roachboy

i am playing catchup with other work so only have a minute here..but i wanted to raise a couple of questions up front...maybe i can get back to this later on. the op is interesting. there is always a problem with such writing though as the linkage between the anecdotal and systematic is trickier to navigate than it appears. it is particularly tricky in ancillary places: so you might be sociologically oriented in some parts (school funding levels, for example) and a curious effect of doing it in some areas is that it generates the impression that the whole of the piece operates from a sociologically informed perspective, so that personal attitudes/tastes/preferences of the writer come to stand in as sociological arguments, when the fact is that they are just substituted for them.

on hip hop. it seems to me that the basic argument that is really outlined in the op is that you, shesus, dont really like the music. you dont seem to know much about it, reacting to it largely at the level of conservative stereotypes concerning it, which strangely enough echo several generations of exactly the same kind of attacks on pop music (rock and roll will ruin america; punk will ruin america--all these "deviant" attitudes--why what is going on here? harump harumph)...

i would make a very hard distinction between levels of interaction with hip hop: if kids find it fascinating enough to try to do the music, then the situation it entails is very different from the one you outline, which is restricted to vague pronouncements about the fictive "lifestyle" you see promoted in the tiresome videos. for example: you might not like mcs, but it is really not easy to do it well. it requires attention to writing, attention to the form, attention to delivery--it requires practice, dedication, perseverance. to become a turntablist requires an enormous amount of practice--have you tried it?--it's easy to make sound, but not at all easy to do anything interesting--it requires attention, listening skills of a very high order, practice, patience, dedication---same goes for making beats--this is a type of composition which requires very considerable skills listening, in audio processing, composition; it requires a thorough knowledge of not only the form but also of wider fields of music (as does working turntables).

even something as straightforward as beatmatching is not obvious.

the advantages of participation in the making of hip hop would run beyond this: it would be a political exercise in the creative re-appropriation of social conditions, their creative transformation--it would also lead into an experience of self-organization, of planning, etc. but mostly, it is a break with passivity. i dont see the downside of it. i also dont see any trace of these aspects of hip hop in the corporate marketing of the mainstream form of this music.

there is an extensive hip hop underground--i am still learning about it in chicago and expect i will be still learning about it for some time--it is a diffuse, complex scene in which skills are far more highly valued than they are in more mainstream hip hop--you get a much heavier presence of more political or conscious rappers in the underground--where is the downside of that?

if you want to not think too much about hip hop as a form, as a still-viable and often vibrant underground access to which presupposes all the virtues outlined above in terms of the acquisition of skills---and want instead to focus on mainstream hiphop--not even in itself, but in terms shaped by ts marketing--then it makes little sense to act as though what you are responding to is not caught up in the system of corporate reproduction of a pop form (which the majors do not do well, reducing every form they touch to its most tiresome, repeatable, marketable elements) but also in the corporate marketing of that form.

what you react to then is primarily the set of devices that record labels have decided to use to maintain their market share.

you could have written the same kind of thing about any pop form. i detest country-western. i could say parallel things about it to what you say in the op: because i dont like the music, i see in its popular presentation alot of jingoism, say. but my brother is a bluegrass musician and while i dont enjoy the form, i understand the dedication that is required to play it well, so it would make little sense to not make a separation between how the form is marketed and what goes into making music based on that form.

it does not in the end matter if you do not like hip hop or if i do not like country music. neither says anything about the value that can be taken from involvement with the making of music, or the making of art more generally. personally, i think that these values are far more important than anything to be taken away from sports programs, and i do not understand why art and music are not funded for that reason as extensively as sports programs are, why they are not seen as serious types of activity.

that you do not like the outputs is a simple aesthetic matter.
and you do not have to like it to see in the doing of it quite important skills the acquisition of which are also quite important for all kinds of reasons.

there is more, but i'll leave it off here for now. hope this makes sense as i am writing very quickly...

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite