2001-06-23 - 11:18 p.m.

Is Rap Crap?

Folks, I know that I have fallen terribly behind, in fact I'm about two weeks behind. The essay on my Uncle Frank made me lose several days, but I was already in trouble before that. I'm going to try to have new content here every day, and catch up as I can. Hopefully I'll make some big strides forward this weekend.

Well, my musical exploration of 1998 is almost done. There are only about a dozen songs on the playlist I haven't heard yet. It is awful convenient to have my computer feed songs into my ears while I am working on other stuff.

Of the 412 songs that are on the playlist, probably only about 50 are worth saving, from my point of view, and from there I'll probably winnow it down to 20 or 30. And I will probably further reduce the number by actually (gasp!) buying some music. But don’t tell Lily - she thinks I'm a sucker for buying CDs at all.

However among the final list there are almost certainly to be no Rap songs, and probably no Hip-Hop either.

I thought my dislike of Rap was mostly an irrational prejudice, but serious exposure to it over the last week has not changed my mind at all. In fact, it has deepened the conviction that there is nothing going on there that interests me in the least.

Oh, there are some songs with rap elements that I like. For instance, one of the standouts of 1998 for me was a song called "I Know Where It's At" by All Saints. But that song is basically pop with a little rapping in it. When Lily found out that I liked a song by All Saints she rolled her eyes. According to her All Saints is the Spice Girls without the classy British accents. Hey, I make no apologies. I like what I like.

There is the occasional rap song with funny lyrics. Lilly has found a bunch of those. And there is the occasional one that has a real cast-iron beat. But so much rap music has so many strikes against it that it's all I can do to keep myself from flipping ahead to the next song whenever one pops up.

In fact, I find it depressing to listen to. The lyrics of so many songs are just so consistently nasty, thuggish and violent. Who needs to let that kind of crap into their life? Maybe I'm just overly delicate, but musical death threats do very little to brighten up my day.

And then there is that word: nigger. It's such a sharp, unhappy buzz word with so many bad connotations, but it's repeated over and over again. Are they trying to remove the word's evil power by simply wearing it out? Be that as it may, I don't like listening to it.

Lily, on the other hand, seems to like rap a lot, even though I don't actually hear her play it that much. I think it all comes down to what associations we have with the music. Lily heard it all the time when she was going up and has good memories associated to it.

On the other hand I first heard rap in college 20 years ago, although it wasn't really rap, but rap's precursor - Jamaican Dub music.

Dub was pretty much just a guy babbling in Jamaican patois over a rhythm track. That's it. In my senior year of college I worked on the campus newspaper for a while, and I hated it. I mainly disliked the arrogant, hipper-than-thou idiots who ran the paper, and it gave me a splitting headache listening to their dreadful Dub music while I was vainly trying to lay out newspaper pages.

I remember in 1990 when M.C. Hammer's "Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'em" was the number one album for weeks and weeks. Curious, I bought the album on cassette to try it out. Ten million people couldn't be wrong, right?

It was dreadful. Nothing but stupid, arrogant lyrics, spoken over stolen melodies. The constant subject of all the songs seemed to be how wonderful Hammer was - what a great lover he was, what a bad dude he was. What a disappointment. And now, eleven years later, subject wise, rap has not moved much beyond that.

My recent exposures to rap have not improved my opinion much. Rap is the music booming out of the cars that pass by on the street at 3AM, their thundering bass making the glass in my window panes rattle.

Once again, I have to face facts: rap music is not being made for me. It's audience is mainly black, but more importantly YOUNG. I suspect I was born about twenty years too early to really be able to bend my ears around it. I just look upon it as young America's latest attempt to find something to listen to that won't be used to sell them cars or soft drinks two years later.

And as for the sheer meanness or stupidity of rap's lyrics - they certainly haven't cornered the market on that. Punk, Heavy Metal and plain old rock can be amazingly vicious and thick-headed. For example, a couple weeks ago my across the street neighbors (different ones than I've spoken of previously) were cranking Ted Nugent's "Wango Tango" at top volume - the Motor City Madman's screeching anthem to his own precious penis. You can't get much dumber than that.

But on the other hand we have "What's Clef?" by Wyclef Jean, which basically is a verbal attack on fellow rapper LL Cool J. Wyclef Jean is supposed to be some sort of a music genius, but this insult-fest done to the tune of "What's Love Got To Do With It?" is right out of junior high. Ol' Wyclef seems to have an ego as big as the moon.

So rap music and I are going to agree to disagree, I guess. And I'm not giving up either. When I get to 1999 and 2000 I'm going to try to download all of those songs too. Hey, maybe it could grow on me.