at least for me i think "emo" "indie" "underground hip hop" is on the up. i havent enjoyed new music thats coming out for quite a while. this stuff always ebbs and flows. its the nature of the beast. which is popular culture in this country we call the U. S.
Pac has a lot to do with what I'm talking about. How many times is a rapper gonna re-tread Tupac's lyrics...it's been done too many times by now. I'm just very tired of hearing the kind of stuff that I quoted from him earlier. I guess 106th and Park is a good forum to speak your mind, but it's also full of one rapper after another after another who all sound identical. I'll give Kanye that much. He doesn't sound like everybody else. That's usually the only kind of music that I'll listen to nowadays. Something that doesn't sound like everything else. But that line just bugs the crap out of me. So does the Michael Jackson line. And the fact that he talks about his jaw for 3 minutes in To The Wire. And the screaming-kid voice in half the choruses. I do like his beats though. Even if it is played the hell out, he was the one to produce "Crazy in Love" (Beyonce/Jay Z)...the beat was more than half the draw to that song. Oh, and as far as Bone goes, all they ever do is talk about social issues relevant to their subculture (that, and violence). They just don't do it in a way that divides their subculture against other subcultures.
I can see the "white man" line bothering you...but seriously, why the Michael Jackson one? I think it's pretty obvious that was just a joke about Jacko's surgery and skin color...nothing really offensive about it unless you get offended by bad jokes. In which case, 99% of all rap has at least one or two bad jokes a song. Sure, Kanye has stuff like the "white man get paid off of all of that." I wondered about that line when I heard it too, but for the most part I think he does a good job about rapping about things a little bit different from the normal crap you hear.
Well, that 20% of the world's population probably makes up of a good chunk of the top 20% of the worlds population.
