estebanana -> RE: Your musical interest apart from Flamenco? (Feb. 22 2013 23:36:59)
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I got something to say, none of ya'll know anything about rap. I live in Oakland, Yo. [:D][:D][:D] 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.
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