Ask Lemmy

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.

Username checks out.

I don't think I'd call rap not music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music

Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise expressive content.

I think that it meets that bar.

I don't like it myself, either, but there are plenty of genres of music that I don't like.

When I see people riding down the road bumping modern rap music, I just shake my head, especially 30-year-old or 40-year-old white women.

Like, because it originated from black artists? I mean...I've heard people make similar statements before, but jazz also originated with black artists, and I haven't heard people object to white people listening to jazz.

Maybe they did and it was just before my time. I remember a World War II Danish Nazi poster complaining about the jitterbug, which also originated with black artists, but that seemed to take issue with the music rather than who was listening to it.

searches

Hmm. Though it sounds like there was some friction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitterbug

Swing dancing originated in the African-American communities of New York City in the early 20th century.[5] Many nightclubs had a whites-only or blacks-only policy due to racial segregation, however the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem had a no-discrimination policy which allowed whites and blacks to dance together[6] and it was there that the Lindy Hop dance flourished,[7] started by dancers such as George Snowden and Frank Manning. The term jitterbug was originally a ridicule used by black patrons to describe whites who started to dance the Lindy Hop, because they were dancing faster and jumpier than was intended, like "jittering bugs",[8] although it quickly lost its negative connotation as the more-erratic version caught on.

EDIT: The WW2 poster referencing jitterbug that I was remembering:

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/1774f384-00b9-4f24-8dcf-880f0cb0d58d.jpeg)

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.