I've thought about writing this for a long time. It started with a telegram post by Bronze Age Pervert. I don't follow BAP but I saw Zero HP Lovecraft mention the post in a tweet so I found the telegram and read it. I also don't follow ZHP but I'm not saying that to get ahead of anything, I don't dislike him and his "she could lose weight" bit is pretty funny. This is BAP's post:
That is poltard "take your meds schizo" rambling that I won't talk a bit about other than how reading it made me realize the animosity BAP has toward eminently black music would spread through his devotees into the rightist sphere. It has, now it's at a simmer.
I'll give a bit of a primer but I figure a lot of you have some familiarity with Hip-Hop. It's more than just music, it's a subculture of fashion, art, music and dance, but I'm only talking about the music. As the genre developed, inside baseball is its variation into East Coast and West Coast Hip-Hop. East Coast where emphasis is on hard lyricism: artists like Biggie, Jay-Z and Run The Jewels. West Coast where emphasis is on the vibe: Dr. Dre, Tyler the Creator, Anderson .Paak. Subgenres people should be familiar with conceptually are Alternative and Progressive. Alternative about deviating from mainstream sound: A Tribe Called Quest, the Roots, BROCKHAMPTON. Progressive, about incorporating whatever sounds good as complexity is developed within the form: Outkast, Kanye, Kendrick Lamar.
I think most people I see in those threads who criticize "Rap"--and some elaboration will follow--don't really know it. They haven't listened to much and what they have is the weakest examples of the genre in performers like Drake and Jack Harlow. In polite terms they call it Rap. Rap isn't wrong but it's imprecise, rapping is what the vocalist does on the track, Hip-Hop is the rap-to-and-the-beat, and the production is equally if not more important. I'm not doing a pedantic gotcha thing, if you respond to this by calling it Rap I'll know what you mean, and when I call it Hip-Hop you can mentally shortcut Rap if it's easier.
I think most of those Xers would enjoy it if they were shown its best, but there is the minority. Those who didn't originate the thought but they are its loud propagators, so BAP, who are filled with the kind of racial hate where they dislike Hip-Hop solely because of its blackness. I know they'd yeschad me calling them racist but that's not my angle. I'm not criticizing them for being racist, I'm criticizing them for allowing their supposedly great intellects to be subjugated by their racism; to be made retarded by hate as they showboat their inability to appreciate beauty. A failing never more obvious than when they inevitably cope with their flaw unrealizing by saying "No, it really is bad."
I try not to call music bad, it's too subjective. I'll happily comment to the side, like Jack Antonoff probably does all the real work in his collabs with Taylor Swift, Swift's popularity is far more memetic than musical, and/also for Olivia Rodrigo who is a stunningly obvious industry plant; Jack Harlow grew up on a horse ranch, enough said. I still won't call their work bad. I have friends who love their music, why would I want to diminish that? But if I called Swift or Rodrigo or especially Harlow, or pulling back to the albums out of pop, rock and alt-rock of the last 25 years (country ignored for obvious reasons), with few exceptions--Viva La Vida counts and it's pretty good but a lot of its strength is the title track and I like X&Y more; Toxicity is superb; In Rainbows likewise--if I called the best of those genres bad relative to Hip-Hop's best, I would be right.
The best writers of lyrics is a long list of black artists. Ed Sheeran, who seems like a right proper lad, had song of the year 2017 with Shape of You (the link is the lyrics.) It might seem unfair to compare it to Outkast's Bombs Over Baghdad as it's the song of the millennia so far, but it is fair because BOB came out about 17 years earlier, as in pre-Iraq, pre-9/11. This is also where production matters so much, the lyrics are good but made best in context of hearing them in the song. So production, the best producers are many of those same lyricists--Kanye, Jay-Z, Pharrell Williams--or they work with those black artists. Nolan's Oppenheimer was beautifully scored by Ludwig Gorranson, Gorranson broke out on the strength of his production work with Donald Glover/Childish Gambino. He could do things he couldn't anywhere else because there is no genre that allows creativity to flourish like Hip-Hop. Shit Kanye was figuring out 25 years ago dominates the sound of modern pop. I anticipate a certain cope: "Yeah, because it's 2024 and we worship blacks." There is sardonic truth in ascribing a religious reverence to some of the leftist establishment's treatment of blacks but production techniques made prominent by Hip-Hop are now in pop because it makes it better. Carly Rae Jepsen's Emotion (2015) is one of the best pop albums ever recorded and it could hardly be more white. White girl from Canada spending 25 tracks (super-deluxe + B-Side EP) singing about her broken heart. Its production techniques, the samples, the synths, yeah that's the stuff Kanye was doing over a decade before, reaching a degree of culmination in his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak. Easily the most influential album since its release, past all the Hip-Hop it impacted, down the line we have Scooter Braun and Jepsen, we have Lorde, Lana Del Rey, Dua Lipa, Rina Sawayama, Spellling (though The Turning Wheel calls way harder to Kate Bush's The Hounds of Love), Billie Eilish and the biggest and whitest T-Swift.
