For those who "hate" "rap" music: Aesop Rock.

Diamond colored spine

Armadillo armor that bends around the blades

Bugs in the beard

Ebony in the lungpiece

Bricks in the Timbs

Bazooka in the tooth that he's flashing at your friends

This is the lifestyle, baby

Know and sip the recipe

Not a single innocuous side up in the centerpiece

Oh my god

Journalists across the globe are officially critiquing my first eight bars





Piety for the fam, embargo piggybackers

Navigate sim-city backwards

Bazooka Tooth, baby!

Zephyrs less dextrimental expect to tone down terrordome for starter crews

Like jousting Pompeii with a garden hose

If you wake up to the sound of helicopters bumping violence

Bodycast the Pilates class

Buckle in the Bronx back alley batting cage with bottle smacks



Drag them prophecies, be them celestine or Mothman to the bumper boat monster mash

See, the pristine kittens fiddle with new yarn

Decrepit sickly dogs get shot behind the barn

One shamp put in long hours like ten liddies lava lamps

To be second headlined under the boy born with lobster hands

Isolated, biological phenomenon

First nocturnally orchestrated car alarms

Y'all sketch portraits of your neighbors, tack em up without fail

See a robored pitchforks and alligator tails

Offical Max Fischer bloom break cable clipper (Def)

Picket train buffer, the riverboat, and the switcher (Jux)

Pipe-dreaming that so fresh and so clean plummage

Is an appleseed of bore that resorts to Bazooka Tooth shit



You don't want me smiling at your cameras




Would anyone like to step up and tell me that's not "creative?"

For the fools, some advice: go to the Apple iTunes Music Store, get an account, and go download any random tune by Aesop Rock (my favorite is "Holy Smokes") and come back and tell me that's not some amazing stuff by any objective criteria. If all you care about is melody and instrumental dexterity, then *yawn*, because the world has passed you by. (Sorry.) Oh and try Sage Francis on for size while you're at it.

Re: melody. I'm a melody FREAK. My favorite "genre" is Power Pop. I need melody in my life. It's wonderful thing. But I also need noise and beats and tension and outworld lyricism, which is why I like hip hop. If your only exposure to hiphop has been through MTV and the radio and BET, then, fuck: I don't blame you for hating that shit. It's the same reason why lotsa kids these days hate rock; their only exposure to rock is fucking Skynyrd and Bad Company and the Eagles (yuck!) so naturally they extrapolate that all rock is as bad. Not true.

And yes, it's music.

People just need to remember that the hip-hop on the radio and MTV is played right alongside Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. In other words, it's a small sampling of commercial grade crap.

Plus, isn't it a little, um, late to even be having this discussion? Like, it's a full twenty years since "Walk This Way," and people STILL refuse to acknowledge that hiphop exists.

if you STILL think hip-hop is just a fad, you might be a little racist. Seriously, it's been almost 30 fucking years.

I can TOTALLY understand where a person saying "hip hop isn't music!" or "I hate rap!" is coming from. The stuff sure doesn't make it easy for white people from the suburbs, raised on Dylan and Springsteen (or Dream Theater or Rush or whoever), to like it very much, since hip hop does not inculcate the same musical values these people cherish (melody, instrumental dexterity, the ability to sing, etc.). I do NOT agree with it, however.

I understand the sentiment, just like I can understand the sentiment of those rural conservatives who hate liberals so much because they blame every unpleasnt thing they see on television on the liberal upheaval of the 60's. It's coming from the same place: hip hop upsets their comfort zone, being such a confrontational music, just as the GLBT rights movement and Women's movement have/had the potential to upset (and unintentionally threaten) someone raised on traditional values and mores.

What's galling, however, is that these same people enshrine a music (classic rock, typically) which, forty years ago, we were having this very same discussion about, and they refuse to see the similarities, because acknowledging that another type of music has taken rock's place means having to acknowledge that the world has passed them by, that things change, that "twas not always thus," that they, supposed "liberals," really aren't all that liberal when it comes to certain cultural totems. And this makes them uneasy and it makes them get all reactionary on our asses, making claims like "hip hop isn't music." Aesthetically, it is in a different realm than rock or any of the small band format musics (which, I frankly prefer, but that's neither here nor there), because its seedbed is in urban poverty, where a microphone and a boombox and a beat up turntable can be more easily obtained than "real" instruments. But it ISmusic. (Anything that produces sound is music. Cage, anyone? How about Zappa?)

That two cd set I sent you? Anyone, anyone? That was pure noise recorded on city streets, and it was (most of it) unquestionably music

Even Holland's Minister of Justice has released his policy statement in convenient rap form.

http://www.justitie.nl/Images/DeDonfeatMeesterG_tcm74-107706.mp3 (that is a direct link to an mp3, on the Justice website)

:hi:

Dutch is gansta