[quote]LarryDavid wrote:
WhiteFlash wrote:
I understand the concept fully, but what you don’t get is the guys I mentioned aren’t making good music about nothing, they’re just making shitty music. I actually have Wests 2nd album [inherited it somehow] and have listened to it all the way through. Aside from the song with Paul Wall and the Ray Charles sampled song that’s not Golddigger the album sucked, and even those two were just ok. And though I detected your sarcasm I’m gonna agree that people like West and Wayne for the reason you stated.
No, they’re not making shitty music. They’re just making music YOU don’t like. And then comes the assumption that since you don’t see the appeal in rappers like Lil Wayne and Kanye West, it’s must be that EVERYBODY ELSE must have a problem, or that the poisonous music industry is to blame.
It’s not that everyone else isn’t smart enough. Maybe people don’t always want to be tested intellectually all the time (or at all) when they listen to music. Personally, I do not listen to music to learn something- I read for that. Lil Wayne’s got some corny punchlines, but it all fits into the aesthetic well. He’s lazy, most likely high, and his unpredictable flow and rhymes fit that perfectly. And he does in fact have some punchlines that make me laugh out loud. Kind of an idiot savant appeal. He raps about nothing in particular, but it’s fun. Not to mention he knows how to make a good beat a popular song (in other words, he knows how to SOUND good over a beat- important since people LISTEN to music). Because Freeway had great production too.
And you ARE right about Kanye not making music about nothing. Sorry if you don’t find his music all that great, but the song you linked is a perfect example of why Kanye’s more famous than a lot of these underground guys. I gave that song an honest effort, I listened to it 4 times, and the lyrics were handily posted in the video description as well. Both songs deal with similar subject matter, but I can actually display some empathy towards West’s song. “Roses” actually sounds like what I would’ve thought in that situation, albeit better than I could’ve written it into a song. The song you posted had the rapper going off on all sort’s of [inconclusive] tangents that I cannot relate to, and as far as an overall message it didn’t have anything “Roses” didn’t have. It’s pretty obvious that more people are going to like “Roses” and it has nothing to do with intelligence. That’s why Kanye’s popular.
And the argument about the music industry isn’t gonna work either. it’s 2009, hell this decade’s almost over and the industry is reeling. If the music industry has been pushing bad music and keeping good music away, why hasn’t anything changed in the popular music scene with the internet opening avenues to artists that hadn’t been there before? Why aren’t these revolutionary artists springing up everywhere, now that they aren’t restricted to radio/MTV airplay for publicity? I can think of a few artists that got popular through online hype alone and they are guys no one would call “artistic” or “revolutionary”. In the U.K. the Arctic Monkeys got big online first and then went mainstream, but they sounded like a combination of all the popular guitar bands of the past 5 years. Lil Wayne was always known, but he only became massive after a wave of GREAT mixtapes and a lot of guest appearances on songs/remixes. There wasn’t any old media hype. Tha Carter 2 undersold, if anything it looked like he was on the way down before he started doing a lot of mixtapes. People overrate the music industry’s power and underrate it’s ability to find good music, and it’s always people who don’t really know much about the biz other than the nasty stories they hear.
BTW, is the other Kanye song you’re talking about “Gone”? That is one of the better songs on the album but if I recall correctly it’s an Otis Redding sample. If you’re talking about another sample my bad, I’m not a soul music buff. And Gold Digger was sick, second verse scares the shit out of me. [/quote]
Great avatar AND a great post.