While tooling around Rhode Island this week, I managed to click the sound system in the rental car over to the satellite input wherein someone had tuned it to a hip-hop station. Curious, I listened to four songs.
The first three described, with no small pride, all manner of sociopathic behaviors. Violence, meaningless sex, consumption of mind-altering substances and more. The point of each song was that the singer, err, chanter, had done these things with greater verve and gusto than the ordinary chap. Hurrah! Well done, lads!
The fourth song was a lamentation. It seems that the singer, err, chanter, had moved out of the hood and had attempted to join normal society. He grumbled in a rather garbled way that his neighbors all thought he was dealing dope and how very unfair this was. It was a trifle contradictory. He and his friends wanted to be the bad dudes in the hood, but be treated like an upstanding citizens by their neighbors.
As the DJ on the station was throwing out every curse word in the book in idle conversation, it was doubtful that even she could see that the sequence of songs made little sense.
Oh well.
2 comments:
Had a co-worker who listened to rap.
It suddenly stopped when he asked me what I thought of it-- and I told him I thought it was silly because the guys bragged about dealing drugs, hitting women, selling women's bodies and shooting people for about six songs, then spent one song talking about how they love Jesus and mommy, then whined for one song because the cops were tying to arrest them for the things they'd bragged about in the first six songs.
Apparently "silly" was simply not the reaction he'd been expecting.
AMEN! That's exactly what I heard. It's the art form of spoiled children.
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