The only genre with that level of willingness and brilliance in total experimentation by arena acts, aside from the artist-that-is-the-genre of Tyler Joseph's Twenty One Pilots, is electronic music. Those Frenchies dominate it, and you know what? Game recognizes game. Daft Punk working with Kanye and then Pharrell, then later coming out of their soft retirement to work with the Weeknd. Outside of France there's Ratatat and MGMT with Kid Cudi, Moby with Public Enemy, DJ Shadow with Run The Jewels, and Calvin Harris with a bunch of artists.
Funny, I never see the righties complaining about what should surely be "height-of-degeneracy" raves. Heavy light shows where white girls take molly and get fucked by strangers in bathroom stalls. What, do they see blond blue-eyed DJs and it's easy to ignore? Must be they see a white girl dancing to a good beat with a black guy rapping and their miscgenic hackles raise. Funnier still since I'm certain those guys know by heart or else have desktop folders with charts of online dating message/response rates-by-demographic just ready to slam on a /pol/ troll's slide thread.
A tangent, but it follows. I watched Demolition Man a few nights ago. I'd seen pieces over the years but never watched it start-to-finish and it's free on Sling. Sly Stallone as the classic 80s (though 1993 release) action hero cop and the fantastic Wesley Snipes as the villain. After Snipes' big plot at the opening, he and Sly are cryo-imprisoned for decades, during which their "destructive behavioral patterns" will be conditioned away. When Snipes is revived for his parole hearing and jailbreaks, he emerges in an idyllic but Huxleyan-dystopic society. The cops are totally unprepared for a man of Snipes' criminality and martial prowess. Sly is revived to stop him; action comedy ensues. A recurring joke is in the control of language, Sly's frequent profanity is met with computer chime, chastisement and fine for violating the "verbal morality statute."
Control of language is a serious problem in modern discourse. It puts on the veneer with lies and thought-terminating clichés, it makes our speech inauthentic and our way of living becomes inauthentic in turn. I don't know if I'd give the film points for directional correctness, I will give it points for the crass, man's-man-at-the-time Stallone solving all his problems with a hammer. It's that language control--inauthentic discourse--has been a problem for this country since before cinema existed. Early American political discourse had a viciousness to it: Jefferson against Adams is the famous example, where Adams was described as with "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman," while Jefferson was described as a "mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw sired by a Virginia mulatto father." (There is some contention about whether these were actually said, I believe firmly they were.)
What changed? Elite WASPs, Boston Brahman and the like. Their values, their etiquette of "modesty" and "restraint" dominated elite institutions and those values trickled down, being inculcated in the masses and where we once had politicians showing their authentic animosity toward one another, now even lefties calling Trump "fascist Drumpfler" or whatever is somehow still only the patina over authenticity. Imagine that level of candor today: Trump calling Biden a "braindead retard whose only good son is dead" and Harris a "marabou cocksucker" while they retort by calling him a "smalldicked whorefucking bankrupt wannabe wop."
It'd be great. I love boisterous and loud, the most obnoxious political characters on all sides. We know you're thinking it, be authentic and say it! Who cares about pretense? whose standards are you appealing to? Yeah, WASPs from 150 years ago. Fuck off, it's a lie, it's the most inauthentic behavior. Trump will sometimes lie in really bad and obvious ways yet his character remains wholly more authentic than anybody else in politics. That fucking is Trump, that's the man himself, and I think it's a mark of great merit, in itself. I'd think every bit the same if AOC came out being her true self. I know there's a lot of digs at her actual competence vs if she's just a mouthpiece, I think she's probably more than competent enough to be a house rep, low bar as that is. I'd love it if she said what she actually thinks, authentic, absolutely no pretense (and to be appropriately crass, in a push-up bra with a tasteful top to show the goods.)
