How many rap "artists" actually know music ?

Discussion in 'Art & Culture' started by Cazzo, Jun 7, 2008.

  1. DeepThought Banned Banned

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    No, it's true.

    In Africa all music was created as part of religious ceremonies in animist faiths, mostly for idolatrous practices, in which women and men danced naked around fires and sung songs (or screamed them rather) at wooden idols. Invisible spirits are commonplace.

    I even have a book written by a contemporary African who urges white people to do the same, as part of some 'healing' process for reconciliation with nature. It's called 'The Healing Wisdom of Africa'.

    When they start doing that at the Royal Albert Hall be sure to let me know.
     
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  3. oreodont I am God Registered Senior Member

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    I'm surprised that anyone who claims to have studied music doesn't undertand that European music theory does not equate with 'music' anymore than English equates with 'language'.
     
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  5. Phidias Registered Member

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    I believe no one said that, i certainly didn't. What we are saying is that we need to write the music, whatever the "language", in order to achieve much higher results and to perpetuate it through time.

    Why would they want to do it in the first place?

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    Is that a bad thing?

    (...)

    So, is it a Gift? Something from the Divine?

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    How lucky they are...

    Rapping is something you can learn. Reading (well) however is not (i'm thinking of poems), you can either do it or you can't.
     
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2008
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Look, Jack, the Scots take this seriously - it's not just a single line of transmission, and the music has a formal structure that resists small changes anyway. At eny given time there are dozens of pipers who know that tune, and if somebody drops a note or two - which would be as noticeable as losing a measure from the middle of a Bach fugue - he'll be corrected.

    Other, lesser, tunes - the dance music and pop entertainment stuff - are open to modification and so forth, and so you get five different versions of "Miss McCleod's Reel and Strathspey" and regional dialiects in the playing. But there is only one version of a given pibroch. That's how you know.
    You just did. You might also check out the royal drum orchestras and classcial Kora music of Africa, or Balinese Gamelin. Compared to some of that stuff, the primitive simplicity and crude repetition of the rhythms of European High Art Orchestral music can come to sound childish, however charming in their way.

    So we have surpassing melodic sophistication on the one hand, and surpassing rhythmic sophistication on the other, in unwritten music. I could throw in Tuvan throat singing fro timbre sophistication, but that's a stretch for you, so we leave it. Western Orchs have the market cornered in counterpoint and harmony, and in large scale musically profound harmonic structure; they are magnificent musical entities. But they are not the apotheosis of sophistication in all aspects of the musical world.

    The sophisticated Westerner speaks:
    For example, the griot's Kora. - old traditional music, carried through time without ever being written down.

    The Kora is introduced to the rubes
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMp_El9ltAs

    A little more detail
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfRUH2fKUgA&NR=1

    and played like a banjo in the kitchen, casually:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHv5VO6khX4&feature=related
     
  8. kenworth dude...**** it,lets go bowling Registered Senior Member

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    first of all, when you say africa do you mean the continent of africa?

    second,how is religious music not art?
     
  9. Phidias Registered Member

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    Nice music.

    That's basically what Bach did many times with the harpsichord, he then wrote it which allowed him to greatly improve it.
    (something Beethoven couldn't have done with his 9th and much of his latter music)

    Obviously religious music is art, but i believe that wasn't what he meant.
     
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2008
  10. sniffy Banned Banned

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    Where do you get this crap? Your ignorance is quite astounding.

    Please go and visit a museum somewhere and do some proper research. I suggest you start with Manchester Museum which will quickly disavow you of your blatantly ill informed notions about African music and art. The museum has an archive of recorded African music as well as textiles, musical instuments, atefacts, and pieces of esquisitely constructed works of art. The Whitworth Art Gallery has a large collection of amazing African textiles.

    Also for a starter try typing Benin and Yoruba Art (into your google library) both of which are highly prize across the world.

    Another thing you might like to consider is how many European artists were influenced by African art not the other way around as you claim. Picasso, for instance, who was strongly influenced by African art as were many of his European contemporaries.

    Oh and here is a link to oral tradition in mongolian epic poetry which was often recited to music - none of which was written down.

    http://journal.oraltradition.org/files/articles/12ii/5_gejin.pdf
     
  11. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    Most rappers do not even make there own beats let alone understand classical music composition, maybe if there was a need for it more would, but its not a requirement. anyway rap is poetry hip hop is the overall music incluing the instrumental sound.


    kind of a moot point.


    peace.
     
  12. DeepThought Banned Banned

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    'Art', in the way we think of it, as objects such as paintings, sculptures, tapestries, etc, which are approached in the rarefied air of an art gallery is unique to Western culture. It is the intellectual appraisal of such work which defines the leaders of Plato's Republic, as against the childish way a more primitive mind would imbue such objects with supernatural powers or meanings.

    An excellent example being the masks created by the people of the Ivory Coast:


    There is clearly a link between the types of music produced by blacks in the west and animist African culture.

