Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Radio & Music >

The white rock fan's hip hop cd collection

Page: 1 2(3)

Goodness Gracious Meme

23:53 / 26.03.03

there's alot of crap being talked on this thread, not all of it by BB. will be back with a more useful post later, though given that music threads are all about fluff, this isn't really a prob, is it?

but just wanted to say that I *heart* Pepsi and hir fabulous posting.

Goodness Gracious Meme

23:55 / 26.03.03

See, I really love Asian Dub Foundation. where does that get me, huh?

Middle class guardian-reader seeking safe political/PC routes into urban music?

Or British asian woman who invests massively in any possible British Asian music role model, especially those with very little 'good little paki' value who are confrontational and full-on, remembering what its like to grow up without role models in anything but medicine/corner shops and with the stereotype of belonging to the if the black kids are giving you a hard time, go pick on a paki' class. )

and BB, where do you get the kit for judging what's white white boy hip hop and what's black white boy hip hop.

can I have one?

Aren't you actually just constructing a stroppy manifesto against crossover in musical forms-

Without which there wouldn't be any fucking hip hop to start with...

-or in favour of a somewhat ludicrous notion of realness?

09:27 / 27.03.03

No, I think he's just taking the piss out of the 'obvious' records white boy rock fans have in their music collections, which they think makes them 'down' with da ill boyz. Kind of like Carlton in Fresh Prince Of Bel Air thinking that his Michael Flatley-style dancing will make him popular with Will and his friends.

Or kind of like how sooo many middle-class white folk love Eminem and buy all his records, and can be found rhapsodising about his lyrical genius, but who have no other hip hop records, except maybe the Beasties (usually the one with 'Sabotage' on it, because they heard it in an indie-rock club), and turn MTV over when black folks start shouting about black folks stuff.

Or maybe that's just my pet peeve.

The Natural Way

12:27 / 27.03.03

I'm torn: I'm feeling Byron AND BiP. Sometimes I get SO suspicious of Byron's motivations for this kinda stuff. Yeah, yeah...I know all the arguments - it's all very plausible.... But something nags. However, I am aware that that shit can't be his only motivation (is there ever only one motivation?), and, basically, I can't help nodding my head a bit. Anyone that needs proof that there are a HUGE bunch of white kids out there that only dig on rockist-approved hiphop only needs to get on a train to Brighton. "Hiphop" nights abound, but there's a marked lack of anything played at these things that falls into the jiggy/cash-money/Too Short/whatever bracket - it's all *Phat beats* and Scratch Perverts. That's the stuff that gets all the airplay. And I want to know what informs this bias - it's annoying and smacks of, well, something bad and head-nodding with backpacks, hoodies and dreads.

On a related note: a friend of mine recently went on the hunt for a R&B/Hiphop night in Brighton and found funk and chunky breaks. In the end, something turned up - but there was only one of it.

No star here laces

09:14 / 28.03.03

Well, I find it very hard not to want to beat the world with my big stick of good taste. Clearly this thread is all about everyone bowing down and kissing my air-maxes-of-crunk, kay?

But there is a serious element to all of this. Hip hop is so exciting, sparkly and fabulous when it's good. When it's really good. When it's great it offers something that I honestly don't believe any other music does. And it burns my ass severely that there are people who will only listen to hip hop for non-hip hop reasons and then justify this as some sort of objective good taste instead of a confirmation of their own small-mindedness. I find it very hard to respect that.

The things that make this music great are not the same things that make other styles of music great. You can't judge techno on its lyrics, you can't judge rock on melodic complexity and you can't judge classical on the drum patterns. So why the hell do people think that the presence of guitars, politics or words ending in -ical are a good criteria to assess hip hop on? Why the hell does it have to be lo-fi and/or polite before people will give it a chance? How can these idiots sit there with a straight face and apply this a-hole elitist intellectual bullshit to the most excitingly viscerally unpretentious music that we've seen in literally decades? It's utterly horrific.

So it's not about crossover, per se. It's about small-mindedness. There's more to this music thing than the noises you use, the words you say. There's such a thing as talent and it is not revealed by how many times someone says the word 'bitch' or how much jewellery they wear, and there's nothing innately more creative in writing endless songs about your "abstract poetical lyrical styles" than in telling us how rich you are. It's about the way you do it, yagetme?

09:20 / 28.03.03

These people you're talking about Bleulaces (ne Byron), who are they exactly? Are they the broadsheet / NME critics that Flyboy complained about earlier?

The Natural Way

09:26 / 28.03.03

Fraelyboy and I were chin-wagging about this last night. I put forward the unconscious racism angle, but he was more down with the musically inexperienced thing. He suggested that whilst loads of peeps (beep! beep! Guardian boys) wanna find an avenue into hiphop, their lack of any real knowledge/understanding of the form leads them down the the well-trodden path of rock-approved rapping. It's easier, safer and they know all their mates will approve. And then some of these guys set up camp there for good (beep! beep! James Lavelle).

I think my take falls somewhere inbetween both positions.

The Natural Way

09:29 / 28.03.03

Sax: they're the kids that infest Brighton. And they're REAL.

If I have to sit in another pub and Sunday-lunch it to the chunky beats of J5 one more time, I think I'll scream.

Matthew Fluxington

12:08 / 28.03.03

"Hiphop" nights abound, but there's a marked lack of anything played at these things that falls into the jiggy/cash-money/Too Short/whatever bracket - it's all *Phat beats* and Scratch Perverts. That's the stuff that gets all the airplay.

Do you think that it could possibly be that some of the music they're not into has something to do with that it might not speak to these people at all? You're acting as though differences in lyrical/musical emphasis aren't at all important. It's not all for everyone. That's a good thing, I think. It speaks well of hip hop's growth that there are entire subgenres that have their own aesthetic that appeal to different people than other subgenres. It expands. It grows. I don't see why anyone should feel obligated to like one subgenre simply because they enjoy some records from another. That would be like someone demanding that everyone who enjoys mainstream rock music also be a speed metal fan. Rock is not a monolithic thing, and neither is hip hop.

Regrettable Juvenilia

14:04 / 28.03.03

True. But I think this goes back to context - the kind of culture that Runce in particular evokes so well has a tendency to paint the majority of modern hip-hop *as* a monolith - in an entirely negative sense. This is usually coupled with the standard crippling nostalgia, insidiously rife in hip-hop and manifesting as the "old skool" - 'the five elements and not the five sell-aments', as one person at Barbelith put it memorably some time ago - ugh! So the mainstream is a big nasty monolith, and only certain carefully vetted artists are approved listening... Such a wide range of music and lyrical style is written off as 'gangsta', 'hip-pop', 'that r&b bullshit'... It just makes some of us angry. Grrr!

To make everyone peeps happy: let's stop this thread and start a new one about good, neglected - slept-on, if you will - hip-hop.

Page: 1 2(3)