Hip-Hop
I am what is today called a "classically trained musician." I suppose that means , I went to school to learn music.I studied composition and musicology, and played a number of brass instruments. I have played with orchestras and swing bandas, but I haven't been a professional performer for many years.Our new car came with Sirius so I played around with it one day, listening to various channels until I accidently landed on a hip-hop station.My ears were assaulted with a driving beat and some person chanting: (Please pardon the following)
"I just wanna fuck bad bitches,
Chicken head, chicken fed, with a dick in your mouth."
As I listened to this charming tirade, I could hardly believe my ears. I later found out that this was some person called Dr. Dre. I decidedto listen to more of this stuff. Surely it couldn't all be this bad. I was wrong, it was. And worse.
Apparently, to rappers, women are not fully human. They are all bitches and whores and are to be raped, abused, and beaten. Hip-hop is for young men who do things without consequences, and society says it is OK. It even gets various music awards though it is filled with violence, crime, sex-as-brutality, and more. And then, society wonders why its young men are so violent.
I suppose I am naïve in that I wasn't aware of the depths of depravity that this so-called music represents. I heard rap many years ago by Ice-T and others of that era, but had no idea how low this junk has gotten. If art is the flower on the tree of philosophy, this must be a stinkweed.
"I just wanna fuck bad bitches,
Chicken head, chicken fed, with a dick in your mouth."
As I listened to this charming tirade, I could hardly believe my ears. I later found out that this was some person called Dr. Dre. I decidedto listen to more of this stuff. Surely it couldn't all be this bad. I was wrong, it was. And worse.
Apparently, to rappers, women are not fully human. They are all bitches and whores and are to be raped, abused, and beaten. Hip-hop is for young men who do things without consequences, and society says it is OK. It even gets various music awards though it is filled with violence, crime, sex-as-brutality, and more. And then, society wonders why its young men are so violent.
I suppose I am naïve in that I wasn't aware of the depths of depravity that this so-called music represents. I heard rap many years ago by Ice-T and others of that era, but had no idea how low this junk has gotten. If art is the flower on the tree of philosophy, this must be a stinkweed.
As far as sexual promiscuity -- that is and should be accepted, by a lot more than just blacks.
(maybe 1968). I had seen it at the Waynesboro
High School in 1966. I was more excited by the
school performance; there was a sort of smugness
in the film that I didn't exactly cotton to.(Not that it wasn't good, but I liked the school perform-
ance better, though some of it lacked polish.
And no, it wasn't my high school).
about not saying putting content on that was ob-
jectionable or offensive, so maybe I ought not to
have made the reference to "throw[ing] up".Rogers
and Hammerstein was reasonably good, but it
never excited me like G&S. Though my ab-
solutely favorite song was not by them--it is
La Marseillaise. (Not that I favor France over
the U.S.A., but they do have one h**l of a
national anthem).
s
that much. Now Berlin is better, I think--I really
care for "God Bless America". But I like a 4/4
rhythm, and not swing--not saying that's all they
wrote. But I think there has been a certain amount of deterioration for a long time. As to
Stravinsky, don't try to make me throw up, please.
lack of opportunity. Several different versions of
The Mikado; also I saw H.M.S. Pinafore on stage once; some years ago, my mother had got-
ten a few on a VCR to show me on a visit home.
But I learned them mainly from record albums.
HMS Pinafore is my favorite.
Oepratic type musicals such as those by Sondheim, or how about The Phantom of the Opera? Don't throw away the 20th century.
great and wonderful--(and I really do mean it)---
GILBERT & SULLIVAN?!!!
to much since Gilbert and Sullivan died (not that
the music itself need ever finally die, but I mean
the era). But it was some time before it got to be
as nauseating as "punk rock", etc. (Of course,
there was Stravinsky; that could be blasphem-
ous and offensive without words--like an attempt
to destroy music from within).
The pendulum is about to swing the other way...way to far as usual.
I don't think so, but then :
"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
The Shadow knows". -- Orson Welles
Thank you, I will steal that from you and place it in my verbal arsenal.
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