[amphibian]

The above is a really, really good post. Nice job, Worrywort.

[Terez]

worry, on 14 October 2015 - 07:04 AM, said:

For the record, I'm still comfortable with what I said. But again it was a response to a question about a specific article posed by the person who posted the article. I was referring specifically to David Crosby, the dork from Slipknot, and whoever else got quoted. I suppose "anti-hip-hopism" could be taken as a generalization, but still meant as a narrow one encompassing rockists and "they don't play real instruments"ists, not every person who doesn't like or listen to hip-hop. You lumped yourself in with them unnecessarily IMO, since (after a half-hearted "bitches and hoes" mention) you made it perfectly clear that it was largely a taste issue.

I wouldn't say it was half-hearted; it's just ultimately secondary to my musical tastes. I don't like the generic hip-hop character (as personified by N.W.A. for example, mentioned by many on this thread as a genre progenitor) and I don't think it's synonymous with blackness. No one should be criticized for not liking it except in cases of hypocrisy.

[worry]

Well that's what I mean; not that it isn't a genuine position, just that it wasn't your favored line of pursuit. Maybe I'm projecting but I also inferred you reasoned that it was -- while an undeniable facet of some hip-hop music -- ultimately reductive, in the same way "pickup trucks and beer" might be reductive of country, thus likely to be a pointless distraction from your more pressing interests.

[amphibian]

Terez, on 14 October 2015 - 07:20 AM, said:

I don't like the generic hip-hop character (as personified by N.W.A. for example, mentioned by many on this thread as a genre progenitor) and I don't think it's synonymous with blackness. No one should be criticized for not liking it except in cases of hypocrisy.

What do you think is "synonymous with blackness"?

N.W.A has a very distinct identity that was decidedly outside the hip-hop mainstream when they started and even today. That N.W.A. identity was and remains something very other than "generic". Lots of people back then and today had/have very valid criticisms of the problematic portions of the identity N.W.A. established/those who create similar identities.

You have legitimate criticisms to make when it comes to musical complexity and so on, but you fall down badly whenever you start talking about cultural things associated with the music.

[stone monkey]

Agreed. Don't even get me started on the multifarious problems that NWA present with their interpratation of a black identity; to my mind they seemed to take the righteous anger at the heart of Public Enemy's and KRS-ONE's social consciousness and bloviated it into an over-the-top caricature of the worst excesses of tough-guy African-American masculinity. NWA, and hence gangsta rap in general, got all the attention imo because they were presenting mainstream American society with an image of scary, violent, misogynist, black masculinity that, for various reasons, it was invested in believing was all there was to say about blackness.

For instance: at the same time as NWA were exploding onto the scene, groups like The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy were presenting a much different take on rap, and there are songs such as Ice T's "Escape From The Killing Fields", or much earlier classics like Melle Mel's "White Lines" or Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message", that use rap to talk about some of the legitimate concerns (and the odd conspiracy theory) that African Americans hold - it's not all bitches and hos and money (although, unfortunately, far too much of it is) Like I said before, you can't really have a sensible conversation about rap without it being, at least partially, about race. At least one person I'm aware of has even described hip hop as Urban Black American Folk music. One might argue that NWA and gangsta rap, despite the banging tunes, were a pernicious influence on the direction rap was to take - Chuck D has actually argued such iirc.

I would also strongly disagree with reading NWA as progenitors of rap music - I mean, they only emerged at the beginning of the 90s, rap was already a mature genre by then. Speaking to the rhythms of music (and putting music to the rhythms of speech) had had a significant history in the art of the African Diaspora before even some of that group were born. I'd personally argue that the ur-text of modern hip-hop is probably Gil Scott Heron's 1970 piece "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". And that itself takes at least some of its ideas from the "toasting" that Jamaican MCs had been doing over dub-plates for at least a decade before. And rap really only emerged from the underground with the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" in 1979.

This post has been edited by stone monkey: 14 October 2015 - 09:50 PM

[Terez]

worry, on 14 October 2015 - 10:24 AM, said:

Well that's what I mean; not that it isn't a genuine position, just that it wasn't your favored line of pursuit. Maybe I'm projecting but I also inferred you reasoned that it was -- while an undeniable facet of some hip-hop music -- ultimately reductive, in the same way "pickup trucks and beer" might be reductive of country, thus likely to be a pointless distraction from your more pressing interests.