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  13. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Since, technically, there is no "music" in pure rap, only poetry, virtually all of them write their own stuff. It's highly unusual for someone to write a rap for someone else to deliver.
    As pointed out by other members on this thread, many singers can't play any instrument. That was more common in the pre-rock era but it's still true.
    Most rock musicians can't read music easily. We can all puzzle it out slowly and come back and play it for you in the morning, but except for the classically trained prog-rockers, rock and roll is often not scored at all. After a song becomes a hit somebody comes along and transcribes it to make it easier for other bands to learn from the chart.
    You're making the mistake of assuming that the greatness of art correlates with the formal proficiency of the artist. That is simply not true, especially in popular art. If you create something that people like and continue to like, it's great, and otherwise it's not. It doesn't matter how much talent and training you have in music or any other discipline. If you haven't got the spirit you won't be creating any art. Compare the Rolling Stones to the Beatles. The Beatles' music is really rich, complex and difficult to play, while any halfway competent bar band can do a note-perfect rendition of most of the Stones' catalog. Yet they are equally "great."
    Since "music" is defined as having a tonal component--melody and/or harmony--and rap does not have that, it could be argued that pure rap is in fact not music. It's just tuneless chanting of poetry over a percussion accompaniment. I would call it "proto-music." It's what people did before they invented real music.
    Singers are musicians. They make music. The musicians' union is full of singers. A musician who doesn't sing is an instrumentalist.

    The question boils down to whether rap is music. If it is, then the people who perform it are musicians. These days just about all of it has at least a slight musical component in the accompaniment, so it's music.

    Rap is like the old "talkin' blues" of the mid-century. Every part of the performance is musical except the actual lyrics.
     
  14. Phidias Registered Member

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    Then, how many rap "artists" actually know poetry/literature?

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  15. Blue_UK Drifting Mind Valued Senior Member

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    It would be thoroughly wrong to lambast rap artists on the basis of poor musical education, since the real measure of any success is how effective the music is at affecting the listeners.

    Since rap is a hugely popular genre, no one can deny its right to be called 'music', despite the fact it consists of only poetry and a beat. In terms of melody, it is easy to point out that rap (and indeed 'urban' genres such as RnB) possess little and are generally about mood and rhythm.

    I would suggest, as an alternative to the OP argument (after all why should they know about the five-line-staff etc.), that people question what it is that they like about their own music and what they don't about other people's.

    It's all too common to hear "stupid music for stupid people", yet plenty of intelligent people enjoy the sounds of Scooter do they not? (And what could be more stupid than that?!)
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2008
  16. EmptyForceOfChi Banned Banned

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    Tupac, Nas, Papoose, Mos Def

    The above rappers If you listen to them are intelligent andhave a good grasp of poetry and literature.


    peace.
     
  17. angrybellsprout paultard since 2002 Registered Senior Member

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    I'd like to know how many people on the raido in general know anything about music, be they country, rock, pop, rap or anything else.

    Then again, the vast majority of the 'rap' you hear on the raido, the source that people who don't know anything about rap use for their opinions, is really just a series of shitty bangers, though plenty of pop has similar traits to the bangers.
     
  18. Ganymede Valued Senior Member

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    Writing rap lyrics is one of the most complex art forms in the history of music. That's why Rap is played, and heard everywhere. Commercials, at 99% of dance clubs, Vegas, New York, LA, Germany, Japan, Brittan etc., they're playing Rap Music in those clubs.

    Rap Music is the most powerful form of music to ever grace the earth. No form of music has ever united so many different cultures, even the haters can't deny that.

    For real hip fans. The Mad Lyrical Physicist himself Canibus has just released the most lyrical rap song ever. It's called Singularity Point

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwWrLahx3R0
     
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    He didn't improve it, he just wrote it down. There's a difference.

    And the old time classical musicians, like Bach, often didn't write important aspects of their music - the continuo and bass parts were often just sketched in with the chords or inversions, for example. Even later on, with Beethoven's piano concertos and sonatas say, you find stretches and passages that are obviously meant as reminders rather than specified notes, places where the performer is expected to know what sounds are meant rather than just play what is written exactly.

    They were part of an active, living, musical culture. They could count on their fellow musicians to supply the right sounds. That knowledge was transmitted "orally", so to speak.

    The closest parallel nowdays might be a good modern jazz band.

    Being able to write music down - or reminders, sketches, of how it should go - has some important advantages. It also has some difficulties, biases - it's difficult to handle real rhythmic sophistication or complexity, dialects of attack and nuance and phrasing, etc, on a the page, for example.

    Compare the written lyrics here with their performances.
     
  20. DeepThought Banned Banned

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    Uniting cultures is wrong.

    Just like when scientists try to create hybrid species.

    And it is all done in the name of profit and convenience; to deal in as cheap a fashion as possible with the social and economic problems of minority black populations living within white ones.
     
  21. Phidias Registered Member

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    Right...
     
  22. sniffy Banned Banned

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    What like a mule or a rose you mean?

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    Throughout human history cultures have united to form new cultures. Change is constant.

    Just because sometimes something is a little difficult or uncomfortable doesn't mean it's wrong.

    first you sounded like a poor man's wanderer now you sound like a poor man's baron max.

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  23. Ganymede Valued Senior Member

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    My gawd this is a classic! The best street story ever told. Kinda puts the lifestyle in it's proper perspective doesn't it?
     

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