Submitted by the good folks @ http://www.errorium.com:
Read the article. Show this guy he’s wrong. Vote.
P.S. He makes a few salient points, this Barrett Kalellis, author of the essay. Especially towards the end of the article. I was tempted to call him a white supremacist patriarch, but I will refrain.
Art does not have to be edifying to be art. Art can be reckless, destructive, angry, and absurd. More important than inculcating kids with Mozart chamber music to stimulate their grey matter (it has been demonstrated that complex harmonies seem to help brain development and task performance), let’s improve our educational system. Let’s help kids learn to think critically. Kids need to learn logic and philosophy, now more than ever. I figure if kids want to listen to “stupid” music, they should be able to analyze it in a sophisticated manner and explain why it’s “stupid”.
And let’s not even get into economics and aspirations to wealth. The entire advertising machine is geared towards creating envy and desire….this greed mechanism is not the function of hip-hop. The American myth (that working hard will get you a house and two cars in the driveway) is more pernicious than MTV Cribs. The American myth of “hard work” is the deepest of lies. In fact, the hardest workers I’ve ever known in my life have been the poorest people. A cunning person learns to loaf effectively and rake in the cash. I’m not talking about street crime … I’m talking about landlords and those who inherited their wealth from plantation owners and industrialists who exploited African slaves and vunerable laborers.
I’ll stop now.
Will rap be a political force?
Listeners don’t vote; music fails to alter politics
By Barrett Kalellis / Special to The Detroit News
In writing about rap music and the hip-hop debasement of culture, one begins to feel like hapless Kevin McCarthy at the end of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956). He wanders into speeding highway traffic desperately shouting fruitless warnings to everyone about the great dangers the pod people represent to humanity: “They’re here! You’re next!”
At the NAACP’s Freedom Weekend in Detroit on April 26, a hip-hop summit brought together performers, music industry executives, a gaggle of politicians and thousands of listeners.
As part of the festivities, industry mogul Russell Simmons received a Lifetime Achievement Award, which symbolized two things. First, the irrelevancy of the NAACP to address problems in a serious way. Second, the hypocrisy of an organization that protests speeches given by Clarence Thomas, the nation’s most distinguished black jurist, yet awards a hustler in the seamy music business who gained his wealth by purveying filth to young people.
The high part of the farce is when Simmons and various politicos try to elevate this nonsense into a Renaissance-like cultural movement that translates into an inchoate political force waiting to be tapped. They yammer about mobilizing the hip-hop generation “to change the outcome of elections” and daydream about all those votes in their column. Trouble is, statistics show that most of these rap listeners don’t vote in elections.
Similar claims were made in the 1960s — how the “Flower Power Woodstock Generation Greening of America” youth were going to change politics and the establishment. The music served as an attractive backdrop to the anti-Vietnam War movement, but it had no lasting effect in informing politics. Although radical activists of the ’60s have ensconced themselves in academic tenures and various governmental agencies, they have been reduced to fighting rear-guard skirmishes against a predominantly conservative mood in the country.
While Jerry Rubin punched a Wall Street time card and Rennie Davis tried his hand (unsuccessfully) at venture capitalism, the pop music scene changed. Folk was out, and post-Beatles bands became self-consciously theatrical. In heavy metal and punk acts, there was satanic, narcissistic navel contemplation through a drug-induced haze, pyrotechnics and smoke machines.
When the music lost its power to inspire, musicians surrendered the high ground from which to make political pronouncements with impunity, as the Dixie Chicks recently learned after one of their singers told a British audience she was ashamed of President George W. Bush.
Former NAACP President Benjamin Chavis, wanting to tap the frantic energy of rap followers as an “influential agent for social change which must be responsibly and proactively utilized to fight the war on poverty and injustice,” now heads an “action summit.”
Fired by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for corruption in 1994, Chavis apparently thinks the hip-hop music culture is ripe for co-option by old fogy reformers of the 1960s. Having failed to achieve their chimerical visions 40 years ago, these oldsters are now trying to learn a new tune and charge once more into the old windmills.
Besides the obvious self-interest of the promoters, what does this culture offer except the fantasy of wealth for the uncultivated and unskilled, who scheme mightily about how to get a demo made of their vulgarian drivel?
The rappers’ cheaply ostentatious and slovenly clothing styles, their food and drink preferences are emulated by their followers, making billions of dollars for companies that prey like parasites.
It’s bad enough that most hip-hop pollution is coarse, uncivilized, unimaginative, endlessly repetitious and soul deadening. Far worse, it sends the wrong message to youth.
Rather than become educated and learn how to articulate ideas, it champions crude and destructive thoughts; instead of focusing on hard work, perseverance and achieving goals, it seduces youth into thinking they can get rich quick and live the high life with no preparation.
It is a pernicious, noxious anodyne for those who step into this mire and, ultimately, a dead end. It is time we scraped the Snoop Dogg dirt of hip-hop culture off our nation’s shoes and moved on.
Barrett Kalellis is a Metro Detroit writer and founder of the Detroit Contemporary Chamber Ensemble.