Welcome to one of the most active flamenco sites on the Internet. Guests can read most posts but if you want to participate click here to register.
This site is dedicated to the memory of Paco de Lucía, Ron Mitchell, Guy Williams, Linda Elvira, Philip John Lee, Craig Eros, Ben Woods, David Serva and Tom Blackshear who went ahead of us.
We receive 12,200 visitors a month from 200 countries and 1.7 million page impressions a year. To advertise on this site please contact us.
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to XXX)
quote:
There is a useful concept called "truth" aka "knowledge". Your opinion on rap doesnt become valid only because you wish so. It is in fact invalid, whether this allows a statement about your person is another question. Considering that you are a retired officer and taking into account your conservative attitude, i think it very well does allow the statement that in your social circles rap should be generally looked down upon and you probably had zero to none exposure to this form of music anyway, at least not without prejudices. Sorry but you have no competence to make *any* judgement on rap.
You certainly make a lot of sweeping assumptions about me, Deniz. And you state these assumptions as if they were categorical truths. The first thing I would question is what you think being a retired diplomat (US Foreign Service) has to do with my taste in music? Would it surprise you to learn that among my favorite genres of music is Mississippi Delta Blues from the '30s and '40s, and among my favorite artists are Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, and, oh, about a dozen others? Do you think I spent my entire career at Embassy receptions listening to string quartets (which I also like, by the way)?
Please provide the evidence (not just preconceived assumptions) to support the categorical statements you made above? Zero to no exposure to rap? The kind of social circles I run in? My prejudices (as opposed to my tastes)? My competence to make "any" judgment on rap? Let's see your evidence to support these categorical statements. If you cannot produce evidence supporting them (which I know you can't, because they are half-baked assumptions), you will have exposed yourself as a blowhard who cannot accept those with opinions different from your own.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to BarkellWH)
Your statement that rap would not be music has been proven wrong. It has rhythmic and melodic complexity (human induced i may add). Thus, it is music. I will translate what i just did: it is music regardless of whether you or i think it is music or not. I simply assumed that you have no knowledge regarding rap music, because of your social/economic and political status. It is just a guess of course, might be as well wrong, but since you didnt disagree with that, i assume it is correct? Feel free to share your non-negligible amount of exposure to rap music and i'll revide my statement. Nonetheless you are also free to back up your original statement about rap being no music anytime (hint: you would need to define music properly and show that none of its qualities can be found in rap. Good luck with that.). Until that happens, your statement above will remain factually wrong (regardless of whether you or i think it is wrong or not).
Posts: 14797
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to BarkellWH)
quote:
What I object to are those who disagree with one's opinion or judgment in a disagreeable manner, by suggesting that such opinion or judgment can only be the product of "100 percent ignorance" or "lack of knowledge." They completely dismiss the personal factors involving experience, attitude, and taste.
My advice for you and MANY others, to avoid this problem, if anyone sees it as such, is simply to leave out the parts about what one finds distasteful or non musical when the topic comes up :"Share what you LIKE with the group"...point being to point others in certain directions....ONLY, that they may not have been aware of previously. The extra bit about negative descriptions of others (possible) likes runs the risk of insulting the tastes of others, and likewise can backfire and raise the eyebrow towards the supposed positive musical/artistic experience you are trying to share. Keeping the negative to ones self in this regard (except when more appropriate topics arise such as "is THIS music any good or have merit I am missing...please explain???") can only be a beneficial thing to everyone involved.
About rap and music etc. music is organized frequencies in time. That is melody and harmony (and perhaps words, more the vowels), and time can mean rhythm (for lyrics the consonants). To me the ideal is copious amounts of both, 50-50% of both need to be good or taken serious. That doesn't mean the rhythm lacking music is not capable of beauty (some symphonic music), nor that some pure rhythmic performances are non musical or high art (indian percussion, rap, marching drums, etc). There certainly can be focus in one direction or another. For sure poetry alone is not music, but when coupled with timing, it takes on true musical aspects. Perhaps when bad lyrical content (gangster rap for example) coupled with non interesting rhyme scheme or rhythms it loses quality...but the intent remains that it is music non the less.
