immessedup17 wrote:
I don't think one can be an "expert" when it comes to musical tastes. If I cared to investigate it further...I'd look into what musical reviewers who don't only focus on rap music think. Rap lyrics don't branch out much...and touch many of the same subjects over and over.
I think current rap can all be broken down into two sub-categories:
1) Bitches & Scrilla
2) The "Struggle"
Give me something new, Pharoahe Monch. Hundred and twenty second verse, same as the first.
lol i struck a nerve earlier and got a proper fuck you, altho i'm pretty sure that wasn't legitimate rage from you as much as it was just your attempts to ratchet me up and get me raging into a ~6 paragraph reply.
it's long been established that you're not a fan of rap, ergo, your schtick is coming into a thread like this and doing your contrarian "imu thing" where you wanna be "the stir that straws the drink" or whatever permutation of the cliche insinuates suckage.
you're touching on a larger disconnect between your semi-/sheltered suburban existence and that of people who grew up in impoverished innercities and, using your term, talks about the "struggle." see, you've got "struggle" in quotes, and given that you've already spoke about how we as americans have the highest standards of living in human history, it's obvious that you chuckle at "them" when they talk about "their problems" because, ask scorehead or elmhurst steve, in "the land of plenty" the only reason that people can fail to achieve the lofty hot-hatched schaumburgian lifestyle is due to sheer lack of desire/drive/passion on their parts.
it's kind of like saying global warming doesn't exist because it's cold today where i live. i don't wish to delve off into a global warming thing cuz i'm pretty open to going tinfoil and talking about a heaping helping of hooey that ultimately heads to a new peasant tax that entails mandatory GPS devices on cars in order to take more money from people who have it, but that's neither here nor there.
whenever you trot out your well-manicured list of "good" or "acceptable" or better yet -- in the hopes of being worthy of being part of your signature, "obviously good because imu doesn't fuck around with anything but top shelf shit" -- you've gone out of way to always put some black guys in between listing aesop rock and atmosphere, clearly your favorite rap outfits. you don't want to be pigeonholed as, hiphoptastically speaking, a white supremacist, so you gotta get some black guys on there who bridge the gap between "conscious rap" and "commercial rap" (mos def and talib kweli. OMFG GUESS WHO LOVED THE BLACK STAR LP AT AN IMPRESSIONABLE AGE?!) however, as you are admittedly a clever boy, you know that merely listing those two upfront ad nauseum will potentially make you look shallow to the actual hiphopheads on here, so you've gotta go with a colloquial usage of "JMT" early on, as you don't want to merely list yourself as liking them... but so you're damn colloquial with them that they're JMT to you, whereas even a self-professed rap fan like me had to go look the acronym up cuz, honestly, it thought justin timberlake's middle initial was "M" when i first saw it.
i bet you sport wood when you see the equivalent of SABRmetric-level intellectual discussion of slug like this
Wikipedia wrote:
Slug raps in an introspective style, as seen on the song "Little Man", in which he confronts the complaints that people have about him by looking at his relationship with his father and son.[4] This introspective style has become less prevalent as of Atmosphere's 2008 album When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold in which Slug navigates through other people's lives.[4] Slug has stated that in and around the year of 2005, he began to move in a new direction lyrically as he became more aware of the effect his lyrics would have on kids, especially his own son who was becoming a teenager at the time.[5]
Slug also dislikes some of the songs that he wrote before and does not perform them live, such as "Vampires" from 2002 album God Loves Ugly.[6] Daley has stated: "[...] when I did get my phase of trying to figure myself out, there was a lot of tug-of-war inside of me between wanting to hate a particular woman and then feeling guilty about that. And there’s certain songs that I won’t perform anymore, because the game of tug-of-war is over and I know where I’m at.[7] Furthermore, Slug has criticised Atmosphere's debut album Overcast! saying: "It's obvious that I’m trying so fucking hard on Overcast and you can see through it and tell it's not a person it's more of an attempt at trying to fill the niche, it was like I was trying to prove to myself that I was a rapper."
