by Apu (yeah, he’s alive)
Well shit, it’s been a while. I’m sure most of the readers of this little blog here were pretty happy with not having the site polluted with my awfulness for the last 3 months or so…I really just didn’t have any motivation to write anything. Maybe it’s because I mentally checked out after school ended, and now that I’m back in a course I’ve got more activity happening in my brain, thus creating the desire to write. Although the more likely explanation for my writing tonight is probably liquor. Regardless, I’ve got something new for you to read and roll your eyes at. Although it might be shorter than normal so there’s that.
As I may or may not have talked about at some point in any one of my fairly insignificant additions to this blog, I started listening to hip hop music around the time of Youtube’s creation. It was pretty good for me, as a person who had next to nobody to discuss hip hop music with. I spent a lot of time on Youtube looking for more music to listen to. At the beginning, I spent my time listening to a lot of Eminem and D-12. Over the next couple of years I did branch out to others like 2Pac, Nas, and others who I could list if I didn’t want to just shut up and get on with my story. While viewing videos (which were usually just audio with stills of incorrect album covers) by the artists I was listening to, I would find myself going down into the comment section. I started to notice a certain pattern in the comments to the artists I was listening to. There would be one comment that would almost always pop up. It’s a statement that I have nightmares about that involve knives, lube, and Mountain Dew. It’s what you’ll probably see coming from “real hip hop” heads. It’s toxic.
“He raps about real life and struggle, not bitches, drugs, and money like everyone else does!”
Jesus Christ, I hate myself for just typing that.
Now, I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t agree with that for a period of time. For a good 3 or 4 years I had that same sort of mindset. But now that I’m not a shitty 15 year old kid anymore, I realize how stupid it is to not listen to some rappers or songs because they’re not meaningful.
NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO HAVE MEANING TO IT.
Crazy, right?
I don’t know. I guess I understand the reasoning behind the idea that music needs to be deep. A lot of the time when I’m in a shitty mood (so most of the time) it’s nice to listen to something with a message behind it that I can relate to. Actually, it’s also pretty nice to listen to a song that I can’t relate to, but can still feel bitter over. It sort of validates the way I’m feeling or the way I think I’d feel if I were in a certain situation. It creates a sort of bond between listener and artist that makes the listener feel like he or she (hooray for gender equal descriptions!) is less alone. I get it. I’ve felt that, plenty of times. It’s definitely something that should be encouraged, as it’s almost a more intimate bond than any friendship or other sorts of relationships can create, because it’s your own raw emotion that you can feel and express without any fear of judgement from others, since there’s nobody else involved in listening to a song. I can’t tell you how often I will sometimes randomly just get misty-eyed for no reason, just because I’m still not the most mentally healthy person in the world and I hear something in music that triggers a raw emotional response.
However (I’ll say it again for extra emphasis since I’m terrible at getting my point across with all the tangents I can’t help but take), that doesn’t mean that all music needs to have a meaning to it. Far from it, actually.
Remember when I did that article on Prof and mentioned how I was going through shit? One of the reasons I gravitated towards Prof almost exclusively for 4 months or so is because he made a tone of ignorant music that I could just listen to, chill to, chuckle to, and ignore my pain to. Sure, Prof releases a lot of emotional shit. “A Month From Now” still puts me in a trance every time I listen to it, and it’s been at least 3 months since I first discovered it. But a lot of the time, I’ll throw on “Apeshit” or “Roughneck” when I’m feeling shitty instead. I don’t need to constantly be reminded how fucked up my mood is by listening to a song that matches it. Sometimes I need to just listen to something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything, just because it’s fun. How does keeping myself down with sad and dark music help me in any way move on?
Whatever happened to “laughter is the best medicine”? Does that suddenly stop applying when it comes to hip hop? This genre is absolutely incredible and I’ll love it forever, but I swear, some of the fans are just fucking idiots. It’s like they want to wallow in their own misery with the artists they listen to, or reinforce the fact that the world is totally and completely screwed and that we’re headed towards destruction (a topic that I can probably talk about forever, but doesn’t apply to this piece much more than that one sentence).