When studying music in school I found it sad that music theory classes focus on the trivial details of harmony and melody, and seriously skimp on the rhythmic aspects which I was forced to pick up on "on the streets" so to speak. I find there to be a touch of snobbery in the general world of tastes regarding this issue. THe less rhythmic more melodic and harmonic the "higher" the art be....the more earthy and groove based, the lower on the art scale it seems to be valued. A shame.
To push musical bounderies...is simply talking musical? No ganster glorification of drug use, money, and womanizing, but equally difficult to swallow for some to consider "music" is steve vai's exploration of the musicality of talking.
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to XXX)
quote:
It is just a guess of course, might be as well wrong, but since you didnt disagree with that, i assume it is correct?
One more unsubstantiated assumption, to add to all the others you have made. Let me give you a quick lesson in evidence-based conclusions, Deniz. It is not up to me or anyone else on this Foro to prove your preconceived assumptions about us false. You are the one tossing out assumptions (about me and, at times, others) as if they were categorical truths, and it is up to you to prove them correct. If you cannot do so, and in my case you have failed to do so (with good reason, as you have no case to make), you simply demonstrate a capacity to generate heat but no light.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to BarkellWH)
quote:
So, once again we find Mezzo in a state of high dudgeon. If it's not one thing, it's another, but always we can count on Mezzo being in a state of high dudgeon. This time over my comments on rap.
Bill, since you like to make big case about assumptions and how bad they taste in the mouths of other rather than in yours, let me label my emotional state for myself. What you perceive and proclaimed as dudgeon is in reality what I would call INDIGNATION. Hope this make sense.
_____________________________
"The most important part of Flamenco is not in knowing how to interpret it. The higher art is in knowing how to listen." (Luis Agujetas)
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to BarkellWH)
Louis Armstrong the father of modern music. a Rap, a Scat , a blah blah rat a tat tat. I love the man so much it almost makes my envy bearable.
I loathed RAP on MTV growing up. The network seemed to push fatuous gangsta nonsense ad nauseum. Slickly packaged politically irrelevant mush to bamboozle 'nonconformists' and churn the stomachs of anyone over fifteen.
But we all look past and back and forward from that don't we. In these information rich days surely none of us are content to get all of our information from MTV ?
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to BarkellWH)
I got something to say, none of ya'll know anything about rap. I live in Oakland, Yo.
Only one or two of you may actually know what that means. I listened to 'Rap" as it was being invented when it came out of Harlem in the late 70's. Most of rap today is total crap. I was being generous when I said 20% is good. But good rap can be great, but good rap is not Mahler, comparing is complicated.
When I get disgusted with rap today I go listen to recordings of James Baldwin reading his writings or Langston Hughes reading his poems. Rap is like Beowulf. Beowulf was a two line poetry style that was meant to be sung as a poem song. Rap came from writers like Langston Hughes who wrote a great, but sadly little known poem called of a Dream Deferred. In that day Hughes' poetry was charged and accented with speech patterns which came from African American idioms of speech. Much like writers of the era in Harlem such as Zora Neal Hurston whose novels were written with those speech patterns.
This usage of regional and dialectic African American speech patterns goes far back in the history of Black written and spoken arts in the US and can be traced all the way back to African origins in the ways that African languages have speech pattering and how those patterns blended with Western poetry meter forms like the most common one in the English language which is found in Shakespeare; the iambic pentameter.
Cab Calloway was a rapper and so was Louis Armstrong, they rapped it was called 'scat' back in those days, but it was the continuation of along oral improvisational technique and tradition carried to the Americas by Black slaves, rap my friends is not a new invention, like the poetry in Beowulf meant to be a melodic spoken word - chanted narrative, rapping goes back into African depths of time, it simply changes with the times and continues.
The problem as I see and hear it is that rap has become stuck in a place which is over produced, over commercialized and performed commercially by people who do not embody the best tradition and qualities of this lineage of performance. The object of rap was to improvise and sadly much of this improvisation and street feet of rap has given way to a slickly marketed, static and musically watered down content.
