Joanna writes:
> I think that the emergence of rap has a lot to do with the disappearance of music/orchestral programs in the public schools. We're looking at a generation of kids with no musical training and very little experience of social merry-making, while at the same time commercial music and all its hi-tech infrastructure comes to the fore.
Huh? There are many rappers who have college and conservatory degrees in music and composition, Wyclef Jean to name one. The musical ability necessary to rhyme is actually quite high.
As for high-tech infrastructure: all you need to rhyme is a facility with words and a fluency with a beat. If you have a human beat box you don't even need a boombox/turntable. Rhyming is a very social event and was born out of the house party scene.
You post reads like you believe that rap is something Black folk do because they haven't been exposed to the (allegedly) more rigorous discipline of classical music? As if hip hop is the music that people make who haven't received a proper musical education. Hip hop, blues, jazz, r&b are all mucial styles that have emerged from the black experience. They are as complex and disciplined as any other type of music.
> Rap also blossomed in a period of hyper-consumersim. It's a lot easier to buy a boom box than to learn to play the guitar, and there's nothing in your culture that attaches more value to being an artist than to being a consumer of art.
Again, you are drawing the wrong analogy. The boom box/turntable provides the beat. The rapper provides the rhyme. It is as hard to turntable as it is to play the guitar. Both require a great deal of practice.
> I remember seeing a teen movie some years ago in which the young male teen comes a courting, not to strum his guitar under his love's window, but to hold his boom box aloft, with music blasting....to woo her. Pathetic.
What is pathetic is the denigration of a cultural expression when it does not conform to a person's preconceptions of what is the "proper" way to make music or to woo someone. I love it when my man rhymes for me. Maybe you want to be wooed with an acoustic guitar. I'll take hip hop. Neither is pathetic.
Brian Dauth Queer Buddhist Activist