Would this cause future trouble? Would we move even closer to President Mountain Dew Camacho? I dunno, where's the impact? You're telling me American politicians have yet more character to sell? Or do you fear politics transforming into the final show, where the people are all but entirely removed from changing who stands at the levers of real power? Well I think the evidence is pretty good Biden isn't entirely running the operations of the executive so . . . who's there when he isn't?
Pretense, decorum, expected behavior; these are arbitrary and often worthless. Note often, not worthless for being arbitrary, worthless where they only exist to delineate class. Talk more properly, dress more properly, behave more properly, again I ask whose fucking properness? The culture-progeny of the blooded aristocracy we killed out of this country 250 years ago. That's who the WASPs were. They deserve credit for the spread of meritocracy America benefited from for so long, but they deserve scorn for that etiquette pushed post-war to post-war and then inertia did the rest. Profanity is nothing, it's sounds, use it or don't. (I do hate the thankfully unsuccessful practice of naming in things like "Slutty Cookie" recipes or putting "FUCK" very large on the cover of books.) Restraint is good to a point, modesty to a point, to speak in circles, restraint and modesty are good when they are good, but they are not good in themselves. "Modesty is a virtue" as it goes but I disagree, rather as with the proper understanding of "meekness", it is not modesty that is the virtue but knowing when to be modest that is the indicator of character. Frank Lloyd Wright said "Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change." As the greatest American architect and the greatest in the world since the Imperial Hotel or Fallingwater, were he to practice "hypocritical humility" it would only serve to assuage those who correctly appraised themselves as inferior to him and lacked the character to persist. It's not like he could design every building.
Not only Wright; the most effective wielders of power in this country's history dropped decorum wherever possible. Big Johnson, back to Teddy Roosevelt, whom I particularly like in this context because as the best member of the Roosevelt family his behavior spurned the etiquette of that mighty WASP dynasty. Back to Lincoln and of course Jefferson and Adams (Adams, whose descendants swiftly forgot the lessons of their sire.) Hate these figures if you want and where appropriate, their high effectiveness as political actors is not up for debate.
So Hip-Hop. Hip-Hop is more authentic to the founding spirit of this country than any other music. I don't mean it in the Project 1619 "blacks-built-literally-everything" pseudoacademic bullshit. I mean in its content, its lyrics, its successes. These are the most American stories. So hating on a guy rapping about all the bitches he fucks? It's called bragging, it's where the eponym "Casanova" comes from. Bragging about gang violence? To the Romanophiles (guilty), you've surely heard of Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Odds are good Ceasar made some of that up or at least embellished to boost his image but that reinforces the point.
Not that I'm comparing Jay-Z rapping about hoes or about his life in the hood to Caesar, but a man famously talking about his wealth or his women or the horde he reduced unto the slaughter, the idea of these as in any way novel, which is necessary for saying Hip-Hop is uniquely degradative, is comical. As long as humans have told stories men have talked about rape, pillage and plunder. Thus authenticity.
Success stories are obvious. Yeah there are guys like Drake who have a negative amount of street cred but Jay-Z was selling crack, now he's worth billions and married to Beyoncé. (And second pic so you can see how little help she needs from staged shots.) There's a lot just there, the pathetic racists who would deny, or maybe really are so tragically incapable of recognizing beauty they miss that Beyoncé is one of the most beautiful women alive just as they miss the beauty of Hip-Hop.
I've talked so much about it, I should really talk about it. If you're unlearned, here's a progress in tracks.
I start with Mark Ronson's cover with Daniel Merriweather singing of the Smith's Stop Me that incorporates parts of the Supremes You Keep Me Hangin' On. This is Neo Soul, Merriweather's soulful singing with modern production techniques: synths, drum machine.
Next is Gnarls Barkley's Smiley Faces. At release, Crazy was the massive single off the album St. Elsewhere but the rest of the album had a sharp falloff in listening. As with Stop Me it's Neo Soul, but with Danger Mouse's production we're getting closer to a beat to be rapped to.
That's Madcon's Beggin. Pure Hip-Hop, not Sugarhill Gang pure, but pure. Taking The Four Seasons' Beggin' as the hook to follow into Tshawe's sing-rap verse, to Yosef's pure rap verse.