Oh, I agree it's reductive, but this lyrical approach remains popular even among a number of people who like stuff with more introspection, and its reductive qualities have permeated pop culture, even among many white people who prefer white rappers.

amphibian, on 14 October 2015 - 05:35 PM, said:

Terez, on 14 October 2015 - 07:20 AM, said:

I don't like the generic hip-hop character (as personified by N.W.A. for example, mentioned by many on this thread as a genre progenitor) and I don't think it's synonymous with blackness. No one should be criticized for not liking it except in cases of hypocrisy.

What do you think is "synonymous with blackness"?

Nothing, really. Nor is anything truly representative of blackness. I think that a very high percentage of black people everywhere probably relate to "the struggle" as it manifests in US culture and politics, but I don't think hip-hop is synonymous with "the struggle" either, despite being one of its primary voices.

amphibian, on 14 October 2015 - 05:35 PM, said:

N.W.A has a very distinct identity that was decidedly outside the hip-hop mainstream when they started and even today.

And yet they remain popular and/or legendary, enough to make a splash at the box office in 2015. I know there is a lot of nuance there, but we shouldn't marginalize their impact.

amphibian, on 14 October 2015 - 05:35 PM, said:

I would also strongly disagree with reading NWA as progenitors of rap music - I mean, they only emerged at the beginning of the 90s, rap was already a mature genre by then.

I don't have any opinion about their being progenitors or not, but the late 80s/early 90s coincide with the mainstreaming of rap (being a different thing from its initial emergence from the underground, as you put it).

[worry]

I wouldn't marginalize their impact and I would consider them a vital building block in rap's history. I like a lot of their songs, am disgusted by a lot of their songs, and occasionally feel both ways about the same song. I haven't seen the SOC movie which has clearly glossed up their legacy in some ways, but it's always been pretty clear that as a group their MO was to have their cake and eat it too: genuine reporting of "the streets" as they saw them and the political landscape that contributed to those problems, and contributors to that landscape themselves with an erratic at best self-critical eye and an exploitative for-profit streak.

[Terez]

PS: I apparently got confused about who I was talking to at the end of my last post, probably because I confused it with my previous post. Sorry about that.

Everyone should feel free to remember that I am from Mississippi, an old Confederate state with the highest per capita black population of any state in the US. I have at least 6 ancestors who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, all on my mom's side, and it was a big deal on that side of the family. In other words, I grew up on the (morally) wrong side of a culture war.

I also grew up with a piano in the house, and a mom who played piano fairly well. She tells me I fell in love with Michael Jackson when I was about 3 (I was born in '78) and she insists that I was disappointed to learn he was black. That may be true, but I don't remember that. All I remember was being disappointed when my dad and my uncles made racist jokes, and I can't remember a time when I did not like Michael Jackson's music, so it must not have bothered me that much. Even now I respect him as an immensely talented musician; "Billie Jean" is a masterpiece in the pop style.

I checked out of pop culture for the most part about 20 years ago, so until a few years ago I had never heard anything by Beyoncé. Then I saw a video of her singing at Obama's inauguration, and she was good. I found out later she was lip-synching, but whatever, she recorded the track that she used. I have often used that performance to demonstrate the "Chopin rubato" to (mostly European-origin white) pianists who argue that it's physically impossible to do. The concept is simple: the beat remains steady (the band, in the case of Beyoncé; the accompaniment hand on the piano) and the melody is relatively free, pushing the tempo this way and that while overall staying with the beat. Today, only pop divas and (especially) jazz singers really excel in that style, and it's almost impossible to find recordings of pianists who use this technique/style; no one can do it, and contemporary accounts suggest that Chopin definitely could, and he recommended that his students listen to (opera) singing to learn how it was done.

So, upon learning that Beyoncé was talented, I listened to a bunch of her music in a vain attempt to find other expressions of said talent. I didn't listen to everything she ever did, or anything close to that, so doubtless I missed something. I just found the search frustrating, and a reminder of why I checked out of pop culture in the first place. What's baffling to me is that the hip-hop genre can support expressions of the upper limits of, for example, Beyoncé's talent without losing its basic musical character. The minimalism is a deliberate choice, a distinct preference among consumers of popular music.

Anyway, the point is, I have no doubt that there are scars of that culture war in my psyche. I'm not immune to racism. I do consciously try to avoid it, as I believe most people do, but I cannot consciously avoid my dislike for this approach to music and the way it has spread across popular genres.

[stone monkey]

I would argue that musical minimalism in hip hop is not only a choice, but inescapable within the form, primarily because there's another instrument being used, the human speaking voice. The music is there to support that. Think of it as spoken word poetry with an accompaniment. The last thing you'd want is the accompaniment to overwhelm the speaker - even if, as is the case a lot of the time in hip hop, most of what the speaker is saying is arrant nonsense.

