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Monday 9 November 2009

Bad rap

After my last little reference to hip-hop, one regular commenter recommended a link to a clip on YouTube. It turned out to be Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" , which I remember enjoying when it first came out all those decades ago.
 
At the time, I was half-willing to believe it might open the door to a wave of creativity. But I've never been  particularly thrilled by any rap that I've stumbled across since then. Ta-Nehisi Coates' interesting essay on Bill Cosby, celebrity turned social campaigner, takes him to task for condemning rap, and argues that jazz suffered the same opprobrium a couple of generations ago. Well, there's an element of truth in that. Some critics, for instance, thought commercial swing induced sexual mania. (And they may have been right.) But as Ross Douthat points out, it was the milieu, the drugs and the booze that unsettled the puritans most of all.

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