Hip hop: Art or Buisness

Hip Hop: Art or Buisness

 

Is there a difference between hip hop and rap? Is the music pushed to the public doing a culture a disservices. The difference to the music you can find on various internet sites and the music in the charts or on the radio is so radical that they may as well be completely different genres. The difference is a product of the industry. The artists coming up speak about their reality Chicken hawks in plush suits swoop down squawking about money and houses with their talons squarely aimed at the very soul of the music. The artists themselves have to make the choice between putting honest tracks out or making money and the result is weak music with unintelligent, irrelevant lyrics that kids grow up believing. I’m not blaming music, or anything else for that matter, for gun crime but I can’t help but feel that if the most prominent rappers in the country weren’t talking about shooting people in their tracks then maybe people would treat guns differently. It is that ugly side of the hip hop coin that forces me to defend the culture when people attack but I am getting tired of it. The only difference between artists like Fliptrix and Split Prophets (some real UK hip hop) and people like Tiny Tempa and Drake is a few million pounds in advertising and a soul because I believe that people like Dr Syntax and The Four Owls would sell just as many records as the shallow snakes if they were given that kind of exposure. It would take a massive shift in perception now, the claws are in to deep and the heart might already be poisoned beyond help but as long as there are artists putting out real music there will be people that listen. Music is a matter of taste but truth is truth, you can feel it when your hear it, it will grab your attention and refuse to let it go. All I’m saying is in our individual daily struggles next time you hear some one rapping about great parties, the women they have slept with or people they’ve shot just ask yourself how can you relate to it. Let face it life is far from one big party and I want my music to represent how life is not a distraction from what it isn’t, these days there are to many distractions and I need to get stuff done. Forty three million albums have been sold this year, which is actually a quite significant drop from last year when the numbers were a touch over fifty three million. The drop in sales is down to the amount of free music that is easily available online and even some artists have come out of their five star holes to complain that they are suffering. Maybe the big ones are suffering but I’m sure the internet has given hundreds of the independent artists out there the opportunity to reach infinitely more people and probably get most of their fan base from the people who hear their music online. Try before you buy will work as long as people still buy. We the fans have to support real music put out by real people otherwise or we can carry on saying “man that’s not it“ every time some one attacks the music based on some bullshit . For to long suits have run the music world forcing the real music to go underground while they churn out watered down swill for ridiculous profit. There are smaller labels out there putting out some real music, High Focus Records for example has a line up that is constantly putting out some really intelligent hip hop. I’ve spent the last couple of days “researching”, basically smoking and listening to what hip hop is in the UK these days. During these blissful couple of days I came across a hip hop collective by the name Concept Of Thought, three young guys out of Brighton prove beyond a doubt that the future of hip hop could be bright. I found their ten track album on their webpage, where you can listen and download if you were so inclined, and trust me once you listen to this thing you will be compelled to get a copy for yourself. Maybe it was the weed but while that album was playing I’d found myself drifting along with the music, head nodding away as if my name were Churchill. The vocals are delivered with some really smooth flow that seems to accentuate the beats perfectly but as with all good songs its not just the beat or flow. The lyrics are intelligent and with substance, which is the main thing that is missing in mainstream hip hop, more than a few times I found myself taking tracks back to hear a line again. Never in the charts do you hear an evangelical argument, I mean how would they fit that into the video, I can see it now bitches and nuns everywhere. That however is just a reflection of our society as a whole, we don’t want things that might cause us to question our reality which is why throughout the day on the radio we get bombarded with ghost written music designed to make money not move or inspire people which to me is the ultimate goal of music, maybe I am just naïve but some things just shouldn’t be about business, keep those jackals away at all costs before everything we love takes another hit. If you love hip hop get out there and support your scene, push records like the crack dealers mainstream acts love to glorify and storm shows as if they were the beaches of Normandy because hip hop hasn’t got an underground it has a resistance.

Racist Media?

Racist Media?

On Thursday the sixteenth of august I went on my break in work and was disappointed to find I had forgotten to put a book in my bag and the only thing I could read was The Sun, I should have just left it alone but with nothing better to do I began to flick through the pages. I was only really looking at the headlines until I came across an article written by Rod Liddle with the headline “Salute MP Fighting Stone Age beliefs”. Obviously it drew my attention so I read the whole thing finding myself more appalled the further I got through it. Basically it was about Africans that practise Voodoo and abuse children, gleefully he tells “there have been 83 cases over the last 10 years and many could have been stopped but for the old bill treading a little to carefully, afraid they might offend some one.” He then chose to pick out cases that involved Africans or Pakistanis clearly showing that your little white children aren’t safe as long as they are on our shores. Apparently “all of these vile practises need to be stamped out and the Neanderthal beliefs challenged”.           
            After reading this I felt so dirty that I threw the paper in the bin in an attempt to save some poor soul I work with having the misfortune to read this or worse still believing it and have spent a little time since researching child abuse cases, trust me when I tell you there are much better ways to spend your time.      
         Seen as Liddle brought up Neanderthal beliefs I thought I would like to start with the Catholic Church, I know how original is it to call a priest a peado however it has to be done. In February of this year (2012)  a Senior Cardinal of the Catholic church revealed that in the past ten years 4,000, let me say it again 4,000 cases of child abuse committed by CATHOLIC PRIESTS have been investigated.    Cardinal Levada, who is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, went on to describe the figure as a 'dramatic increase'. Yet nobody calls for Catholicism outlawed. However I don’t want to only talk about priest as that would be unfaier. Christian parents have been convicted for beating their own children to death with crucifixes, locked them in cages and starved them. If that isn’t enough what about Christian parents that warp their own kids minds, can you imagine growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household house hold if you were homosexual or worse still Atheist, how many people under that kind of pressure have grown up hating themselves or simply taken their own lives. Every one knows all this already  though,don’t they, even if it’s only relatively recently that these matters stopped being “taken care of” internally and the perpetrators made to pay for their sins rather than simply given a slap on the wrist and moved on to another trusting community. Just to be clear I am not just priest bashing here, does anybody need reminding about Ian Huntley, baby p, the murder of James Bulger, Fred West, Mary Bell… I can keep going if needs be but I really would rather stop. By Liddles his own words should these case not be considered an anomaly and all white people are “human filth” (just to be clear that quote wasn’t taken from the article I am writing about, it came from an article he wrote for his Spectator blog in 2009) and he continued with “The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks”. An interesting side not on that quote is that thanks to a number of complaints Liddle became the first journalist to have the contents of his blog censured because he couldn’t back up his claim with statistics, shocking. Even if every word he said was true I believe that unless you are going to at least try and objectively explain the reasons behind this or solutions to the problem you are doing nothing more than inciting racial hatred, which I thought was a criminal offence according to the Incitement of Racial Hatred - Sections 17-29 Public Order Act 1986, which by the way carry the maximum penalty of seven years in prison, just a thought. How this story made t into a national newspaper is beyond me but it just tells you everything you need to know about the feelings of the editors that allowed this to be printed thinking it was a fair and unbiased piece of journalism. If you agree with Liddle that is your right but I urge you to read about the worlds history before you take the word of a BNP member as fact because whether you like it or not we are all the same and this type of thinking only holds the entire species back, so how about we sort our selves out and move forward to make every ones life better or maybe I’m wrong and you can go back to eating your curry while you moan incessantly about those damn immigrants taking over “your” country. Child abuse is just wrong no matter who's doing the abusing and to turn it into a racial issue is just illogical, offensive and dangerous and I would rather not read the opinions of sombody that has proved themselves to be a bigot time and again, save it for your BNP meetings Liddle.