Rap music is my favorite type of music. It's practically the only type I actively listen to. I hear other types of music here and there, on the bus, or in the car when someone else is driving, but if I ever have a choice, it will always be rap music.
One of the biggest undercurrents in the hip-hop community (especially online) is snobbery; the kind of person that goes "I only like REAL hip hop like 2pac, and I don't listen to hip hop that's just about bitches and money. Aren't I special". It's like wine-snobbery but with music.
Now, I like weird hip hop. I love ICP's earlier stuff, I love Necro, I love Lil B (unironically), and I love lil yachty and desiigner. Don't get me wrong, I love the classics too, and I even like the radio-station hip hop from time to time, but I love it when an artist takes what he knows, and really pushes boundaries with it.
I was told the other day by one of my classmates that I was letting a culture die by listening to yachty. I know he was half joking, but it made me think about what it means for a culture to die and what it means that I'm participating in it, and I came to this conclusion: he is absolutely 100% right. Hip-hop as we knew it, is dying. And I'm killing it by contributing to the "new hip hop" instead of the "real hip hop". And to be quite frank, I'm happy about it.
Death is really just radical change. You're alive, and then you're dead, you're never both. You are one, and then you are the other. One moment you're up and about, moving around having a grand old time on Earth, the next you're experiencing rigour mortis on the embalming table of a morgue. It's a change. It isn't an ending. No one knows what happens to your consciousness after you die, but your body simply changes in how it interacts with the world.
We can extend this further. When talking to my father about this, he said in rebuttle to my classmate "the you that was 10 years old is now dead and you killed him!" . Which is true. When I was 10 I was a different person with different ideas and different ways of interact with the world. I've changed and am a different person, and so the me that was 10 is no more: dead.
I think hip-hop and every other culture on earth could use a little killing. Just imagine if hip-hop had stayed stagnant for all these years. It would be fucking BORING! No new ideas, no new creativity, no new styles no new artistic techniques or beats or rhyme schemes. It would be an endless drivel of the same shit over and over again, something that those hip-hop snobs complain about whenever they hear the radio: "oh I don't listen to radio hiphop, it's all the same!" (note, I'm a hypocrite because I too can be a hip-hop snob, but it doesn't dominate my life and I tend not to be a dick about it).
Cultures need to change. That's how new ideas are born. I love the artists I described above because they all brought something new to the table. They're original. They don't play what will necessarily get them paid, it's just worked out that way.
To summarize: go out and kill culture. Tear down artistic barriers and create new things that go beyond them. That's that kind of weird art that is amazing and loveable. Do new things, make life interesting.
The same thing happens about everything. For an example, go up to someone in their 40s/50s and say "I like the last half of Aerosmith's discography". They will shit bricks and start ranting over how the OLD Aerosmith was awesome and the "new" Aerosmith sucked. Same with Metallica, but in that case they always sucked. Retroactively.
Quote from: PopeGillies on October 10, 2016, 09:41:44 PM
Death is really just radical change. You're alive, and then you're dead, you're never both.
Well what if they put you in a sealed box with a vial of poison gas rigged to a detector designed to determine if a radioactive isotope has or hasn't decayed at a particular time?
QuoteTo summarize: go out and kill culture. Tear down artistic barriers and create new things that go beyond them. That's that kind of weird art that is amazing and loveable. Do new things, make life interesting.
Are you familiar with Mckenna's take on culture? You're probably not going far enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-tY6hmKcms (short version but gives a fair summary)