Next is the Pharcyde's Runnin' as remixed by electronic duo Philippians. The original is closer to Sugarhill Gang purity vs Madcon, in part of course because Pharcyde is old school. Their sample of Saudade Vem Correndo as the guitar riff is the big feel of the song, gets you that instant West Coast vibe. The Philippians remix preserves the sample, keeps the rapping at the front, and is an example, insofar as it's DJs remix, of Progressive Hip-Hop. Developing complexity within the form. If you haven't listened to much but you enjoy what I've listed and you're interested in more, the original is just as good but I'd say Pharcyde's Passin Me By, which is probably their most well-known track, is the next step.
Last is Kanye, Heaven and Hell. Ye starting off as usual with a sample he's put his spin on from the beginning of 20th Century Steel Band's Heaven and Hell is on Earth, and he also incorporates the refrain from the song as backing on his verse. I'd say this is pure progressive Hip-Hop, it would have been at the start of his career, but now this is just standard work for him.
Can't ignore Ye. Continued below.
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Notes -
Your essay is way too long for how little point you are deriving. I read four paragraphs before deciding it’s more efficient if I just briefly argue why hip hop is harmful in a comment, than divining what your argument is.
Music is about producing a spirit in a person, a social emotional-behavioral orientation. Music can produce approximately any emotional space, from the felt sense of eeriness, to grief, even to tones that connote honor, duty, profundity, you name it. We do not need to prove how it does this, as we all agree it does this. This means we can judge music not just by how well it accomplishes its intended emotional result (its technical skill), but whether the resultant emotional space is beneficial or harmful to social life.
Rap, a normal selection of popular rap, focuses on self-aggrandizement, pride, antisociality, and lust. If you were to literally ask yourself, “what is the worst emotional orientation to promote in the youth?”, you would come up with a litany of themes that occur in rap. What would be worse for the youth than to hyper-focus on lust, consumerism, killing people who slight you, and narcissism? Okay, well that’s most popular rap songs. Were satanists to be producing good music (again), it would probably wind up more prosocial than hip hop.
But don’t take my word for it. If you had a teenage daughter this month there’s a good chance has heard
You haven’t “discovered” anything special when you notice that your most debased and primitive animal self enjoys the fantasy of power and sex. Every 10 year old can imagine this. Someone who thinks this music is good is as tasteless as a foodie who tells you sugar is the most exquisite because it makes his mouth feel the best. The music is bad, because the spirit it produces is bad. Yes, it may be pleasurable, but you wouldn’t say the best medicine is heroin, would you?
The lyrics are only one aspect of music. The BPM and rhythm can also induce in a person a sense of patient thought or a sense of urgency. Rap combines sin with urgency.
An unwise person may reply, “okay, but like, The Beach Boys also sang about hooking up with girls…”
In a totally different phenomenological space that promotes delicate emotion, love, fidelity, and not lust, which is communicated via the slow beat, the instrumentation, and vocals.
It is a bad idea generally but especially in this place to speak confidently while betraying such ignorance on a matter. How do we have discourse on a topic you show you know nothing about?
Your pissant bit of writing was addressed in full in the essay, read it or don't, I wasn't addressing you. I understand your being and I know what's above can't crack your animus. You hate jews and viewing Hip-Hop as a tool of jews--it's been one moneymaking tool of many in the legendarily corrupt profiteering of the jew-dominated record industry, certainly--you hate Hip-Hop.
If you actually understood the problems of today you would laugh at calling Hip-Hop a problem. You bring up the Beach Boys? They were unique in how they were fairly uncontroversial to the conservative establishment of their era but who do you think the hippies were listening to during the Summer of Love? Yeah I think Good Vibrations got bit of airtime. Shit man, seems like their music wasn't particularly edifying after all. But you should know this, you see through the excess of modernity, you're not unimpacted because it impacts us all, but you remain yourself. You are authentic, and my respect for authenticity is a major theme of the essay.
