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I can TOTALLY understand where a person saying "hip hop isn't music!" or "I hate rap!" is coming from. The stuff sure doesn't make it easy for white people from the suburbs, raised on Dylan and Springsteen (or Dream Theater or Rush or whoever), to like it very much, since hip hop does not inculcate the same musical values these people cherish (melody, instrumental dexterity, the ability to sing, etc.). I do NOT agree with it, however.
I understand the sentiment, just like I can understand the sentiment of those rural conservatives who hate liberals so much because they blame every unpleasnt thing they see on television on the liberal upheaval of the 60's. It's coming from the same place: hip hop upsets their comfort zone, being such a confrontational music, just as the GLBT rights movement and Women's movement have/had the potential to upset (and unintentionally threaten) someone raised on traditional values and mores.
What's galling, however, is that these same people enshrine a music (classic rock, typically) which, forty years ago, we were having this very same discussion about, and they refuse to see the similarities, because acknowledging that another type of music has taken rock's place means having to acknowledge that the world has passed them by, that things change, that "twas not always thus," that they, supposed "liberals," really aren't all that liberal when it comes to certain cultural totems. And this makes them uneasy and it makes them get all reactionary on our asses, making claims like "hip hop isn't music." Aesthetically, it is in a different realm than rock or any of the small band format musics (which, I frankly prefer, but that's neither here nor there), because its seedbed is in urban poverty, where a microphone and a boombox and a beat up turntable can be more easily obtained than "real" instruments. But it ISmusic. (Anything that produces sound is music. Cage, anyone? How about Zappa?)
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