- I am African-American, and I agree: hip-hop and rap culture
are dangerous to blacks. The level of cultural damage being wreaked by
this so-called "music form" is chillingly incalculable. A think
tank of supremacist Klansmen could not have envisioned a more efficient
method of ridiculing and disempowering a despised race of human beings.
I consider rap and hip-hop the artistic versions of the AIDS virus. They
arose during the same period in history, they attach themselves to a host
and then destroy it from within, and every time you think you're about
to defeat them, they mutate into another form and then replicate. Similarly,
the people most at risk to be infected by each of these devastators are
the most mystifyingly enthusiastic about engaging in the reckless and stupid
behaviors that wind them up infected.
-
- An entire generation of males has been brainwashed into
no longer thinking, no longer writing or speaking intelligently, but instead
mumbling rap lyrics like mantras, nodding their heads like catatonic idiots
to a beat the rest of us cannot hear - all day - and doing what the lyrics
suggest in their own lives, to their own detriment. A generation of females
now think their bodies are gaudy currency, to be traded and negotiated
at will for burgers, fries, and baby's formula for the day. Ask yourself:
would you hire a young person with a deliberate limp, clutching his testicles
in one hand, clutching a cellphone in the other, with straggled, ugly hair,
poor hygiene, and gold teeth and jewelry, whose only language is an unending
stream or poorly rhyming couplets about shooting, robbing businesses, and
impregnating?
-
- Would you hire a young woman with flashy copper hair,
outrageous jewelry, rhinestone-studded dragon talons on her fingertips,
a baby on her hip and a second baby on the way, wearing a thong you can
see jutting out of her mall-level denim jeans, with an invented name like
Taniqua or Sheniquieyah, who won't even answer phones when asked, and whose
idea of a hard day's work is to gossip the 8 hours through about what babydaddy
did this, and what babydaddy did that? Thanks to Affirmative Action, which
I, a black woman, oppose, this is what is probably going on downtown at
your local capitol's government offices, and is part of the reason customer
service is so poor today, and nothing in America runs on time anymore.
-
- And if whites continue to turn a blind eye to the fact
that there are two black Americas -- one comprised of educated blacks,
the other of what could impolitely be termed "black trash" --
and if white America continues to lump all African-Americans into one huge
monolithic demographic they are afraid of offending by declaring rap "offensive",
this is the hiring pool you and I will be forced to choose from for the
remainder of the decade. Whites will miss availing themselves of the very
blacks -- millions of us -- who would stand right beside them driving this
"music form" into its belated grave.
-
- In less than two complete decades, by a single form of
repetitive, mind-numbing so-called "music", all the previous
struggle and eloquence of the former black America has been reduced to
ruin: swaggering, foul-mouthed, gimp-legged, testicle-clutching, prowess-faking,
loud-talking, gun-toting, beeper-packing, prostituted ruin. And whom have
we to thank for it?
-
- One could offer that it is the nameless hierarchy behind
all the record labels and television networks, they who have ever made
all the decisions about how many times which race should be depicted and
in what way, making yet another faceless and ultimately racist decision
to keep pumping rap and hip-hop music out like rotted meat pulsing out
of some national grinding machine, like poisonous piped-in lullabyes to
pacify and entertain some despised collective black "baby" -
-
- But ultimately this is the fault of black people themselves.
-
- As a black woman, I was excoriated profoundly and with
great, ridiculing mass malice whenever I dared to say openly that rap was
not music and hip-hop was going to eventually call in a price from the
black community. Uneducated blacks brayed with laughter and pointed scorn
at me, calling me "Wanna Be White" and other names, for opting
to step out of the company line and call, for lack of a better phrase,
a spade a spade. (Educated blacks always agreed with me.)
- As a member of the entertainment industry, which I am,
I was ignored by colleagues when I asked why rap was still being signed,
produced and promoted when it has clearly hit the limits of every music
genre's twenty year lease on the collective consciousness. I may be politically
incorrect on your site for saying this, but Jews were the most supportive
of my views and asked me, mystified, "Why do blacks LISTEN to this
stuff? Don't they realize what it's SAYING about them? YOU realize... why
don't THEY?" But the young whites in my industry seem hypnotized.
