Robert C L Watson wrote:
They may have come before the genre we call rap, but I fail to see
any difference whatsoever in the musical content involved, except for
the underlying musical style. They are both words spoken rhythmically
to musical accompaniment, where the delivery may have definite pitch
contours at times and less definite at others.
Current commercial (c)rap - not that I can bear to listen to it for long
- is sloppy and irregular in metre, and has either non-rhymes such as
"time" and "fine", or other symptoms of illiteracy. (Back to the topic
of literacy.) Hardly comparable to sophisticated works from musical
theatre.
That sort of rhyme is used throughout literary history -- to denigrate
rap artists for using the same sorts of "almost rhyme" that major poets
and songwriters of the "great American songbook" have used to great
success tells me there's more to this dismissal of rap music than real
artistic judgement, and that bothers me most of all in this whole
discussion.
The idea that rap doesn't involve pitch baffles me. There's a helluva
lot of subtlety to the vocal delivery that is not just in the
incredibly complex rhythms -- there is shape to the vocal lines as
well.
The rhythms are complex because there is no discipline. It is a case of
fitting any word and words desired into 4/4 time. It's a long way down
from Shakespeare or Swinburne.
Do you really mean to assert that Shakespeare or Swinburne never
stretch-ed [2 syllables] words to make them fit? Nor ever contracted
them just to squeeze them in? When did "ever" become one syllable
"e'er" I would like to know? Yet great verbal artists have used that
contraction for centuries -- shall we call every one of them who made
such a "fitting of any word" non-artistic? I guess you must have a
different edition than I've ever seen, then, because my Shakespeare has
lots of apostrophes in words which should have had more letters. Maybe
I just bought the cheap edition so they omitted letters to save money?
The rhythms of many folk songs from many different countries are complex
for the very same reason you are putting down rap -- are you really
asserting that any music which utilizes complex nested tuplet-type
rhythms isn't very good?
I must admit I am really surprised by the assertions being made in this
discussion -- if Schoenberg had written those same rhythms (Pierrot
Lunaire is full of complex rhythms, fitting speech to song and removing
the clearly delineated pitch of a fixed-pitch scale in order to get
subtle nuances of speech) we wouldn't be having this discussion. But
because it's music made up by people who don't have the same high degree
of musical education we do, for some reason a lot of people seem to feel
it's alright to disparage it? I just don't get it.
Verbal artists (poets, dramatists, novelists) have always played around
with language, it's their primary tool, yet because rap artists do the
same thing, suddenly it's not art?
Let's toss eecummings out of the literary canon, then, too, since he
didn't follow the accepted rules of punctuation and capitalization!
Sonny Rollins? Throw him outof all the music history books because
he'll walk out on stage and simply improvise for 30 minutes, using
rhythms which some might look on as having no discipline.
Maybe it's jealousy we're really reading here -- jealousy that these rap
artists with their minimal music education are making lots of money and
their music is far more popular than any of our music is, with our
collegiate and post-graduate degrees.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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