So today we have guys like the wonderful Bobby McFerrin who do have that improvisational playfulness that carries on the tradition, but he's not hard edged, his hot sauce is not hot enough for many people. But he serves as an example of where that tradition that flowed through people like Cab Calloway ended up today. His music is component of the greater narrative spoken poetry of this whole thing that parallels Beowulf up in Europe and reaches back into Africa. But what we call Rap was another branch of that same lineage and its in my opinion hit some walls.
So to those who say to others you don't know what rap is you can't speak bad about it, I say you probably don't know the whole history either. And for those who say rap is not music, well technically it is a form of improvised dramatic monolog that is often set to a beat. Personally I don't like where the beat making has gone these days, over produced slick, facile, vaccuous, self indulgent, shallow, but one can hope that the form keeps evolving and that it will reinvent itself as all long standing traditions in art eventually do.
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to Leñador)
quote:
I got one better, I got suspended in high school for beating up ice cubes nephew
I've done some maturing since then.........
Yes you probably got me on that beatdown of the cubes sobrino, but I managed, as usual, to post one post about rap which will make everyone mad.
I'm way more immature than you Lennie. _____________
I've seen guys in Oakland throw down raps on street corners that would put a smile on your face, but sadly those are not the guys getting recording deals.
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to BarkellWH)
There are no styles or genres that i outright dislike. I can find something to like in anything.
When i was around 9 or 10, there was one of the first huge Rap songs that was a chart topping hit. It was called Rapper's Delight. My sister and i absolutely loved it. We had the 12 inch vinyl, and knew every last word of it. We had so much fun rapping along with that record in the living room. Great memories :) My favorites growing up , Mozart French Horn concertos, Getz and Gilberto, Entres Dos Aguas, Julian Bream, Heart, Micheal Jackson, Hendrix, Ravel, Kenny Rogers,Stephen Sondheim,, Van Halen, The Eagles, I was even a Kiss fan for a while haha There was literally a little of everything in the family record collection. I feel blessed to have had a wide and eclectic music exposure. If i ever have kids, i will do my best to make sure they have the same.
Is Rap real music? If a tree falls in the woods, is it flamenco??
Who cares? Just listen to stuff, and have fun. Its pretty easy.
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to ToddK)
quote:
My favorites growing up...Getz and Gilberto...
The Brazilian wave that came up in the '60s is still among my favorites. I was lucky enough to come to Washington, DC when Charlie Byrd was still around and playing Bossa Nova at his old club "Charlie's." In my opinion, Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto's rendition of "The Girl From Ipanema" is almost the perfect piece. The composition by Antonio Carlos Jobim and the Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes fit perfectly. Last year marked the 50th anniversary of "The Girl From Ipanema," and someone actually located the woman who (then as a young girl) used to walk in front of the beach-front bar in Rio de Janeiro every day, inspiring Jobim and de Moraes to create the song.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to Sr. Martins)
quote:
Its hard to believe it was about only one girl walking across the beach, especially since we're talking about Brazil here
I know what you mean, Rui Martins. I have been married to a Brazilian for nearly 40 years and have studied the female of that species during trips to Brazil with her for just as long. Nevertheless, as high a standard of beauty as Brazilians have set, there are some who still stand out, and apparently the girl who inspired "The Girl From Ipanema" was one such beauty (above all others walking by that beach-front bar daily) who caught the eye of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes. It was probably the whole package: Her looks, the way she walked, the way she carried herself. In any case, it resulted in one of the iconic songs of the 20th century.
Cheers,
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to BarkellWH)
Met a guy once, originally from Jamaica, grown up in London slums. The man new lots of limericks which he quoted very well, and I really digged the honed way of it all.
Why the hell, - provided such actual lyrics in the first place -, would you need to loop up any monotonous background and force it into the realm of music? And that even in an explodingly rich musical era.
Simply as launching another new thing was chique and for that again turning into a money making machinery for record labels. The biggest in the history of the branch, despite the patterns anaemia not run dry yet after over 3 decades. I and if I recall that corretcly, sane folks thought that was a gimmick, a bad joke that couldn´t find enough bad taste to last.
