The Electric Lady
Post and toke
I like hip hop. I just have a problem with it basically having a monopoly on black music. Also, hip hop doesn't really have much to say. The themes discussed in hip hop date back to the 80's. It's tired and needs to stop. There are so many possibilities and types of music to belay the black american experience. Why do we continue to peddle a broken genre that refuses to evolve? Thankfully R&B is making a come back because that's my favorite genre, but it's not like my favorite artists - Janelle Monae, Solange - get much radio play, if any at all. Why can't young black people fukk with jazz and souls and blues like I do? I feel so alone when I delve into our peoples musical history, because everyone else is just interested in listening to rap. shyt is sickening. Our young people don't even know our musical history roots or history. Much worse, they don't even care.
Hip hop has gone from a genre that held all of black America's hopes, loves, vices, grievances, and aspirations in one genre to one that placates a mundane and canned narrative. When was the last time you heard a hip hop song that told you something you never heard before and was relevant to you? Then again, the same can be said for most modern mainstream music. Sure we had dance and club songs. But we also had songs that spoke of the Black American experience and the things we love. Like the song Basketball. Hip hop spoke of the black experience - whether good or bad - in music-form. Nowadays hip hop, while much better than it was in the past ten years, still is no long relevant to the average black American. Instead of expanding upon our content and speaking of the lives of our people, we just make songs that are mostly made for commercial success. Recent songs like Killer Mike's Reagan being exceptions. I mean, it's still all great music these days, but it's just no culturally relevant and it's as if rap is stuck in a cultural vacuum.
One reason I have this signature is due to how rock evolved. The signature may seem inflammatory, but I truly believe it as fact. Hip hop, despite being a more lyrical genre, has yet to top even the best of rock content-wise. Songs like Bob Dylan's Blowin In the Wind, Pink Floy'd Time, Nine Inch Nails' Hurt, The Beatles' Let It Be, Elanor Rigby, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, Under Pressure, and Prophet's Song; these all communicate a range of diverse topics that tell you a story or do something to make you think. David Bowie created an entire character in the Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. He made the entire album connect and tell the story of one man on Earth when everyone finds out that the planet has only five years left to live. He created the first concept album, and used the power of music to tell an animated, theatrical story, song-by-song. Yet I'm called a c00n when I point this out observation.
Sometimes rap fukks with some of this. For concept albums for instance, I don't think anything tops Little Brothers' Minstrel Show, which is an all time classic to me. But for all of hip hop's verbosity and lyrical emphasis, it still hasn't managed to top many of the songs listed above that communicate a wider range of human emotion. And when they do, such as Kanye's 808's and Heartbreak, nikkas go wild that it's not the same shyt that we've been listening to the past 30 years. shyt is ridiculous and tiring considering that 60's and 70's r&b/soul/funk had a fukk load of relatable things to talk about: from love, to heartbreak, from political anger and racism, songs about weed.
Our people have completely lost our musical backbone and that makes me sad because music is a huge part of our experience. These days, music-wise, we are mostly representated by rap and r&b thugs like Chris Brown. Where's someone that I can relate to, that talks about normal human topics and the black experience in America? Black music used to play its own instruments, from guitar to flute to piano, whatever. And due to hip hop, we've lost that. By selling out our music, we have thrust a single narrative about our people through the guise of hip hop. It's one of our only means of communicating our experience, and when they can stifle our music, they stifle us and our message.
Maybe I'm missing something. Listen to the lyrical content in this song. It's amazing. Can anyone point me to rap that discusses similar themes? I don't mean a line or bar, either. I mean an entire songs' content:
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say
Considering that our people have a long history of poetry, from the slaves of the south, to Harlem Renaissance and Maya Angelou, raps lyrical content is a far cry from those from an objective point of view. We can do better.
I don't see why it's so hard when we have countless examples of us doing this over the years:
Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit
Or Gil Scott-Heron's Save the Children.
Diana Ross' I'm Coming Out.
Marvin Gaye's Mercy Mercy Me.
Aretha Franklin's RESPECT and Natural Woman.
What I posted above? That's BLACK music. They speak to our cause, they speak to our culture, they speak for men AND women. Not just a bunch of young people who want to dance.
The reality is that hip hop is shyt, with a few exceptions.
Hip hop has failed black people.
As a music lover, I feel like I was born at the wrong time. I would have 
so much during the 60's - 80's. God I love music.
Hip hop has gone from a genre that held all of black America's hopes, loves, vices, grievances, and aspirations in one genre to one that placates a mundane and canned narrative. When was the last time you heard a hip hop song that told you something you never heard before and was relevant to you? Then again, the same can be said for most modern mainstream music. Sure we had dance and club songs. But we also had songs that spoke of the Black American experience and the things we love. Like the song Basketball. Hip hop spoke of the black experience - whether good or bad - in music-form. Nowadays hip hop, while much better than it was in the past ten years, still is no long relevant to the average black American. Instead of expanding upon our content and speaking of the lives of our people, we just make songs that are mostly made for commercial success. Recent songs like Killer Mike's Reagan being exceptions. I mean, it's still all great music these days, but it's just no culturally relevant and it's as if rap is stuck in a cultural vacuum.
One reason I have this signature is due to how rock evolved. The signature may seem inflammatory, but I truly believe it as fact. Hip hop, despite being a more lyrical genre, has yet to top even the best of rock content-wise. Songs like Bob Dylan's Blowin In the Wind, Pink Floy'd Time, Nine Inch Nails' Hurt, The Beatles' Let It Be, Elanor Rigby, Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, Under Pressure, and Prophet's Song; these all communicate a range of diverse topics that tell you a story or do something to make you think. David Bowie created an entire character in the Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. He made the entire album connect and tell the story of one man on Earth when everyone finds out that the planet has only five years left to live. He created the first concept album, and used the power of music to tell an animated, theatrical story, song-by-song. Yet I'm called a c00n when I point this out observation.
Sometimes rap fukks with some of this. For concept albums for instance, I don't think anything tops Little Brothers' Minstrel Show, which is an all time classic to me. But for all of hip hop's verbosity and lyrical emphasis, it still hasn't managed to top many of the songs listed above that communicate a wider range of human emotion. And when they do, such as Kanye's 808's and Heartbreak, nikkas go wild that it's not the same shyt that we've been listening to the past 30 years. shyt is ridiculous and tiring considering that 60's and 70's r&b/soul/funk had a fukk load of relatable things to talk about: from love, to heartbreak, from political anger and racism, songs about weed.
Our people have completely lost our musical backbone and that makes me sad because music is a huge part of our experience. These days, music-wise, we are mostly representated by rap and r&b thugs like Chris Brown. Where's someone that I can relate to, that talks about normal human topics and the black experience in America? Black music used to play its own instruments, from guitar to flute to piano, whatever. And due to hip hop, we've lost that. By selling out our music, we have thrust a single narrative about our people through the guise of hip hop. It's one of our only means of communicating our experience, and when they can stifle our music, they stifle us and our message.
Maybe I'm missing something. Listen to the lyrical content in this song. It's amazing. Can anyone point me to rap that discusses similar themes? I don't mean a line or bar, either. I mean an entire songs' content:
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say
Considering that our people have a long history of poetry, from the slaves of the south, to Harlem Renaissance and Maya Angelou, raps lyrical content is a far cry from those from an objective point of view. We can do better.
I don't see why it's so hard when we have countless examples of us doing this over the years:
Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit
Or Gil Scott-Heron's Save the Children.
Diana Ross' I'm Coming Out.
Marvin Gaye's Mercy Mercy Me.
Aretha Franklin's RESPECT and Natural Woman.
What I posted above? That's BLACK music. They speak to our cause, they speak to our culture, they speak for men AND women. Not just a bunch of young people who want to dance.
The reality is that hip hop is shyt, with a few exceptions.
Hip hop has failed black people.
As a music lover, I feel like I was born at the wrong time.
I would have so much during the 60's - 80's. God I love music.
Last edited:
yes when you put hip/hop up to other genres there's no comparison
to me.
People like what they like. I like everything. Hip Hop is tough to defend because it's so overtly negative. Its artistry gets lost in translation which is sad because anger is a natural emotion. It's just that hip/hop is always angry. Where's the positive? Where's a Will Smith Summertime jam?
.
