And I don’t call it rap music because it’s not music.

shit only racists say

And I don’t call it rap music because it’s not music.

Disliking something doesn’t inherently exclude it from a category. Rap is a genre of music, what else could it possibly be? So are country and metal, even if many dislike them.

Hip hop comes from the projects in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City, where it coalesced from several different art forms developed in defiance of rampant poverty and oppression.

All these people do is write down a bunch of words and speak them.

Those people couldn’t afford ‘real’ instruments and didn’t have the musical education to take advantage of them anyway. Turntables became instruments in their hands because there were no other options. Rap itself draws a pretty straight line from poetry- infuse some more emotion and performance, and you get rap.

As the movement grew in popularity, the hip hop and rap genres were effectively stolen around the turn of the century by producers to sell to white people instead of allowing it to thrive in the black communities that created them in the first place. The lyrics changed from being about surviving and thriving in spite of The Man to focusing on exploiting women and doing drugs, in ignorance of the short but rich history behind the genre.

(I’m lounging in bed writing this on my phone, so no direct sources sorry. We talked about this in one of my high school classes eons ago, I might be able to dig up those files later if there’s interest.)

In that sense, it’s not all that different from the newer corporatized country that you spoke about, or even rock and roll. If you’re going to mad about rap lyrics, be mad at the cultural theft and exploitation rather than discounting it wholesale just because you dislike the sound.

I think it’s important to parse country music. There’s Nashville country music and then there’s county music. Actual country music is great. Nashville country music is not.

Username checks out.