 robertplantowns wrote:
You implying that they have to be resourceful
at all implies that you believe they need some sort of help in creating art
because they are incapable of doing it themselves. Creating true art does
not require resourcefulness whatsoever. Your message really seems to
imply that people involved with hip-hop need help in creating their own
art and even though it is masked in political correctness I think it's truly
racist. |
Yes, I love hip hop, bossa nova, jazz, and Tibetan throat
singing and yet I break out in splotchy hives all the live long day because
I fail to live up to my true spiritual designation as a racist who believes
rappers need 'help' creating their art. I'll dispense with how dirty and base
of you it is to assume that because my sense of myself is strong enough
to be untarnished in the face of such ill informed hysterics. You are a fine
chap, I'm sure, and our differences are nominal. I'm certain if I met you in
a pub we'd get on just fine. So leave those code red buzz words out of it.
However heated my little rant may have been, I didnt point any fingers at
you for holding down an entire people with well seeming ideals. We're all
shiny on that, okay?
I can only gently remind you that your conception of the culture which
created hip hop music must be dim and sorted if you think someone
stating the economic and social context into which the media of sampling
was born should be both celebrated and vindicated as resourceful
amounts to "these people are cows of lesser creative stuff and can only
steal in order to express anything" betrays a dangerous imposition of
middle class values upon people who were at that time as remote from
the tools (both materially and situationally) which to you qualify as
essential in the creation of 'real music' as mozambique is from gary,
indiana. It would be an entirely different matter if the nouveau riche in
London were doing it, that is everything to my mind! Ask grandmaster
flash or any of the vangaurds of the first wave of hip hop if 'your kind
were resourceful and I respect that' is an underhanded way of saying 'you
can only steal to make music, therefore what you making isnt music...so
tell me, do you even have the power to express yourself at all?" and
behold the look he'd give you. Those people didnt have conservatories,
they had a hungry ambition to do 'something.'
I won't call you names. I will say your judging hip hop outside of its
cultural context (how it started, not the opulent monster that commercial
rap has become, which, by the way, is a reaction to how destitute and
urgent its original survivalist aesthetic was.) To sit back and label a song
based on samples as unoriginal is well and fine and I'm not asking you to
seek personal enjoyment from a kind of music you deem to be 'recycled.'
In purely musical terms, you are absolutely right. But, like most
movements in art, nothing can be viewed in purely formal terms, divorced
from its fertile bed of blanketing surroundings. I would suggest, then,
that a step outside your own perspective, upbringing, and even values
momentarily might allow you to realize the people who birthed hip hop
music had no assistance to LIVE governmentally, this being at a time
when welfare was far from the 'all you can eat handout' some claim it to
be today. its hard to take piano lessons, or study the classic works of the
italian renaissance in painting when you can't post rent and you have 3
kids with empty bellies crying their eyes out. You can call that hyper-
sensitive or politically-correct all you want. I would call you self-
possessed and heartless if its not something your at least momentarily
willing to consider. It may not be about that for you, and that is fine. Just
know you can't dance across the vast wilderness of conceptual meatspace
without stepping on someone's toes eventually. What is just a matter of
idle debate for you was a matter of life and death for your conceptual
querry, i.e. 'the big bad wolfy rappers'
And yes, when I look at a time and a place in this country (the US) where
masses that are all but left to perish in their own filth by an indoctrinated
state only hellbent on maintaining its own comfortable status quo, I feel
an intense and prolific joy when reflecting on what some of those
unfortunate ones did to uplift their minds and their bodies out of the
squalor. That is what hip hop, sampling, grafitti, breakdancing, the whole
culture originated to supply. A sense of empowerment and self worth.
"You took from us, now were taking something back and making it our
own, and speaking our truths no matter how unpopular they are, just to
maintain our f*cking sanity." They had no concert halls, no harpsichords,
no hammond organs, no classical music instructors intrepid enough to
risk their life just to penetrate into the murk to teach them major from
minor scales. Hell, there were barely even libraries in brooklyn at the end
of the 70s.
This is not a crisis you may have had the resevoir of experience to
understand, but to some of us, it is a wonderful and bright thing which
only became perverted from its core values (as did punk music) when the
record industry infiltrated and made blind commodities of its most
desperate truths. You don't have to agree, just know its a touchy matter
that transcends your qualification for 'what art is' and seems doubly
callous of you to deem it has no validity when it, in a sense, was all that
was available to them. Turntables were rotting in the attic alongside old
soul records. Suddenly they became the vital cultural epoch of a
movement that sought to uplift and invigorate rather than fetter and
constrain the community (as a good bit of the modern sh*t masquerading
as hip hop does, only to cement industry farmed trends, mind you.) That
being said, Madlib (the producer that sparked this whole debacle) is one
of the good ones, okay? This dude can play his ass off, in addition to
being a phenomenal producer and arranger. He surrounds himself with
quality and produces quality that stands for something and his love for a
band like Gentle Giant is no small surprise. I've heard him mention them
on several instances, and your rightcheous indignation barely applies as
I'm fully aware he both contacted and cleared the sample with them. He is
educated and a scholar of all forms of expression. Something I might
suggest. For you to demonize him with your pet theories about the rest
of the industry or the stale state of rap music in general is about as
relevant as accusing Joan of Arc or Ghandi of being an imperialist.
Just try and think of it from a 'non-musical' standpoint, and youll see that
this media, this mode of expression, while being nowhere near prog or
classical in terms of its technical or even operational capacity, is
nontheless completely necessary to a different kind of person in this
world of ours and no amount of rationalizing or wishing it away on an
obscure prog rock message board can change that.
Would it be so inherently destructive for you to envision a world in which
prog and hip hop arent quarantined and over-proud of their own time
encrusted dogmas? Didnt prog itself result from the marriage of already
well trodden ground to something more modern and fresh. I know, its a
sample, I get it. But do you?
Edited by dojonane
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Gentle Giant HAS BEEN HIP-HOP SAMPLED!!!
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