Re: Rap and honest observations.

[Rmsarig <Rmsarig...>]

>Generally, sampling means ' I've got no talent to write a song, so I 
>steal
>the hook from a hit record so people will think I'm cool"
This is something that's always annoyed me in the case of most rap 
music I've heard.  Why can't there be some original music in the 
background?  Sampling was fun in the good old days of early 90's 
techno, but even electronic dance music has evolved to a place where 
it's moved away from dependence on sampling to make some fantastic and 
beautiful original sounds, but in the case of rap, where the message of 
the words is so important anyway, I don't understand why the musical 
backdrop has to rely on the strength of someone else's  pre-existing 
musical effort so much of the time.  I'm not saying *all* rap does 
*nothing but* rip off samples, I haven't the authority to make such a 
statement,  but most of it that I've ever heard has.  I'm making an 
honest observation from my own limited perspective, please understand 
it as such.

just to clarify, there's a mistaken assumption here on the part of people who 
haven't heard much hip-hop music that sampling involves taking entire backing 
tracks of previously released songs and rapping over them. That was certainly 
the case with the first rap song to become popular, "Rapper's Delight," way 
back in '79 or '80. And it still is the case with a few rap songs that have 
become big hits (such as that awful P. Diddy song that lifted the Police's 
"Every 
Breath You Take" completely). In fact, part of the reason these songs became 
hits is because they were instantly recognizable -- we already knew the song! 
But I'd venture to say that more than 95 percent of what would be defined as 
hip-hop today either uses no sampling at all or else samples tiny bits of 
music, digitally alters them to make them unrecognizable, and collages those 
bits 
together to create something entirely new. Collage techniques, of course, are 
not new in art, and they're one of the defining elements of postmodernism, 
which was the dominant aesethic movement for decades. So this isn't something 
that I would think would be impossible to appreciate, even for people who just 
don't like hip-hop music no matter what. It fits very much into larger art 
trends in recent decades.
Sorry, we really should get back to Jewish music, right?
-Roni