The spirit is sick and there are places the music certainly reflects it; music as symptomatic would be fair so Hip-Hop as symptomatic is obviously fair. The disease is elsewhere, and this is what you surely understand. Like how these problems would still exist if Hip-Hop never emerged because the major points of shift in this country occurred long before Hip-Hop led in just black culture. The great disaster of our age is social medial and veritable epochs in internet time passed between [epoch] Facebook/Twitter, [epoch]Instagram/Twitter, [epoch]the preeminence of smartphones, [epoch] the explosion in Hip-Hop's popularity. Without Hip-Hop's dominance TikTok would still exist and still fill the internet with the shittiest, most cognitively degradative content yet devised and the laziest rap wouldn't be clipped a million times but there'd still be the million clips of the laziest rock and pop and country. Videos would still be plentiful of shitty shows where hundreds of girls dance while being recorded for their instagrams by others and righty commentators would still bemoan the state of the western woman. Even if you weren't wrong about the quality, on this matter you still would only be decrying the trappings rather than the thing itself: a thing that existed before ¥ was even born.
My children will be homeschooled and I will curate their exposure to culture but I will eventually show them everything--given, with my description and guidance on certain subjects rather than graphic depiction---because I will not be able to to guide my children at every moment in their lives, nor should I want to (beyond the father's healthy wish to always be there for his children). They will need to become adults and make good judgments on their own, so if my daughter at any time in her life were at risk in being negatively affected by hearing that music I will have failed as a father. This is something modern fatherhood has failed at and continues to fail at so often, but even recognizing that as an issue I'm still in the trappings. Far closer to the source, but still the trappings.
Cool it with the personal attacks. Even when you disagree with someone, you need to remain civil while you make your points.
WTF are you even talking about here? I don't like (post Y2K) rap very much either, but I read the above post several times searching for a personal attack and didn't see one -- other than accusing coffee of not knowing anything about rap, which is, like -- probably true and not much of an insult?
To the extent that politeness norms encourage good discussion I can understand you guys modhatting/warning/banning some stuff that I would rather you didn't -- but politely expressing that c.e. isn't making great points (for instance: "Your essay is way too long for how little point you are deriving" -- which is kind of an ironic one given the norms being enforced a.t.m. -- but also objectively not a great contribution) is just not a personal attack?
WTH man.
“Betraying such ignorance,” “pissant bit of writing,” “if you actually understood”…these are all attacking the character and competence of the OP. The sarcasm doesn’t help either.
There’s a lot of good substance in Jake’s rebuttal, and I’m not objecting to that.
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I assume its in reference to this
That you didn't see it after rereading the post several times is a bit strange to me.
That is not a personal attack, it's an attack on c.e.'s writing. (in response to an attack by c.e. on OPs writing)
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@ZorbaTHut
Why are you responding to the volume of reports from the black-and-jew-haters I have correctly identified and criticized in this essay? @coffee_enjoyer, after the jew-hate he doesn't remotely hide in his commenting here, has shown an astonishing lack of knowledge given the arrogance with which he writes; he doesn't know a goddamn thing about Hip-Hop or clearly anything more than some very basic sociology of black culture yet he gets no ding for making this discussion immeasurably worse. Every comment he has on this post is immediately disprovable and he started off with "Too long didn't read lol."
Why shouldn't I respond?
Let's say you're correct, and your post was exclusively reported by racists and anti-semites. They would be right to do so, because your response breaks several of our rules. It doesn't matter to whom you're writing; you must be polite. Civil. The better person, even. This forum is founded on the idea of engaging with your bitterest enemies rather than falling back on suppression.
For what it's worth, I think there are several non-identitarian reasons why your original essay received criticism. It comes across as kind of smug, which basically guarantees that people are going to come in and nitpick regardless of subject. In my opinion, it would have benefited from some aggressive editing, too--as much as I like the ideas, you spent too many words on tangents. You could have made the point with, like, three paragraphs plus the progress-in-tracks.
But I digress.
You wrote this post expecting to draw out some race warriors. At least, I hope you did, because that's what this place is all about: engaging. Encountering arguments that one would never have seen in one's own bubble, and taking them seriously rather than flinching away. Do it right, and you can expect to see some nonsense. Some degenerate fools who don't recognize the truth of [insert belief here]. So if you think you've found one, help him understand. One of you will learn something.
I don't pay attention to admin actions here, I think you all do a good job, I say that because I don't know and I'm not suggesting you only replied because of reports. But if you did--someone downvoting these comments is hitting the user and not the substance. They are here in bad faith; if they report, they report in bad faith. They should be ignored.
