop became about glamorizing an image, an image that doesn't actually exist in any ghetto, rather than talking about what was going on and deciding the message was less important than the beats (and the dollars that came with them). Maybe the one is more depressing (and that might explain my personal attraction to it, along with blues music), but that hardly justifies trying to drown it out in a sea of meaningless nonsense.

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