"the hip-hop debasement of culture"

http://www.detnews.com/pix/2003/05/11/a15kalellis.jpg

Even Allen Bloom wasn't this bad. Was he?

Mr. Kalellis's entire article, on the other hand, comes off as one big long "YOU KIDS, TURN DOWN THAT INFERNAL RACQUET!"

"Rap has become one of the dominant forms of popular music in the country. It is a musical style in which artists talk in rhyme to the rhythm of a beat."

"eh, we're realistic."

"'I don't want Jelani and Jalil out there, you know, even seeing that type of lifestyle,' Kilpatrick said in May. 'I don't want it to happen. It's too important, especially for men today.'"

(See here.)

After reading this, though, you'd think he'd find this GOOD that they don't vote:

"In our republican form of government, unfettered universal suffrage has been taken to an extreme. Why is it that there are age and residency qualifications for voting, but none for the comprehension of elementary civics? Why is any vagrant allowed to cast an ignorant vote on our country’s future and that of all of its citizens, but cannot participate on the jury panel of, say, the Van Cliburn Piano Competition?"

Barrett Kalellis: battling the decline of Western Civilization with every seven-hundred-words-a-pop spasm, each suitable for folks at a seventh-grade reading level (with super-duper bonus SAT words!). The futility of it all makes me yawn.

Seriously, though, are there really statistics that show a correlation between listening habits and voting? Can somebody find this? (Oh no! SoundScan run amok! OH NO!)

...uhm, what?

and, dudes, I am SO going to name my band, "Vulgarian Drivel"

There was a lot of weirdness in the article, but what jumped out at me was the way the author seemed to say that the foundation of graffiti and rap was primarily the thrill of breaking the law. He mentioned several times that rap was made from "stolen" snatches of music, and that graffiti, besides being inherently illegal, was perpetrated with "stolen" cans of spray paint. Here's a paragraph to give you the flavor, and maybe some laffs, too: (plus I like how he even accuses the movie itself of 'stealing' the music, cf. the 'uncredited' aside)

"Brandishing cans of stolen paint, the new vandals sprayed cryptic messages on trains, spun on their heads and rapped over stolen beats in the parks. Graffiti artists like Seen, Doni, Demon, Dust, Case, Crash, Iz the Wiz, Kid 167 and Futura were every bit as central to the new hip-hop culture as Grandmaster Flash, the Treacherous Three, the Furious Four and other artists whose music appears (uncredited) on the "Style Wars" soundtrack. All celebrated spontaneity and law-breaking. The art of rap depended on the deft appropriation of pre-existing beats, capped by the lyrical flow of the rapper — who appeared to improvise incandescent rhymes on the spot, just as the quick, fluid movements of the graffiti writers suggested that the artists were being chased by the cops. Furies of invention, the city kids who bombed the trains and scribbled over beats pushed themselves to ever-greater heights of innovation, out of a thirst for local fame and for the pleasure of communicating in a code that moved too fast for outsiders — especially adults — to break. Rap was a form of aural graffiti, just as the graffiti style wars were the visual counterpart of the fevered sonic competition among rappers and D.J.'s."

http://www.detnews.com/pix/2003/05/11/a15kalellis.jpg

....seriously?

Yeah, yeah, I'm not disagreeing about that, but that article was really pushing a view of hip-hop culture as an multi-faceted expression of the joy of stealing/breaking the law. C'mon. Does anyone think the music of Grandmaster Flash "celebrated law-breaking" as the article writes?

I don't remember reading such a blanket view of rap music == stolen music in a very long time. I still think it's weird.

That said, I still wanna own the DVD.

I'm astonished BTW that the article in question (the subject of this thread) was published in a major city newspaper. It's the kind of beyond-parody through-the-looking-glass stuff I see all the time in college and small town papers but rarely in a major paper. I mean there's plenty of stuff in the Chicago Tribune that's tone-deaf and oblivious but not to that ridiculous an extent. It's especially weird in a majority-black city.