Most of them, maybe the vast majority, are just cosplayers projecting their violent fantasies, which I suppose stems from some weird Freudian complex about their sexual inadequacies (see: incels). But some of them will find the ability to act out their violent fantasies when they’re in a mob large enough to give them an apparent impunity from consequences (see: J6). And a handful are psychotic enough that they’ll court likely death (see: the nut who committed suicide by FBI agent when he tried to attack a field office after Trump was indicted in the documents case).
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What was racist about the song? Clown spent the whole article calling a some random dude racist, but never said why.
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Thanks for sharing this.
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As someone who spend a good part of the FGP watching music reactions the first thing I discovered is that the younger folks need more saxophone in their music choices. Along with some other wind instruments like flute, i.e. Boz Scaggs’ “Lowdown”.
It was enlightening to me when these younger folks that grew up on Hip-Hop and Rap finally heard the original song that some artist sampled. i.e. Bruce Hornsby and the Range’s “The Way It Is”. I can’t tell you how many of these reactors were stopped dead in their listening when they realized Tupac sampled this song. But they all appreciated Bruce’s piano ability, so they’re not too far gone.
Yeah but today’s music ain’t got the same soul.
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A fun article to help lighten the mood. A bit OT but not much since this piece of crap should be #1 on the list (and probably tied with many others these days who follow or support his views)
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Not just lacking soul, most Pop songs now don’t even have a chorus (something I hadn’t realized until Sting pointed it out in an interview with Rick Beato). It’s all hard-locked to a Midi rhythm grid, so all that cool push and pull against the beat with bass players and drummers in the pre-Midi days is gone.
And then there’s AutoTune’d vocals, and the annoying emo whisper singers. Hip Hop may be unlistenable for someone of my geezer age, but the rest of Pop music isn’t any better.
And you kids get off my lawn!
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I get the feeling it’s not about planarians.
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The Graboids in Tremors should have rated #1 in that list. The scale is big but not ridiculously huge like the Dune worms. It’s also a great B-movie start to finish (the sequels are dreck).
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Hard no. You are ignoring precisely what MCs call “flow,” which has to do with how phrasing, inflection, syncopation, hemiola, polymeter all within the text’s delivery interacts with the beats. It is in no way “b-o-r-i-n-g.”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/924425
The following, from The Roots’ Black Thought, is a 10-minute improvisation. This is musicianship and spontaneous creativity operating at the absolute highest level:
Sorry, not trying to engage in overkill–but the accusation above is frequently leveled by outsiders against hip hop and it is simply, musicologically, technically, and aesthetically not true.
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Music Theory and White Supremacy (formerly titled, Music Theory is Racist) is quite a good analysis. That may be why it’s garnered such massive backlash
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There was absolutely shocking pushback against Philip Ewell’s (really very mild, and rather self-evident) critique of music theory; the Schoenberg old guard hated it:
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The “flow” is interesting for lyrics, but it’s still b-o-r-i-n-g for someone like me, because it’s over a monotonous 4/4 beat. There are other rhythms, other forms of music that are a lot more rhythmically interesting to me anyway. I know grid-locked 4/4 is the lingua franca of modern commercial music.
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Thanks for the link. Adam Neely’s video (the one I posted) is also very mild despite the provocative title
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my number one pet peeve - no matter what country of origin the music is from, or the singer, it makes everything sound the same
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I’ve played all kinds of polyrhythmic, cyclical, interlocking, oddmeter musics, and I love them all for different and unique reasons.
But hip hop is not to be dismissed because of a “monotonous 4/4 beat.” You could try to dismiss bebop, funk, or swing-jazz with precisely the same critique–just to cite exceptionally familiar North American idioms–and it would be equally mistaken. Hip hop is a polyrhythmic and polymetric set of approaches which are enormously sophisticated. See the scholarly article I linked above.
Taste is taste, and anybody is entitled to like or dislike anything they want. But this is my professional expertise, and it’s pertinent to distinguish taste versus musical content.
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From my purely lay (wo)man’s perspective, I’ve always experienced rap and hip-hop as having 3 rhythmic lines: 1) instrumental percussion (this one is sometimes absent), 2) vocal rhythm line, and 3) an implicit rhythm line that’s the delta between how ordinary speech would meter the same vocals in conversation and how they’re metered in the rap
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This really is it. There is something terribly wrong with about 45% of the electorate. It isn’t about Trump – a single individual, a raving sociopath who must lie and cannot speak coherently. It’s the people: about 45% of our fellow Americas are fucked in the head, and they have been telling us loudly and clearly for many years now that they are fucked in the head. They should be taken seriously on this. I trust them on this. They will vote for Trump in November.
The empty and cynical Haley is very much part of the problem.
[Haley] repeated her past assertions that President Biden was a worse option than Mr. Trump
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Yes–at the least.
Spot on. That’s the “flow” of which someone like Rakim, Snoop Dogg, 2Pac, or Megan Thee Stallion is an absolute master.
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I was more careful to say “grid-locked 4/4” and that’s what I’m actually addressing. There is a varying rhythm pulse within the 4/4 structure of instrumental bepop, funk, and swing jazz when played by humans and not grid-locked Midi instruments.
Grid-locked 4/4 is what I hear in the rhythm track of the YouTube clip you posted. There is plenty of rhythmic variation in the vocal rap, but that’s the only place I hear it, and it’s the underlying rhythm track I’m talking about. Anyway, de gustibus and all that.
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