Hip-Hop is Dead!

[The Green Lantern]

According to Billboard, rap and hip-hop album sales are down by more than 40 percent compared with the year 2000. It's hard to know why the genre is suffering a bigger blow than rock or pop.

Some industry experts say young people are fed up with the violence, degrading imagery and lyrics. Others say the music is just as popular as it ever was, but that fans have found other means to consume the music.

Cheers to all!!!


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=7834732

[The Green Lantern]

[dеiтайожни]

You fucking crackas, rap isn't dead. Stronger than ever, bastages just ain't paying for it no mo'. Watch these and say rap sucks, you can't!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGJGem6QUwU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-u_QijkXwU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjzYf9GEVqE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXDoxxlgNG0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhCbXNuS8SI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ac-KlpQE_c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON8WZCQX_P8

[RubHer Yellow Ducky]

it never lived

[The Green Lantern]

Originally Posted by d?i???????

You fucking crackas, rap isn't dead. Stronger than ever, bastages just ain't paying for it no mo'. Watch these and say rap sucks, you can't!

[KenP]

Originally Posted by RubHer Yellow Ducky

it never lived

Sure it did. They just keep killing each other so there's no one to write the music.

[The Green Lantern]

Originally Posted by KenP

Sure it did. They just keep killing each other so there's no one to write the music.

LOL

[RubHer Yellow Ducky]

Originally Posted by KenP

Sure it did. They just keep killing each other so there's no one to write the music.

What Music !!!

[dеiтайожни]

Originally Posted by The Green Lantern

He said that? What a ****.

[dеiтайожни]

Lucky for me I don't like too much of the new stuff so I'm set with all the pre 2004 goodness.

Yea but R&B is growing. Maybe that explains recent declines in Hummer sales...

[h2co-pilot]

Originally Posted by RubHer Yellow Ducky

What Music !!!

[Agriv8r]

hey my dot is red!!! wtf is that about??? oh yeah rap sucks...

[The Green Lantern]

Originally Posted by d?i???????

Lucky for me I don't like too much of the new stuff so I'm set with all the pre 2004 goodness.

I don't mind listening old school rap like the 80's.

I drive a Hummer, so of course I listen to some rap (and rock, jazz, classical).

[RubHer Yellow Ducky]

Originally Posted by Agriv8r

hey my dot is red!!! wtf is that about??? oh yeah rap sucks...

You must have been a Bad Boy...

better ask the T & A crowd...

[K9sH3]

i said a hip hop the hippie the hippie
to the hip hip hop, a you dont stop
the rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie
to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat

[MarineHawk]

We need more Charlton Hestons. He took a big swipe at rap music. From a speech he delivered in February 1999 at the Harvard University Law School:

Originally Posted by Charlton Heston

If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does -- does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don't celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe.

Don't let America's universities continue to serve as incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism. That's what it is: New McCarthyism. But, what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation?

Well, the answer's been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people.

You simply disobey. ... Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with that disobedient spirit that tossed tea into Boston Harbor, that sent Thoreau to jail, that refused to sit in the back of the bus, that protested a war in Viet Nam.

In that same spirit, I' m asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives, and onerous laws that weaken personal freedom.
But be careful. It hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk.

A few years ago, I heard about a -- a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a CD called "Cop Killer," celebrating the ambushing and of murdering police officers. It was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the country -- in the world. Police across the country were outraged. And rightfully so. At least one of them had been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the -- the CD was a cash cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around because the rapper was black. I heard Time/Warner had a stockholders meeting scheduled in Beverly Hills, and I owned some shares of Time/Warner at the time, so I decided to attend the meeting.

What I did was against the advice of my family and my colleagues. I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of "Cop Killer" -- every vicious, vulgar, instructional word:

I got my 12-Gauge sawed-off. I got my headlights turned off. I'm about to bust some shots off. I'm about to dust some cops off.

It got worse, a lot worse. Now, I won't read the rest of it to you. But trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me for that. Then I delivered another volley of sick lyrics brimming with racist filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing the two 12-year-old nieces of Al and Tipper Gore:

She pushed her butt against my --

No. No, I won't do to you here what I did to them. Let's just say I left the room in stunned silence. When I read the lyrics to the waiting press corps outside, one of them said, "We can't print that, you know." "I know," I said, "but Time/Warner is still selling it."

Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T's contract. I'll never be offered another film by Warner Brothers, or get a good review from Time magazine. But disobedience means you have to be willing to act, not just talk.

When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself, jam the switchboard of the district attorney's office. When your university is pressured -- your university -- is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students graduate with honors, choke the halls of the Board of Regents. When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl's cheek on the playground and then gets hauled into court for sexual harassment, march on that school and block its doorways. When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you -- petition them, oust them, banish them. When Time magazine's cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month, boycott their magazine and the products it advertises.

So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobediences of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God's grace, built this country.

If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree.

I thank you.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/spee...ulturalwar.htm

[dеiтайожни]

Everyone always brings up Cop Killer, ! Who cares, it's a song.

There are so many movies out that promote illegal activities, but nobody cares. IMO they are more influential than music.

[MarineHawk]

Originally Posted by dеiтайожни

Everyone always brings up Cop Killer, ! Who cares, it's a song.

There are so many movies out that promote illegal activities, but nobody cares. IMO they are more influential than music.

I see your point on its face, but if you look a little deeper you might see a difference.
Rap stars attempt to personify their lyrics into their image. Actors who play murderers don?t do so nearly to the same degree. That?s why countless rap musicians are killed by other gangstas or imprisoned for violent crimes. Not so much Jack Nicholson (who has played a murderer in movies). Though Darth Vader was a bad guy, James Earl Jones was not going out and shooting other actors while hopped up on crack. It?s a totally different culture. If you turn on MTV?s violent rap crap, you see that those guys are trying to convey that they really are cool, fancy violent people who kill at will. While Kaiser Soze was pretty brutal in ?The Usual Suspects,? I doubt many people in an alley are as afraid of Kevin Spacey as they are the gangsta rappers, who really try to act the part of the brutal murderous man who can kill at will. It?s a different message. One is fiction. The other really attempts to convey reality. If you don?t get that, then too bad.