I'm Simone, big bird stan and whiny asshole. This is a blog for reblogs, incoherent blabbering, and whatever I’m presently fixated on (wrestling, horror movies, aatc, Batman, etc) - he/him - Black and Korean - 25 - admin of ttgpics - art blog: @alternativeprojectdraws - [email protected] -
a lot of people are dismissing the "violent" rap music rushing and scrambling to say well not ALL rap is violent here's some rappers who don't rap about violence but like. idk. I think the "violent" rap is important to listen to as well. do you know why gangs exist? do you know why Compton is the way that it is? can you listen to the experiences of black men when you can't personally relate on any level? or will you dismiss an entire genre of music because certain sub genres make you feel a bit uncomfortable as a non-black person?
The post about white people refusing to listen to rap or take rap seriously has got every white person trying to explain why they’re so special and them categorically dismissing rap is ok actually. Very Predictable but it is interesting to see how many ways you can spin “I’m autistic so it’s ok if I’m racist let me make this about me now”
There’s six guys who live in this flat and all they do all day is play WoW and watch movies. Waking up at 2pm every day and there’s always just someone asleep on the bed near all the multimonitor computer setups. There’s always music playing and it feels like a recovery day every day, padding around blearily in pyjamas or underwear. Old hoodies from defunct school teams. They’ve got this system where they’re selling their excess computing power to companies and hosting all this warez, and they’re stealing the internet from the business next door anyway and getting welfare on top of all that. They’re self sufficient and never go outdoors except to buy more fast food, and even then only in the dark. But then one of them wakes up dead some heavy afternoon. He’s just dead and they don’t know why but maybe the floor covered in fast food wrappings is a clue. They don’t want to tell the cops because of the purgatory den they live in and the illegality that supports it, and as far as they know he never had any actual parents. So it’s trouble. It’s taking a long trip out to the forest and thinking about how stars are so far away for the first time in a long time. It’s sweating in the cold air and digging a hole all night with your brand new shovels to leave him alone in. And it’s a long few days cracking all his passwords to keep his identity and associated payments persisting. Until the rhythm of waking up every day at 2pm to play WoW for nine hours and half watch a movie on your other monitor takes over again. It’s the same as it ever was except now there’s a room no one ever goes in.
A lot of you on here feel waaay too comfortable admitting that you don't and refuse to listen to rap music, and I'm not loving the incredibly reductive takes on rap because the kendrick/drake beef has it on some of yall's radar for the first time in your life.
I'm not going to sugar coat it-- for americans especially, if you consider music a significant interest of yours but still feel the need to search for acceptable reasons to keep yourself ignorant of black music, or think of rap as a monolith of hate and violence and not equally as diverse as any other genre, or can only name nonblack rappers… you should be embarrassed of that. And your embarrassment should not keep you from being active about exposing yourself to unfamiliar art and broadening what you listen to.
'I don't understand what they're saying/they rap too quickly' I'm surprised by how much I keep seeing this-- speed is not a stylistic trademark of most rap music, & clearer diction as a performer is much more necessary in rap than other genres?? Statistically rap has a lower bpm (here's an example of one person's study) and word-per-minute (another person's study of about 20 thousand songs) average than other genres. (of course these aren't all-encompassing, but you can look into this yourself using sites like bpmdatabase.com.) Do you really feel overwhelmed by speed listening to Kendrick or Biggie or Nas or 2Pac, or have you never actually listened to their songs?
'I have to look up the lyrics'-- so what? is it a bad thing to take an extra few seconds to engage with an artist's work? If you listen to lyrical music, do you care when it's the artists you listen to? Why does the thoughtful art consumption everyone talks about not also apply to black art?
'there is too much violence and misogyny and commercialism' this is not unique to rap, or true of all rap music. Artists exist that talk about other things, the way they exist in all genres. There is an entire wikipedia page listing alternative hip hop musicians and rappers if you consider seeking it out too much labor. Click one!
'i find it unrelatable'-- who cares? Being unable to engage with art you don't find wholly relatable is a deeply childish and self centered way to exist. You get on here reblogging feel good navel-gazey posts about the shared human experience and caring for one another, but a rapper talking about living with violence or poverty is stretching the limits of what you can imagine or empathize with too much for you to care about it? You don't find that embarrassing to admit to?
You don't have to love rap, you don't have to incorporate it into what you listen to every day, but a lot of you need to be aware you're parroting reagan era anti-rap (& antiblack) pearl-clutching talking points, and it's a very ugly look. It isn't racist if your favorite genre isn't rap, but you need to do some serious self reflection if you consider it inherently less artistic, intelligent or positive than 'whiter' genres when you only listen to nonblack rappers or not any at all. I am looking at you, people into other counterculture genres-- it's crazy how much I see this from self-professed punks and metalheads especially lmfao. If expression, counterculture art, anti-censorship in music and the right for raw and unfiltered music to exist matters to you as much as you say you do, you should care about rap's relationship to censorship just as much as what you listen to.
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