But also, someone who reports because they care about this place and they're following the spirit of this place, they would have reported coffee. "I didn't read that but you're wrong" is the antithesis of the Motte. It's a violation so apparent it needs no context, but given context they might also note how his arguments were at best contrived and detached from my essay and at worst asked and answered by my essay. Such a user would have also seen how after my initial harshness I praised him and even agreed with him on certain points. I engaged, he didn't, but he's not here to engage. He saw "On Hip-Hop" and thought it would be a good place to opine, began reading my essay and realized he was profoundly out of depth but rather than the healthy behavior, not responding, he charged ahead to betray his ignorance; to act like he understands subjects he clearly doesn't. I think my essay should be treated as adequate support for my labeling someone in this manner.
As for "pissant": If someone new to this place came in and gave loud and wrong opinions it's possible they could be swayed from their arrogance by a particularly thorough teardown. A user who's been here for years and has over a thousand comments knows better than to respond how he did. It's a bad debt for the spirit of this place when the long-present, loudly wrong but ostensibly properly spoken can escape the criticism they deserve and need. Discourse cannot be good if it refuses to include just rebuke and I'm not talking about a modded "Don't do this."
The person who has succumbed to extreme hatred of jews isn't going to be swayed with even the greatest of otherwise and only tone-neutral arguments. Hard antisemitism is the final deviation from thought norms and it requires strong emotional impetus. They don't believe any experts or evidence against them; they're prepared for those arguments anyway and they have their "experts" and "evidence" to fall back to if their preparation fails. They become walking confirmation bias feedback loops and it's all cemented with hate. BAP's gotta be pretty smart but the rant I linked shows the guy operating multiple sigmas below his actual intellect as he expresses his hate. It makes him dumber, it makes them dumber. You have to engage and give good arguments, absolutely. You must also absolutely target them in the same place their hate dwells, and that means making them feel shame--the shame from recognition of the deep iniquity within themselves.
But for your purposes, I can say I don't anticipate responding to a user like I did to coffee again.
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I don't think we all agree it does this, at least not in the way you seem to claim. Music can temporarily evoke an emotion, in much the way a movie can, but the idea that music changes people's actual beliefs or actions seems like a very strong and unsubstantiated claim.
I enjoy Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon and Maxwell's Silver Hammer by the Beatles. Both songs basically celebrate deranged serial killers. Neither has made me want to kill anyone to even the slightest degree.
There is an element of behavior and not just emotion because dance is universal. The music can literally compel us to perform a repetitive physical action. And there are clearly natural physical responses, like if you were to slow dance to techno you’d actually be doing something wrong, and if you were to jumpstyle to an slow piano etude you’d be responding unnaturally. I don’t mean that music is going to make you want to do specific behaviors like fold your laundry, but that it infects our physical bodies and begs us to respond with our bodies. And music can then be seen to promote urgency and low-impulse via quick actions, or longmindedness and thoughtfulness. So when you pair pro-drug visual media/lyricism with a low-impulse rhythm, that’s a recipe for immorality.
That’s because you have the social intelligence to understand that the Beatles are not extolling murder. The music behind the lyrics is upbeat and devoid of anger. The juxtaposition was chosen to make a humorous and interesting song. This is different from hip hop, with some of the artists having genuinely murdered people and then gaining respect from other artists in the genre.
Music changes something more significant than beliefs, it changes a person’s focal emotions. What emotions they can more readily access, appreciate, and pursue. This may be temporary or it may be lasting depending on how often the music is consumed. Psychology tells us that repeating the same neurological patterns creates a mental habit, leading to easier and access / recall. This is why you might hear a phrase and suddenly remember a song, or might have a song stuck in your head due to some emotional problem you are dealing with.
The fact that certain types of music promotes certain types of dancing does not imply that it promotes specific types of behavior off the dance floor. You haven't provided any evidence of this and it certainly contradicts my experiences.
You claim this based on what evidence? It sounds like in your worldview music is almost a hypnotizing force, something that changes people subconsciously, but then you contradict yourself with statements like:
It sounds like you think Maxwell's Silver Hammer is fine because if you intellectually analyze it you realize it's not pro-murder. But if it's just a hypnotic or automatic response to lyrics + rhythm, why should this matter? I can tell a just-so story about how pairing an "upbeat and devoid of anger" melody with lyrics about serial killing actually conditions people to thinking killing isn't a big deal. But that story would have as little evidentiary basis as yours does.