well slap me silly and call me susan, whoever wrote that certainly has a far more academic outlook on rap as opposed to the "struggling" sort who wrote pharoahe monch's page, well, RPB quoted that... but it's not nearly as eloquent and efforted as whoever wrote sluggo's page. compare that with the paltry offerings on aceyalone's wikipedia page, and the irony is that acey is better than both pharoahe and sluggo:
acey's wikipedia page wrote:
After releasing To Whom It May Concern... and Innercity Griots with Myka 9, P.E.A.C.E. and Self Jupiter as Freestyle Fellowship, as well as Project Blowed compilation in 1994, Aceyalone signed to Capitol Records. He released the solo debut album, All Balls Don't Bounce, in 1995.[2] He returned three years later with his second album A Book of Human Language, a collaboration with producer Mumbles.[3]
His third solo album, Accepted Eclectic, was released in 2001.[4][5]
He released Hip Hop and the World We Live In in 2002[6] and Love & Hate in 2003.[7][8][9]
In 2006, Aceyalone released Magnificent City, a collaborative album with producer RJD2,[10][11] followed by the Grand Imperial mixtape.[12]
He has collaborated with producer Bionik on Lightning Strikes (2007) and Aceyalone & The Lonely Ones (2009).
WTF?!?! nobody sat down to talk about acey's influences or anything? dude he must be a simpleton.... i mean,
aceyalone (and self jupiter) inherently lack the ability to 'tell stories' in their rap. acey was on a major label in 1995 and promptly bounced from it by trying to forcefeed the public crap like the greatest show on earth. damn simpleton. he's even got an LP cover in a shirt that says "the struggle continues" --- if he was truly on his game he woulda had "struggle" in the quotation marks cuz, duh, there is no struggle unless you're a goddamn idiot. essence precedes existence, right, or is that getting too philosophical? i should get back to my bitches and scrilla flowargh, i told myself i wasn't gonna do this with you cuz i can see right through your schtick.... but at least the people who know what's what know i'm on point here. you're trolling us, and i take my hat off cuz like, if your goal was to get me out in front of this and rambling my ass off in a futile attempt to prove that i'm essentially more of a rapping bigot than you are cuz as opposed to your "rap sucks except for the stuff i've listed. try to prove me wrong and i'll make you look bad on the board" schtick you're trying to expose me as equally as close-minded and sweeping generalizing as you are by tricking me into saying "the rap i like is the best rap on the planet, and if you don't like the rap that i like you're a moron" and like, i do commend your point here... you are indeed making a point, yin and yang in terms of liking rap and not liking rap.... but like, if you're really gonna play the game where it's like LOL FUCK YOU I TRIED... TOO MUCH 808 IN THOSE BEATS, TOO MUCH STEREOTYPICAL CRAP ABOUT THE STRUGGLE. SLUG TELLS A STORY ABOUT GIRLS WITH TATTOOED HANDS EMBODYING THE ESSENCE OF THE FEMININE, BUT WHEN PHAROAHE TELLS A STORY OF BEING A BULLET IT'S JUST "STRUGGLE" CRAP AND BTW THERE IS NO STRUGGLE.
it's no surprise that you're going to relate more to a guy who looks like this:
than a guy who looks like this (pharoahe is to the right)
that's a picture of aesop rock (ian bavitz) from his high school yearbook in long island, and that's a picture of monch back in his ~90-91 organized konfusion days. and hey, there's nothing wrong with that.... aesop rock and sluggo have lived lives that are closer to yours... their experiences more closely resemble yours, and since you're not a wigger or caught up in afrocentricity as a form of escapism, white guilt, or whatever it is that makes a suburban white kid like me think that black culture can be so goddamn cool.... welp, i don't expect you to fancy the kind of rhymes that you'd hear at an impromptu blunt session / cipher at an urban playground basketball court in 1993.
i mean, that pharoahe monch show i was @ in jan 2012 was the best rap show i had been to in a long time. b-boy circles, stylish well-dressed men with their women... rappers coming up to you like OMFG it's snockal-piss whaddap dude hey [bouncer dude] this is my guy right here you shoulda seen him clown on kid static at his own damn show this guy's a genius ((psst hey imma find you in 30mins cuz we're gonna go around the corner and smoke a couple'a blunts... don't get lost)) and yeah, hey, the show was 95% black, which you often don't see save your 1) bitches and scrilla raps (and i can almost hear you spit-take when you use the term scrilla. well played) etc.... yeah, and hey, i've seen aceyalone ~7+ times or something, and like, even at my favorite aceyalone show in... 06? 08? the one with rjd2... the crowd was 95% white... i mean, in terms of underground or "conscious" hiphop you dont get as many black ppl at shows as you would at a bitches-n-scrilla show.... and see, that's where pharoahe comes in and i think that's why rpb/OKC others wanted you to try out pharoahe.... he's kind of like a bridge from "street raps" to "conscious raps" (funny typos to be made typing those) and while you're clearly gonna hold "bitches and scrilla" raps in contempt for, quite frankly (w/stephen A smith) being what they are.... the hope was that ingratiating you to the top shelf "street" shit would perhaps take you somewhere.
