In the last few days, I've been encountering a lot of people who dislike hip hop. It really annoys me. Not all of them have necessarily been old, but every last one of them has had a significant strain of "curmudgeonly conservative" in them. As you'd expect, most of them are rock fans of some stripe or another. What sticks in my craw more than anything is the rhetorical trick that somehow hip hop isn't "real" music. ie. It uses sampling and loops instead of instruments, the vocals aren't conventionally singing. First of all, any time someone says something isn't "real music," that's ludicrous, unless they literally don't believe that it exists. Furthermore, that attitude clearly stems from the fact that the people in question aren't taking hip hop on its own terms. Any genre has a specific set of values, and of course if you try and judge one genre by another's set of values, you're going to end up making a deeply flawed judgement. So the question is, why are these motherfuckers dumb enough to try to judge hip hop by rock's values?
I'll admit that I have fairly well-defined tastes, and there are numerous genres I don't care for, listen to, or readily endorse. I don't like country because I don't really listen to music for the purpose of hearing someone talk about their day, which is kind of how I see country. And, musically, it just does nothing for me. I don't like the instrumentation or the arrangements, and it doesn't exactly have an abundance of tunes or hooks. But I wouldn't try and judge, let's say, a Marty Robbins record against a Beatles or Smiths one, because it would be, as they say, comparing apples and oranges. Another genre that i don't like at all is prog. I like short, concise, catchy songs, as a rule of thumb. Four chords or less, preferrably. Prog rock groups don't exactly make such songs their aim, so they're already not boding well for me. Other than that, I don't play any instruments, so I get little out of virtuosity. I wouldn't judge a prog rock band's musical ability, because I'd be really, really out of my element on that one. And, being a literar buff of sorts, I place a relatively high value on lyrics, so, again, I wouldn't judge either prog or country on the wittiness, insightfulness or eloquence of their lyrics, since that would be unfair, as I would be taking them on my own terms rather than theirs. They may have shitty lyrics, but that's kind of part of their job description. On the other hand, when I hear a Bob Dylan song where what he's singing doesn't reach "Blonde on Blonde" levels of brilliance, I figure it's time to call out the motherfucker. You see my point.
But I digress. Back to thne anecdotal shit. Despite how obviously childish it is to judge a genre without taking it on its own terms, people continue to do it with hip hop. Why? I guess one reason is that people have a major straw man. I always hear the claim that sampling constitutes "stealing" music from other people. I've heard examples of hip hop where that's the case. Bujt I've heard plenty more where it isn't. Hip hop isn't the central focus of this post, so I won't go into too much detail on it specifically, but I will just say that recontextualizing snatches of random funk/rock/pop songs in hip hop is as legitimate as, for example, recontextualizing found sounds and electronic noise in tape music. I'd define that as "real" music. But it goes beyond straw men. People just do it habitually, and it strikes me as a mainfestation of the belief that whatever they spend their time listening to is, in some way, inherently the best shit ever, and the metric by which all other forms of music should be judged. Classical snobs are probably one of the better examples of this, although the more cliched ones are a rarified breed at this point. But I don't need to elaborate on people who think that Chopin and Vivaldi and shit is some perfect high art, and whatever kids these days are listening to is crude and without merit. Chuck Berry already did in "Roll Over Beehtoven." Of course, irony being the only constant in the universe, classical snobs have more or less been replaced by rock snobs. Marvellous.
We all know a few of these assholes. Rap is crap, Noise rock is just Noise, and Punk is just a bunch of fags with weird haircuts yelling stupid crap. Quoth Homer Simpson, "Everybody knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact." Actually, Homer Simpson's not a bad archetype for these stupid fucks. They're often bald. They do drink a lot of beer. They are really funny to listen to. Anyway, Homer seems like the kind of guy who figures that he is, culturally speaking, the center of the universe. That is the problem, isn't it? People realize that what other people listen to for kicks is fairly different than what they do, and they mistake "different" with "inferior." And the sad thing is that I'm the one who ends up saying "d'oh!"
No comments:
Post a Comment