I don’t know where this “ugh this has no substance” mindset came from, and I wish I did. Not everything needs to make you think. I don’t really care if my opinion on this matter makes me come off as even stupider than you all probably already thought I was, but I’d rather read if I wanted to think (and trust me, I read plenty, I love reading). People can tell me that’s retarded all they want, because I’m sure that those same people probably don’t fucking read to begin with. If I’m really, really sad, I’ll listen to something that I can relate to, something powerful that’s cathartic for me to listen to. But if I’m just feeling down like normal, I probably want to listen to something that’ll get me in better spirits and uplift me.
It’s almost sad how much people hate to listen to lighthearted, meaningless music. People will essentially dismiss artists like Lil Wayne, not because of skill levels or anything (I’m not the biggest Wayne fan in the world but the man can fucking rap), but because of the type of music he makes. People talk about how he doesn’t make real shit, and it’s all vapid, and shit like that. Well, my question is, why the fuck do you care? So what if he makes vapid music? How does it affect you as a person, when you just have the option to not listen and choose something else instead of complaining?
And it’s not even really about that, either. What really amuses me about the hatred of new-school hip hop is how these so-called old-school fans, these “real hip hop heads”, say that the only hip hop that’s good is the deeper shit, and that’s why new shit sucks. These fucking mongoloids seem to forget that hip hop was founded on celebratory music. It was music that people danced and partied to. Shit, break-dancing is supposed to be one of the main pillars of hip hop, isn’t it? To my knowledge, the socially-aware aspect of hip hop didn’t become something that was really widespread until the late ‘80s. Before then, it was primarily partying, having a good time, bragging about how good you are, and topics of that sort. Why is it that hip hop can’t still occasionally be about that just because something new was introduced to it? Now, the keyword here is “occasionally”. I’m not saying that the only hip hop that’s worth a shit is empty nonsense. I’m just saying that that sort of music should be able to co-exist with the realer shit, too.
Somewhat related, I would like to also ask…why is it that rappers who sound like they’re being lyrical as shit and socially conscious by essentially just rhyming a lot and using metaphors that reference current social issues, while actually saying nothing but gibberish, get so much more praise than those who are upfront about the fact that they say nothing of importance? I personally find when a rapper is talking irreverent shit about having fun to be better than when a rapper just rhymes a lot of nonsense while trying to sound deep. At least the fun rapper is actually saying something, as opposed to masticating the English language until it becomes almost caveman-like just to fool people into thinking that they’re really good at rapping. They’re not trying to pretend to be anything that they’re not. They’re just having a good time while the “lyrical” rappers are just acting like they’re fucking messiahs to the people, because that’s how their audience treats them for being able to relate something to a truck running over people in France while rhyming every other word, even if they’re made-up words. Hip hop fans for some reason have got some over 4 hour long Viagra hard-ons for rhymes that sound intelligent while being unintelligible, and they need to get over it. But again, a topic of discussion for another time.
All I’m saying is that life isn’t all about staying paranoid and keeping up with the latest conspiracies that rappers are coming up with to try to make themselves seem smart (I’m looking at you, Immortal Technique). There are several aspects of life, and one (or more) of those aspects is enjoying yourself. At the end of the day, being alive really has absolutely no reason behind it. The least you can do is embrace and enjoy the absurdity of life. In our modern society, I believe part of that is listening to absurd, vapid music. All you’re doing is removing yourself from a part of your life that is pretty essential to living with at least somewhat decent mental health. You’re not fooling anybody by listening to so-called “smart” music.
I really don’t know where to go from here. I’m on the verge of writing about how life is essentially meaningless so there’s no reason why music can’t be meaningless as well, but I feel like that’s a pretty bad idea, so I’ll sign off and send this to Dustin. I think I’ve made my point, but if not, I’ll do a tl;dr version of it right here: Stop being a pretentious fuckwad and enjoy some music to party to. It’s not a bad thing to actually enjoy yourself, you delusional masochists
Extraordinary Nobodies 