But we underestimated the host that had been celebrating schlager already, finally served with something as fashionable, and to be ashamed of only during the very first years before simplicity devolved en vogue.
During Goethe´s Waerter times folks wanted to be melancholic and thoughtful. During Satre sophistication was glory, and that period again was followed by the decades of trivial hip. Serving primare demands seemed to turn out as just enough for a human being. Proven by countless of ordinary examples that yielded even careers of milk & honey.
Distinguishing is for geeks anyway. Ever tried brain? Fried it really tastes great; though as Bavarian "Waaswurscht" it ain´t exactly schabby either.
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to BarkellWH)
quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
quote:
It is just a guess of course, might be as well wrong, but since you didnt disagree with that, i assume it is correct?
One more unsubstantiated assumption, to add to all the others you have made. Let me give you a quick lesson in evidence-based conclusions, Deniz. It is not up to me or anyone else on this Foro to prove your preconceived assumptions about us false. You are the one tossing out assumptions (about me and, at times, others) as if they were categorical truths, and it is up to you to prove them correct. If you cannot do so, and in my case you have failed to do so (with good reason, as you have no case to make), you simply demonstrate a capacity to generate heat but no light.
Bill
Could you please react on my actual reasoning that rap is music because it contains melodic and rhythmic complexity? I can repeat that statement one more time: rap is music because it contains melodic and rhythmic complexity (human induced). Music is sound organized in a way. Melody and Rhythm is sound organized in a way. Rap is music. So far i havent heard you provide any reason as why rap would lack any musical quality. (apropos reasoning one's own statements...) About my assumptions about certain social groups being less exposed to rap or even having a preconditioned dislike for it, because of their social surroundings, i think that is pretty legit and reflects everybody's everyday life. Are my assumptions incorrect, ie that you have had little exposure to rap music and that in your social circles there can be found few if none rap listening people, let alone rap artists? I cant prove that, hence i am asking you. I am not going to fly over whereever you are to make an empirical study on how many rap akin friends you have. I think you understand (i HOPE).
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to XXX)
Two points need to be made, Deniz:
A. You obviously haven't noticed, but we've moved on. You are the only one left who wants to argue about rap.
B. As I mentioned in my earlier post, neither I nor others on the Foro have to justify ourselves to you. You would be wise to stop flattering yourself by thinking otherwise.
(Note to self: Do not respond to trolls.)
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to BarkellWH)
quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
Two points need to be made, Deniz:
A. You obviously haven't noticed, but we've moved on. You are the only one left who wants to argue about rap.
B. As I mentioned in my earlier post, neither I nor others on the Foro have to justify ourselves to you. You would be wise to stop flattering yourself by thinking otherwise.
A. Basically yes. I have questioned correctness of your statement about rap not being music and provided some reasons.
B. Justify *yourself*? Thats cute. I dont care about you, but i care about the stuff you post and you should too. And yes you should back up the things you post and especially such a bold statement. If you cant, you should revide your statement - like any honorable man would do.
C. This post of yours - again - doesnt contain any point that could serve a progression in the discussion. Your escaping uncomfortable questions is not a solution to the disagreement we both have. I will keep pointing out this "particular style of discussion" of yours. I think you got away with it too many times.
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to Leñador)
Cool I like a lot of Mexican stuff..Juan Gabriel, Anna Gabriel, Ramon Ayala..being of hispanic descent in Illinois I mostly hear Mexican music in the realm of "Latin" music
I like some narco-corridos also..
Other stuff 70's/80's europop from Spain and Italy...or if Im smoking green cigaretts I love listening to classical Arab oud music or perhaps 70's Jamaican dub
RE: Your musical interest apart from... (in reply to BarkellWH)
I also don't like rap anymore ,but did when I was a youngster in the 80's and 90's
Rap is better looked at as a literary form like poetry than it is music IMO..its performance poetry more than it is music unless its full blown hip-hop which almost always is terrible unless it being listened to in a strip club at which point its better
Printable Version
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread