RAP!
Give me two small sticks and a hollow log and I can turn out better end results than this unmitigated imitation musical manure being passed off today as being primitive, soul-tempered “rap”!
It is not rap! It is not music!
I find I must stretch my definition of what is meant by just the use of the word ”rap” in any attempt to qualify the current flow of noisy sequences being exhausted forth over an unknowing audience existing in a low-lying sea of fake fog. Turn the dry ice machines and fans off, please. Let's try to make some sense of the present epidemic of cacophony - which shows that I have, at least, been near a musical dictionary and may have some idea of what mankind, in general, might have become familiar with that which may be called “music.”
I can accept the idea that rhythm alone can be musical.
Certainly savages of musical expression depended on the repetion of sounds and a person ”composing” with such materials that he might keep records in patterned forms so he could repeat them as needed.
The least complicated situations demand the most precise of terms be used.
No doubt some performers hit upon some exact rhythm forms, but the vast output of so-called “rap” depend on repetition of the same. Good rap requires precise rhythm; approximations will not do.
Do you remember type of song we did some years ago
which we called “The Talkin' Blues” I think? Those songs killed themselves off by insisting on always staying the same. Rap, I fear, is doing the same thing but in a different way: by imitating things it has never been.
To me “rap” was real a one time, I think. It faded quickly. Some think it starved to death, and find very few seem to miss it. For myself I'd have to say I'm rather glad that I was ''out” when rap was “in.”
Andrew McCaskey amccsr@adelphia.net 8-17-06 [c344wds]