Also you seem to be claiming that if Paul McCartney turned out to be a serial killer, and stated that Maxwell was meant unironically, this would transform it from a "good" song to a "bad" one?
I should probably also note that Charles Mansion credited Beatles songs as inspiring his murders. How do you square that with your claims?
Any evidence for this claim? In my experience the songs that get stuck in my head are random and have no connection with my emotional state.
let me clarify as much as possible, just using the song I included in my original reply. We have:
Memorable music with memorable lyrics, which teens will lip-sync on tik tok,
paired with an emotional state of urgency, pleasure, and power (this is communicated via the music, lyrics aside),
with lyrics designed to be catchy that extol drug use in a non-satirical, non-sarcastic, non-fantastical way,
associated together with the imagery of high status symbols, both within the song and in the culture of the rapper — you see teens with posters of their favorite rappers whom they idolize on their walls
Now, what motivates all teen behavior is the prospect of status and sex. (No, you will not get a source for that, don’t ask). This is mediated by looking upward toward those of high status. Hip hop is prepackaged odes to status and its rewards. We already know that fans of hip hop will imitate their favorite rappers, sometimes how they speak but also how they dress. If Kanye comes out with a new shoe, a fan will buy it to imitate who they see as high status. Given that we know fans will imitate rappers already, it is rational to conclude that they are also imitating what the rapper extols in their lyrics — like drugs. All of the fans? No one has ever alleged that. Rap is harmful if even 1% of the fans are more likely to do drugs after hearing a literal ode to drug use by their literal idol.
You should actually be able to understand this intuitively, no intellectualizing required. On the one hand, you have an upbeat narrative song about someone else, sung by some hippie British guys, and the musical feeling is entirely non-aggressive. On the other hand, you have an aggressive song written by a rapper who sings about his own life, who is gang affiliated, whose peers are murderers and who has probably spoken out against snitching.
It is the adolescent imitation of idols believed to have high status, not hypnotism. If you’re a kid in the ghetto, and you see a guy getting respect and women and money and later learn he runs a gang, will this make you more likely to join a gang? Common sense says yes, and hip hop is merely the packaging of this experience into a commodity to be sold to those outside the ghetto.
The emotion of anger leads to murder, and this emotion isn’t in the song. It’s peaceful, frolicking, almost joyful in musicality. You literally have a “doo doo doo doo, doo” background vocal. No one is entering into a murderous mood listening to this song and no one with a modicum of social intelligence would mistake the Beatles for promoting serial killing. In contrast, rappers are known to go to jail for killings and to carry guns.
Well I suppose it’s funny to know that he is still successfully trolling after all these decades
My interest in continuing this conversation is waning given your unwillingness to present even a shred of evidence to substantiate your rather strong claims.
It seems to me that all your arguments are fundamentally the same arguments that people in the 60s advanced as evidence of the Beatles corrupting the youth. Run for Your Life is a song about beating or killing a woman for infidelity, written and sung by John Lennon who literally beat his wife. Got to Get you Into My Life and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds are about how great LSD is. Many Harrison songs promote Hinduism like My Sweet Lord. Polythene Pam promotes drag and crossdressing. Not to mention the countless songs that promote premarital sex.
The Beatles were as high-status and looked up to by teenagers as any band in history, arguably far more so than any hip hop act ever. You haven't given any principled reasons why your critique of hip hop wouldn't apply equally to the Beatles. By your logic they clearly and unironically promoted abusing women, doing drugs, leaving Christianity, and wearing drag. Other than wearing drag, these were all things members of the Beatles actually did and unironically supported in their own lives. Clearly you would agree that Beatles songs are harmful if even only 1% of the fans are more likely to do drugs after hearing a literal ode to drug use by their literal idols.
Do you have any evidence of people "outside the ghetto" joining gangs because of hip hop? Even one anecdote? It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely.
The Manson murderers literally wrote "Helter Skelter" and "Piggies" in blood on the walls. You're saying that was trolling?
My interest is less than existent and I am participating out of charity. You are asking for a peer-reviewed longterm study proving that a statistically significant amount of at-risk hip hop listeners will go on to try drugs relative to controls — yes, I would also like that study. But you understand that they haven’t done this study, right? There’s nothing I can do about that, which means we have to arrive at conclusions by reasoning (at least in my case).