Some of them adore rap. Their children have bought hip-hop materials, be
they clothing, CDs, what have you. Most of what I perceive is an industry-wide
white horror of disavowing rap culture in any way lest they be categozied
as racist. That seems to be the cause of all this from the media end.
-
- So, I am saying to whites now:
-
- Educated African-Americans agree with you and always
have: rap is not music; hip-hop is not a valid music form; and even if
it were, its time is up; the music itself is aurally destructive; its lyrics
and iconography are less than healthy; all in all it presents a poor aesthetic,
and one we frankly, as the Americans who created it, need to disown now
in favor of The Next Big Thing Coming Up The Block. Rap is not rock music.
Hip-hop is not soul. This is McMusic, counterfeit mass produced product
for a counterfeit mass produced consumer base. But the jig is up, fellows:
-
- As a black person, I'm playing the race card here and
declaring it now safe for whites to say out loud that rap's reign is over.
If you want rap and hip-hop to go away, you as white Americans must begin
by making the unified decision to admit, publicly, that there is such thing
as black trash, just as there is such thing as white trash. Rap and hip-hop
are the music of black trash.
- They are not all our race has to offer culturally, and
have never been, and never will be. They do not speak for our people, and
we call out for an immediate end to this epidemic. Rap and hip-hop, in
my opinion, are indeed the cultural equivalent of AIDS: they arose at the
same time, they attach to a host and destroy it from within, and every
time humanity thinks it has it licked, it mutates into another form and
replicates. But just as the medical community will eventually lay HIV in
its cemetery, for every kingdom hath for certain a grave, white and black
Americans will eventually come together as one and put rap and its diseased
sister hip-hop six feet under, for good. That day must surely come for
us, as flowers follow rain.
-
- Dear white America: Rap and hip-hop are the pop music
of black trash America.
-
- Pass it on.
-
-
-
- Comment
- From Raul E. Diego
- 9-21-3
-
- "They said to blame it on a song
- when someone kills a cop.
- What music did they listen to
- when they bombed Iraq?
- Just give me one example,
- so I can take a sample.
- No need to play it backwards
- if you want to hear the devil,
- 'cause music's not the problem,
- it didn't cause the bombing.
- Well, maybe they should listen
- to the sound of people starving.''
-
- These lyrics, this song, this hip hop style, african
beat infused song is called "Crime to be Broke in America".
-
- I no longer live in "America". I still, of
course, live on the continent once labled as such, only now I live in the
part denominated as "Latin" America - to diferentiate it from
the Anglo dominated northern areas, much in the same way one would diferentiate
between, say, my mother's son and "that son of a bitch" across
the street.
-
- Over here in the "Latin" part of this so-called
America, we don't watch the Latin grammys. Most of the artists up for
said award haven't set a foot below the Rio Grande. And so most of the
so-called musicians recieving the all encompassing, vain-glorious spotlight
and other, non-Latin awards haven't had a guitar lesson in their lives.
The same can be said for a number of self styled rappers who hale from
that other fictitious geographical, ethnological location, "African"
America.
-
- Who is worried about the denegration of society as alledgedly
perpetrated by hip hop and rap? Certainly Ms. Sheridan, who states inequivocaly
at the very outset that she IS an African American. One that seems to be
terribly concerned about the fact that her "hiring" pool isn't
dressing properly. Who's going to hire you?, she asks. Who will hire such
a being in America, be it "African" or otherwise?
-
- Who wants to work for you?, is the actual question.
- I don't.
- And who wants to live in America?
- I don't.
- I don't want to work for Wal-Mart, I want to grow a
garden.
- I want to be broke whenever I want.
- And I will be loved in spite of it.
-
- Did the mob and wall street infiltrate post 1960's black
culture and
- sow the seeds of gangtsa rap? Maybe.
-
- Is gansta rap the crux of black culture? I'll let Ms.
Sheridan answer that one.
-
- For now all anyone needs to know is that there is no
such thing as America, wether it be called "Latin", "African"
or "Under God". It's all just a big pillage fest where people
hire and fire each other, bend and break each other 'till nothing is left
that can recognize
- beauty, much less create it.
-
- Don't blame it on the song.
-
- RAGA
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