Re: Maybe why Avante-garde looping in US...

[mech <mech@m3ch.net>]

At 12:40 PM -0800 2/2/06, johnsrude@peak.org wrote:
>
>This is kind of long-winded but please let's not start a thread about the
>music each of us hates.  I've seen this thread on just about every forum 
>I've
>ever been on and it's boring.

Hopefully not a thread about the music each of us hates, but rather 
still staying open to legitimate criticisms of the form here...

>  I don't think it's going to go away because you disapprove of
>it.  Besides the same thing's been said about just about every new music
>that's come up: rock, jazz, waltzes, Broadway show tunes, ambient, 
>looping...
>Hey, Stravinsky's music started a _riot_.

My biggest problem with the current state of Hip Hop is that it seems 
to have lost any innovative or revolutionary spirit that it once 
possessed.  Rap (the predecessor to Hip Hop) began by combining two 
things: the expression of message(s) that are outside the mainstream, 
and the use of the voice as a rhythm instrument.

Unfortunately, in America, 99.9% of current Hip Hop artists seem to 
have completely lost this.  They have few, if any, meaningful 
messages to convey.  Failing that, it would still be acceptable to at 
least have an interesting rhythmic sense.  However, most American 
artists seem to have missed that point as well.  In short, my largest 
criticism of current American Hip Hop is the same as my criticism of 
the majority of other musics here -- it is simply boring and 
mainstream.

Now, in Hip Hop's defense, I would instead recommend trying to find 
music from cultures other than America.  As mentioned previously, the 
art form's been around for a quarter century.  Other cultures have 
adopted it as well as ours, and a lot of them have done really 
interesting things, IMNSHO.  Also, some languages besides English 
seem extremely interesting in a Hip Hop context.

The French Hip Hop that I've heard is simply phenomenal, maybe 
because French seems to lend itself to rapid fire strings of 
syllables while still maintaining an interesting "flow".  That 
results in really interesting rhythmic juxtapositions (I'm curious 
how other Latin languages would do here).  Slovene is another example 
of a language that lends itself surprisingly well to Hip Hop.  And, 
believe it or not, there are even some artists singing in Deutsche 
that are more interesting than many American artists.  Witness the 
antics of German artists, Die Fantastisch Vier, as well as the 
occasional Falco rap done in his sing-song Viennese dialect.

So, to summarize, there is interesting Hip Hop being made.  You just 
have to get out of the US to find it.

        --m.

-- 
_______
" I want to keep you alive so there is always the possibility of 
murder... later"