At 3:58 AM -0400 4/4/06, Robert C L Watson wrote:
They may have come before the genre we call rap, but I fail to see
any difference whatsoever in the musical content involved, except for
the underlying musical style. They are both words spoken rhythmically
to musical accompaniment, where the delivery may have definite pitch
contours at times and less definite at others.
Current commercial (c)rap - not that I can bear to listen to it for
long - is sloppy and irregular in metre,
Well, that's your interpretation. I find that much of it (not that I
listen to much of it!) makes very creative use of cross-rhythms
without losing the basic meter.
and has either non-rhymes such as "time" and "fine", or other
symptoms of illiteracy. (Back to the topic of literacy.) Hardly
comparable to sophisticated works from musical theatre.
Only two comments: (1) I find "time" and "fine" a perfectly good
rhyme, much better than much of Shakespeare since vowels have shifted
phonemes since his day; (2) the rap genre deliberately seeks to
mirror inner city ghetto dialect (remember "Ebonics"?!). Musical
theater in general does not. So?
The idea that rap doesn't involve pitch baffles me. There's a helluva
lot of subtlety to the vocal delivery that is not just in the
incredibly complex rhythms -- there is shape to the vocal lines as
well.
The rhythms are complex because there is no discipline. It is a
case of fitting any word and words desired into 4/4 time. It's a
long way down from Shakespeare or Swinburne.
Again, your interpretation on at least two different levels. It
isn't fitting any word in. You come across horrible examples of that
in the case of anyone without a poetic sense trying to fit
contrafactum words to an existing tune. It's a much more
sophisticated fitting stressed and unstressed syllable into the
prevailing meter, and that's about as sophisticated as you can get in
handling words.
I agree completely with David F: stop trying to impose your
interpretations of what music is or should be on everybody else, and
you are perfectly free to dislike or even hate rap. (As Pete Barbudi
said, "There is no bad music ... except Hawaiian!")
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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