Is it your opinion that the 60s and 70s did not see an increase in both LSD and eastern spirituality? If you asked a poll of teens who tried LSD in ‘69, how many of their favorite musicians would be Stevie Wonder versus Janis Joplin? Don’t we know that the teens all went to Woodstock to see their favorite musicians, then did the drugs of their favorite musicians?
“If you cheat on me I kill you” is not exhorting people to beat their wives, it’s a song from the perspective of an obsessive male partner that should be interpreted with exaggeration in mind. “If I catch you with another girl you’re a dead man” is an age-old exaggeration that a woman might tell a man, vice versa. That’s this song.
Qualitatively different as I explained in my last comment. You’ve ignored everything from the publicized lifestyles of the artists, to the visual culture (guns), to the aggression embedded in the actual musicality.
If Lucy in the Sky was about fentanyl, that would be horrible and the song should probably be banned. I would prefer that they not sing about drugs, yeah. Unlike hip hop, they actually sing about things unrelated to vice and pride, which redeems them. And do I blame them for getting impressionable teens to do LSD? Yes!
Youve misunderstood thr metaphor. Black gangs don’t recruit white suburban kids, they just sell them drugs
Manson was motivated by a bizarro eschatological race war ideology that he retcon’d into the Beatles. Where do you think the Beatles sang about that, the while album?
No, I am asking for literally any evidence at all. Even an anecdotal story of a middle class kid joining a gang because of hip hop would at least be a data point. Or a study suggesting that certain types of musical structures produce aggression. Anything at all besides your own opinion, really.
Is it your opinion that this was causally related to the music of the 60s? If so, why do you single out hip hop as special and different in its influence?
This is special pleading. Lennon beat his wife and wrote a song about beating or killing a woman. If you want to argue this isn't meant to be taken seriously, you have to be willing to say the same about hip hop lyrics about killing written by murderers.
The publicized lifestyles of the Beatles included infidelity, heroin use, beating women, leaving Christianity, etc. Appeals to "the aggression embedded in the actual musicality" is special pleading. You're just saying hip hop is different because it feels different to you.
But surely the violent lyrics and "aggressive" music should be inducing suburban kids to violence too, right? Why are they magically immune to this?
Does anyone dispute that drug use in the late 60s did not rise because of music culture? It was the access point for finding drugs, and probably the only way a middle class person learned about psychoactive drugs. If music compelled some to move to San Francisco and change their life philosophy then yes, it must have also compelled them to do drugs.
Because a hippie doing LSD is not morally commensurate to getting hooked on codeine or opiates. And because psychedelic rock is not shilled by large music corporations to the youth today, like Travis Scott performing in Fortnite to a crowd of tens of millions of kids (hit song titled: “drugs you should try it”). It’s a difference both in qualitative moral harm, and quantity of moral harm. Not to mention, it’s a difference in mood as well — exploring your psychology through ayahuasca is much different than plying a girl with “nose candy”.
The popular conception of Lennon was not one of a wife-beater, and social perception involves what can be perceived. The rappers don’t just talk about their crimes, they broadcast it on instagram. Lennon did not present a public persona of beating his wife. And again, your understanding of the lyrics lacks nuance: consider that the song is spoken to the girl, not bragging to the audience about keeping his bitches in line.
I don’t think you know what “publicized lifestyle” means. Lennon did heroin in secret around 1969, well after Beatles peak fame. The newspapers were not writing about his heroin addiction until much after, unlike their marijuana use which was actually common knowledge.
I do believe they are, yes. That does not mean white kids get a magic pass to join the crips.
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I love me some Beach Boys (Good Vibrations is a work of art), but I'm gonna need some evidence that Barbara Ann is about love or fidelity.
I’m being subjective now, but I think what people like most about that song is the melody line where the vocalist yearns for Barbara Ann. There is a yearning, crying plea, which connotes the emotional space of youthful puppy love rather than lust. Remember that we can’t trust the text exclusively for what a song is about, the actual music comes first. Radiohead’s True Love Waits may be titled as such but its music paints a deep, despair-ful sadness.
For an example of pure lust in rock, see “hungry like the wolf”. There’s no element of any romance, just the lustful chase for a woman. (Yet even then, it’s not as prideful or low-impulse as lots of hip hop). Then you have examples of forceful love but which are not lustful, like the Proclaimer’s I’m Gonna Be…
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