Why listen to dozens of new hip-hop albums every year if you're clearly not that fond of the genre?
Other points:
- I do not recall one song where Kendrick disses other MCs for rapping about "getting laid and being the best"
- What is inherently wrong about rapping about getting laid and being the best
- White rock musicians have been singing about getting laid and being the best for fucking decades
Show me an Over/Under vid where a rapper "knows nothing" about music.
Danny Brown's MO is literally a crazed guy with problems yelling on a street corner and his music fucking rules..
First off, all listen to anything that's highly acclaimed, even if it's noise or a hip hop record from someone I already know I don't like. I just love music exploration and genre is meaningless to me, just as it is for film or television. I just want to hear what people are saying is
great, regardless.
But I really fucked up when I mentioned unimaginative hip hop lyrics because it really only bothers me when the
music is boring. Boring MC with no flow and predictable beats. So I just kind of made myself a hypocrite there especially given that there's plenty of acts big on braggadocio and the like that I love such as UGK.
Likewise, I think the rock example is kind of a good mention of a double standard. Like nobody is going to take 80s hair metal seriously or whatever, but I feel that sort of stuff coming from white guys gets called out a lot more. Not that hip hop doesn't, but it's usually just by the moral police rather than someone wanting to make a point about sexism or artistry, but perhaps it's become so embedded in the DNA of rap and a part of black culture that it isn't what it seems at first glance.
I really don't need to post the Over/Under vids, but they really do exist. You ask some young 20 something rappers who don't play instruments who such and such white musician is and they really don't have a clue. We can talk about different cultural territories and how they may not have grown up in an environment where they were exposed to a lot of different music, but it's still a little perplexing that artists could be that unaware. I don't know, to me a lot of MCs are there to talk about their personal experiences and rap but might not even be that big of a music fan or even know the slightest thing about how to perform it. Maybe you don't really need to be if you're a rapper and someone else is supplying the beats which is fairly often the case.
Danny Brown is a genius at what he does and I loved watching the Jonah Hill directed clip the other day. But it's brilliant because it comes across more as performance art than who he really is or at least he has the awareness to self-diagnose and then amplifies it all to freak people out.