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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   25324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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Speaking of the legal force. Maybe you will have better luck on YouTube, or failing that just use VPN.

It's banned on YouTube and every single streaming or music hosting service (Spotify etc.). X is the only place that allows hosting it.

It cannot be denied that it's a truly transgressive song, and a genuine act of rebellion, given it warrants this response. Can anyone else think of a single song that has received this treatment despite the ubiquitousness of explicit material in that genre?

Trivial to find: https://odysee.com/@LightElf:0/Kanye-West-Heil-Hitler:9

Not worth listening to, rather terrible, but such is our fallen society that some like rap.

Writing off entire major genres of art is needlessly impoverishing yourself. I'm not even a rap fan, but it is obvious that there is artistically great rap music.

As far as I can tell, the vast vast VAST majority of it is slop full of repurposed music and lyrics that get by on being offensive rather than clever. Rap artists aren't known for being intelligent, after all. I suspect most "celebrated" rap music would fail a double-blind test against some rando writing parodic lyrics and banging on an audio synthesizer for a few hours. Much like postmodern art, where the janitor can't tell it apart from trash.

There probably are some examples of the genre that I could learn to appreciate (Epic Rap Battles of History comes to mind), but it's hard to find them because of the pomo effect.

there is artistically great rap music.

Link?

How narrow are your goalposts? Does it need to be on a par with Shakespeare's sonnets to qualify or is anything more intelligent than Love Me Do good enough?

There's a certain ceiling as rap is based on simple loops and unpitched AAAA BBBB rhyme schemes and the further you go beyond that the more you risk a counter of "that isn't rap".

Stan by Eminem is a fairly easy example of something that surpasses the guns, drugs, whores and gold stereotype without having to reach for a laboured meta analysis that the guns and whores are a reflection of those artists' social environment akshually and are being held up as an ironic means to confront society's hypocrisy ("I was only pretending to be a violent greedy thug!"). On the other hand a vast amount of rap genuinely is wilfully degenerate so I can understand why so many people condemn it and write it off wholesale.

Some actual literal nazis in the vein of 'gas the Jews like we actually literally mean that' have had their pro-holocaust songs banned everywhere, I think. I can't remember a case of an American being banned from literally everything though, so that might have only been after a German court order or something.

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