[Terez]

Someone made that point earlier, but I can't see that rap is any different from singing in that particular respect. As I argued before, if the music distracts from the lyrics then you might be doing it wrong; the two have been complimenting each other for thousands of years.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, there are rare exceptions to this rule, tracks with what I call interesting music happening in the background. The example I liked the best was Pharcyde's "Runnin'". I doubt that anyone has ever said about that track that the music distracts from the lyrics, that they were thereby arrant nonsense.

PS: A good example of complexity distracting from lyrical value is the late medieval practice of singing counterpoint of multiple lyric sets simultaneously. They figured out that needed to change over the course of the Renaissance.

This post has been edited by Terez: 16 October 2015 - 08:24 PM

[stone monkey]

I also guess that technical proficiency can be used to do things that some people don't like - I know a couple of professional electric bass players who think that Tom Jenkinson (aka electronica artist Squarepusher) is an absolute genius for his playing technique... They can't stand the music he makes and performs though. I guess they believe he uses his powers for evil.

[Terez]

Ultimately I think musical structure and virtuosity are quite separate things, and of course musical taste is immanently subjective. But you reminded me of a conversation I had about musical analysis on Theoryland recently, where I had cause to quote a recently-discovered letter addressed to Chopin from Friedrich Kalkbrenner, a German pianist-composer residing in Paris. He was older than Chopin, and offered to teach Chopin for three years upon his arrival in Paris. Chopin turned him down, but they remained friends. (The translation and any mistakes are mine.)

Kalkbrenner said:

Dear Chopin

I cannot resist the desire to express to you all the pleasure you gave me yesterday. I needed to reconcile myself with the Piano that I no longer loved the day before, after having heard a so-called Concerto of Beethoven, distorted such that the poor author was forced to turn over in his grave from indignation and rage. Persevere, dear friend, in this suave and delicious manner that will always be preferred by people of good taste to all this Robespierrism of execution.

***

Cher Chopin

Je ne puis resister au desir de vous exprimer tout le plaisir que vous m'avez fait éprouver hier. J'avais besoin de me reconcillier [sic] avec le Piano, que je n'aimais plus depuis la veille, après avoir entendu un soit disant Concerto de Beethoven, tellement dénaturé, que le pauvre auteur a dû se retourner dans la tombe d'indignation et de colère. Persévérez, cher ami, dans cette manière suave et délicieuse qui sera toujours préférée par les gens de bon goût à tout ce Robespierrisme d'exécution.

[27 avril 1841]

In other words, the argument about the inherent value of virtuosity is an old argument. Both Chopin and Kalkbrenner wrote virtuosic music; Kalkbrenner merely believed that the current trend of virtuosity in pianism personified by Liszt, Thalbert, and other less-talented imitators was lacking in musical value.

This post has been edited by Terez: 16 October 2015 - 08:44 PM

[Studlock]

Terez, on 16 October 2015 - 08:22 PM, said:

Someone made that point earlier, but I can't see that rap is any different from singing in that particular respect. As I argued before, if the music distracts from the lyrics then you might be doing it wrong; the two have been complimenting each other for thousands of years.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, there are rare exceptions to this rule, tracks with what I call interesting music happening in the background. The example I liked the best was Pharcyde's "Runnin'". I doubt that anyone has ever said about that track that the music distracts from the lyrics, that they were thereby arrant nonsense.

PS: A good example of complexity distracting from lyrical value is the late medieval practice of singing counterpoint of multiple lyric sets simultaneously. They figured out that needed to change over the course of the Renaissance.

Perhaps I am wrong here, but rapping is like a percussion instrument (I read an musicology paper a while back that argued hip-hop is complex in terms of percussion, and often, including the rapper, have many layers of rhythms going at once, but I'm not really trained to speak musicology outside of being an academic) whereas traditional singing often occupies harmony, or melody, or something like strings or brass. Rapping is a particular talent set aside from singing in my mind.


Edit: and just to annoy Terez; Joey Bad$$!

This post has been edited by Studlock: 04 December 2015 - 12:06 PM

[Whisperzzzzzzz]

Just gonna drop this off here:



I only found out about them last week, but Solillaquists of Sounds are something special.

[QuickTidal]

Whisperzzzzzzz, on 04 December 2015 - 01:26 PM, said:

Just gonna drop this off here:



I only found out about them last week, but Solillaquists of Sounds are something special.

^^See, now that Is something special. Sop much more to that than just average hip hop. Lots of musicality, and clever hooks in there. Great find.