but hey, respect due for sticking to your guns and going out of your way to prove your point about everyone and their tastes being forced on you and whatnot... i mean, thats why i made my obvious troll is obvious post... it's clear to me that you're doing a bit here, and in the process you ARE making a very valid point about people forcing their tastes on other people.... that's something i've been guilty of for the longest time, as i try to usurp coolness via osmosis from my favorite music...
but like, still, the core fundamental issue is that since you've had a solid successful life with shiny chinese electronics and hot hatches and this and that, you're not game to hear about the "struggle" which, quite honestly, you don't believe exists as prevalently as it does. you could possibly be making a deeper point about the fundamentally disingenuous nature of rappers, people who make a living by making music, talking about a struggle that they no longer live in.... but it's where they came from, and without inviting another ginormous thread about innercity/ghetto issues and race relations in america relative to opportunities available to people based on socioeconomic/racial status (cuz seriously, this thread doesn't need elmhurst steve coming in and dropping more codewords like martin luthor king jr to show off to his people down with "the brand" aka the aryan brotherhood) it was basically their reality for a long time, and as such merely escaping that has provided a foundation for their music to rise from... i mean, just because we have high living standards does "the message" essentially have no meaning nowadays? or because it's a time of financial zeitgeist should we all be having smart clever fun by bumping fett's vette by mc chris?
long story short, basically, "hip hop culture is african and it ain't never going back to the fields" - aceyalone
so again, after all of the honestly-academic-if-anything-at-all exercise ^^^ up there ^^^ (i reckon you've "got me" if you go tl;dr or "i can't follow your logic) the point is this is prolly some debate club stuff where you're just trying to string us along and "beat" us in internet arguments that we can't possibly win, cuz as you've stated time and time again, you don't like rap. you've got your genetically-engineered list of rappers to namedrop in order to make you sound like you're knowledgeable about rap, but the truth is you are to rap what that I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE facebook page is to science. superficially related. maddox did an article on that, noting that people posting pics of a skeleton from biology class gets 40k likes, but someone posting a link to an article on actual hard science gets 400 likes. it's windowdressing, just like your list.
that's why i've officially changed my stance on "enlightening" you about rap... cuz you've already got your mind made up. having met you IRL @ a couple'a board functions, it's not like you're a raging blowhard douche or anything.... you just like arguing on the internet, and when the topic gets to be something as nebulous as internet taste, you like to hold out on imu island against the waves of people who try to flood you with groupthink. it's commendable.... but honestly, it's semantically a form of trolling whether or not you want to readily admit it.
so i respect where you're coming from and all of that, and i'm no longer gonna be like YO PEEP THIS OLD LATYRX CUT THE PRODUCTION BUMPS!!! (if the song "lady don't tek no" by latyrx doesn't do something for you then you don't like rap, period. #FACTS) or trying to get you into some of the stuff that works for me.... cuz #TRUTH is that like, you're not a fan of straightforward oldschool-in-nature rap/hiphop (same thing. dont get me started on that either... you cant hiphop into a microphone) cuz like, at its core i define rap as saying what people wish they could say in a way they never thought of saying it before. if you're not a fan of people talking about adversity that they faced growing up in a neighborhood you'll never spend more than ~10 minutes in save total accident, welp, what can i say other than WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, YOU PAINT THAT SHIT GOLD. grow a soul path and catch an atmosphere show sometime and you'll have a ball going word for word with your hero, and hey if ~17-20 year old white suburban girls dont dig hot hatches then holy shit it's time to go eunuch, homey.
in other words, we'll agree to disagree.... but i'll sleep easy tonight knowing that i'm right. obvious troll is obvious.... THANK YOU, NEXT CALLER!
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