Yay, finally have enough time to post this~!
Uzumaki Kaen said:
How the hell can you compare songs that just go "Do drugs, Get Laid" in different words to stuff by The Who
The same way one can
easily generalize rock into people either screaming at the top of their lungs or just being emo. If someone tries to defend rock and still bash rap as nothing but the mainstream crap, then they're being too biased to know what good music is.
Myself, I enjoy both genres and their sub-genres greatly...but like Niko, mostly just old school now. 90% of all music has deteriorated to people singing about sex or just being plain emo and annoying.
Both rap and rock face the problem of just "going with the flow", it's undeniable how much times have changed in both areas. This may be a bit old for some people, but the old school style in the eighties and early nineties was great. An artist by the name of Rakim had a great song called "Go See the Doctor", telling people in this great rhyme to be careful who you sleep with. But nowadays the main public is getting fed on how good it felt when [insert] got his [insert] sucked and how many [inserts] he [inserted] in a night. Then we have rock, it used to be about great lyrics and awesome bands, but these days that's hardly the truth. Whatever happened to talents like Axl Rose and Slash? These days we usually just get really bad guitarist and singers that I can hardly even tell apart anymore. That's not music, that's just pandering to the audiences.
Velvet Revolver is a great band for rock, just as Gorillaz and Jurassic 5 are great bands for hip-hop/rap. For rap, the problem is that emcees can talk about killing and get money for it, and people are excepting it. So as long as this method of making money works, these late emcees will continue this pattern. Probably scared to be diverse and change, with fear of backlash or whatnot. Not wanting to ruin the resume they made for themselves. Basically digging the hole that they forced themselves into.
Now for rock, the way I see it is that a lot of these new bands don't know what they want to be. Too often do I hear songs from totally different bands that sound almost the same, both lyrically and verbally. Some bands get so caught up in the idea that they should be different that they forget what the roots of the genre are and try to rearrange it into something that's just people selling out and fans buying it up. What happened to the days when someone could take the old school style and make it better than it already was? These days guitar music doesn't sound anywhere near as good as it used to be. It'll be rare to find a truly great talent, but with the older stuff it was common as can be. The singers also fall into the trap of selling to teens, pandering to teens and that's what sells because that's what they "relate to", it's crap, I don't want to hear a whiny boy talk about how bad his life is, if I wanted to hear a great song about how bad aspects life can be, I'd listen to something like "El Manana" from the Gorillaz or "Fall To Pieces" from Velvet Revolver. They can do that style of music and pull it off, these other bands are just riding on the wave of emo teens who think they're so troubled.
Then we have the MTV trap, if it isn't on MTV, it's gotta be bad. Seriously, when a channel called "
Music Television" goes from airing Music programs 24-7 to being more of a reality channel than anything else and that channel is still the benchmark of what's good, then we know there's a problem. Doubt I'll see De La Soul or Theory of a Dead Man on MTV anytime soon.
The rap that's getting the attention is gangsta rap, the worst type of rap out there. People are so uneducated about the genre and just cast it off as not being music without even bothering to hear bands and singers like De La Soul, Gorillaz, Jurassic 5 and Floetry. Same with rock, the type of rock that gets the attention these days have hardly even qualify as rock. Take a single Simple Plan song and it'll get more airtime than a song from Theory of a Dead Man, U2, Velvet Revolver and Aerosmith combined in a year.