[Terez]

Studlock, on 04 December 2015 - 11:46 AM, said:

Perhaps I am wrong here, but rapping is like a percussion instrument (I read an musicology paper a while back that argued hip-hop is complex in terms of percussion, and often, including the rapper, have many layers of rhythms going at once, but I'm not really trained to speak musicology outside of being an academic) whereas traditional singing often occupies harmony, or melody, or something like strings or brass. Rapping is a particular talent set aside from singing in my mind.

Many standard percussion instruments are tonal, though, like the keyboard instruments (xylophone, vibraphone, marimba, etc.) and the chimes (two tonal sets superimposed on one another) and timpani and even bongos (sort of - they're tonal but not finely tuned). You can actually play Bach on marimba, though one top-notch marimba player I knew in school told me that they rarely adapt his keyboard works and stick to the solo string works and the like. The keyboard works are too complicated for the technical limitations of the instrument.

Piano is a percussion instrument. It's also a string instrument, but it is very much percussion, the most complex percussion instrument there is, and the only one that percussionists aren't expected to learn.

It's all about making music to me. And rap, as a (mostly) non-tonal exercise can work in my mind with music rather well, as it does in the examples I liked, but without the tonal elements I'm just bored.

[Terez]

Sorry for double posting, but I was not happy with the last bit of my post there and I feel the need to clarify. I kind of got distracted by the percussion distinction.

Even speech has tone. But there are several different ways to use "tonal", and I think I used it two different ways and there is another way (more common in academic music) that I didn't use (but will).

Every sound has a frequency and frequency is not the only way, or the most important way (in ordinary life), to differentiate between sounds. But frequency is how tones are distinguished.

In speech, these distinctions are very general, but they are still very prominent. We might think about them much or even notice them until we hear someone speaking our native language with difficulty, and they don't know how to raise their voice here and lower it there.

This is different from accent and speech rhythm, which are also important elements. To demonstrate the distinction, I have been trying to wrap my head around Polish diction, and accents are supposed to be easy in Polish because the stress is always on the penultimate syllable of the word. But I have had difficulty in some places because of secondary stresses, which are more tonal stresses than dynamic/temporal stresses.

Often, the word begins on a high note, then drops toward the end of the word, with a small tonal jump on the penultimate syllable (still not reaching as high as the first syllable). Sometimes there's a "pick-up" syllable, like there's sometimes a pick-up note in music (a lead-in to the first "downbeat", or the first stressed beat)—the tonal stress is on the second syllable, and the first syllable starts a little lower.

One of my Polish friends who is helping me learn was absolutely lost and confused when I asked her about this, and whether there are consistent rules for it. She had no idea what I was talking about and still doesn't really.

That is one of the ways I used "tonal" (when trying to distinguish between bongos and timpani). The other has to do with the 12-tone system of Western music, which incorporates many non-Western tonal systems (like the Asian pentatonic, corresponding to the black keys on a piano, though the pattern can of course be transposed).

Those 12 tones were only canonized, so to speak, beginning in the Renaissance when keyboard instruments were invented and it was all of a sudden necessary to find ways to assimilate what we call "enharmonic tones" today. Today, we consider (for example) F-sharp and G-flat to be the same tone. That wasn't always the case, but it was always very close.

Originally the musical tones were calculated from a somewhat mystical musical worldview, i.e. the "perfect" (simple) mathematical ratios (2:1 for the octave, 3:2 for the 5th, 4:3 for the 4th) were the foundation and the other notes were extrapolated from the circle of 5ths. (C-G-D-A-E-B-F#-C#-G#-D#-A#-E#-B#—today we consider B# and C to be the same tone, but the original difference is called the Pythagorean comma.)

Boiling down sound frequency to 12 tones allows us to distinguish between tones more easily and (this is important) repeatably. And thus these tones have become a language of their own. One can place the sound of a timpani in the series rather easily (assuming it's tuned correctly), but the tones of the bongo are closer to speech tones.

The other way to use "tonal" (again, this is the most common way to use it in academia) is to distinguish between music written in the language of Western functional harmony (tonal music) and music that is (usually) written with those same 12 tones, but without any (or much) regard for the language (atonal). Again, the language was born of the mystical "perfect" intervals. It has rules that were codified in Ancient Greece and again in the well-tempered Baroque.

Atonal music dispenses with the rules of the language. There is even a genre of music called 12-tone music in which each tone must be used before the same tone can be used again. The appeal of this music is incomprehensible to most people (musicians and non-musicians alike).

I happen to be quite fond of the language of Western functional harmony. It has incorporated the kinks of many non-Western cultures over the centuries (see jazz), and nearly every non-Western culture has adopted it. It is present even in hip-hop music (which is rarely atonal), but the difference between popular music and classical or jazz is often like the difference between Dick & Jane and Erikson. And it's not just about complexity—there's a lot of room for poetry: short, simple, and profound.

I feel like I should go on but then I would just be repeating myself. This post might or might not be helpful.

[Studlock]

It's a but worry that nearly every non-western culture has 'adopted' it (I doubt the history is clear-cut, but that's a different discussion--one that starts in racism and imperialism and ends in naive rejection of 'traditional' musics like my own peoples). I've found an interesting book
(The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop) that would probably engage you on a level I simply can't but here's a couple quotes from the tiny samples I'm allowed access to that I find relevant:

Quote

The fact that many MCs need more words per minute than an average singer of a pop song has a lot to do with their specific rhythmical approach to lyrics, using the vowels and consonants to form a mostly rapid and rhythmical highly organized flow of syllables. Looking closely at the music, rapping combines a stylized form of Sprechgesang (speech song) with vocal percussion, which explains its vast “consumption” of words. This musical function of the lyrics is so essential to rap music that Kyle Adams argued that the meanings of many rap lyrics are far less important than their pure sonorities. This argument might be striking when contrasting non-narrative, self-referential boasting songs like “Scenario” (1992) by A Tribe Called Quest featuring Leaders of the New School, to storytelling songs like “The Message” (1982) by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, or “Stan” by Eminem (2000). But the semantics of rap lyrics cannot be reduced to mere storytelling.

From chapter 8, examining the bits of musicality in the flow of the rapper and:

Quote

Hip-hop music resists traditional modes of musical analysis more than almost any other genre. The techniques developed for the analysis of Western art music, even when they can provide accurate descriptions of some of hip-hop’s surface phenomena, often leave the analyst without a deeper sense of how hip-hop operates and why it seems to communicate so effectively with such a broad audience. And yet there is no question that hip-hop does operate according to some set of musical principles: clearly, hip-hop is not a jumble of random sounds, but a collection of sounds and words organized in some deliberate fashion. The organizational principle ought to be knowable, just as it is with more traditional Western repertoires, but none of the current analytical tools seems to be equal to the task.

From chapter 9 breaking out the hegemonic practices of the academic study of music.

Also just and interesting song for any individual peaking in:

[Terez]

Studlock, on 06 December 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

It's a but worry that nearly every non-western culture has 'adopted' it (I doubt the history is clear-cut, but that's a different discussion--one that starts in racism and imperialism and ends in naive rejection of 'traditional' musics like my own peoples).

For the most part, we're talking about something that happened centuries ago, and the "traditional" music of non-Western cultures is in that same language. Most "traditional" music is. The exceptions are mostly found in India and Africa, but even Indian and African "traditional" music is often like a dialect of the lingua franca of music. There's nothing particularly racist or imperialistic about it because it dates back in many ways to a point in history before our cultures diverged in the first place.

Studlock, on 06 December 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

Quote

Hip-hop music resists traditional modes of musical analysis more than almost any other genre. The techniques developed for the analysis of Western art music, even when they can provide accurate descriptions of some of hip-hop's surface phenomena, often leave the analyst without a deeper sense of how hip-hop operates and why it seems to communicate so effectively with such a broad audience.

The same can be said even of genres that don't resist traditional modes of musical analysis, because all music has cultural context and other types of context.

Studlock, on 06 December 2015 - 04:36 PM, said:

Quote

And yet there is no question that hip-hop does operate according to some set of musical principles: clearly, hip-hop is not a jumble of random sounds, but a collection of sounds and words organized in some deliberate fashion. The organizational principle ought to be knowable, just as it is with more traditional Western repertoires, but none of the current analytical tools seems to be equal to the task.

I disagree with that; the musical analysis required is not that different from what goes before; I've already analyzed form and harmonic structure of a few tracks; the organizational principles are hardly unknowable. The most difficult part of rap to analyze is the importance of timing; as I mentioned before, it's the kind of thing that's prominent in jazz and soul/R&B singing, and it's not all that different from the Chopin rubato, which also mystifies musical academics.

[Tsundoku]

Whisperzzzzzzz, on 04 December 2015 - 01:26 PM, said:

Just gonna drop this off here:



I only found out about them last week, but Solillaquists of Sounds are something special.

Cool sound, but I'm lucky to make out 1 word in 10.

Which for me is a massive issue with most hip-hop. It may sound cool, but if I can't understand wtf they're saying then I tend to avoid the rest of their work.

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 11 December 2015 - 07:18 AM