In a further sign that the end times are near,* Ben Shapiro raps.
I'd never heard of Tom MacDonald before this, but apparently he's an independent rapper who's been hitting the top 10 in digital sales reasonably regularly for the last 5 years.
It's an interesting synergy. Both have very different audiences, but they share an anti-woke sentiment, so this is getting a bunch of cross-audience exposure.
So how did this happen?
A phenomenon I've noticed on YouTube is people whose whole thing seems to be "reaction videos" where they just react to other peoples' content, usually in 5-20 minutes or so. Within just a few hours of "Facts" hitting YouTube, there were probably half a dozen reaction videos on my feed, so I spent half an hour or so watching some (I usually watch everything except music on 1.25 speed; sometimes I forget to change the setting and end up listening to music at 1.25x; some of it is pretty good that way).
Most of the reaction vids I saw were either all positive or all negative. To my surprise (which just shows my ignorance of the rap world), a number of black YouTubers gave it pretty positive reactions. The one that seems to most honestly evaluate the rap qualities, with positive and negative comments, was this one, though there is some foul language here:
"*Likewise, one might also see rap being posted at the Hall as another sign of the end times."
ReplyDeleteThe fabric of space and time
is slowly crumbling.
Howling bandogs stare into the void.
I posted some hip hop back in 2020 to explain a controversy occurring around the BLM movement.
ReplyDeletehttps://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2020/07/gangster-rap.html
I’m not against the stuff, it just doesn’t usually fit here.
Who is Ben Shapiro? Another ‘conservative celebrity activist’?
Who is Ben Shapiro?
ReplyDeleteNoise
A voice being constantly ignored.
Fading into insecurity forever
Greg
He made his name speaking at universities and debating woke opponents in the Q&As following his talks. He is conservative and an observant Jew. He graduated from Harvard Law and he's quite good at debate.
ReplyDeleteHe worked for Breitbart News and later co-founded the Daily Wire, a conservative media company. He also has a podcast in the top 10 on Apple podcasts.
On rap in particular, he is a classical violinist and has said that rap isn't music because it only has rhythm, not melody or harmony. Also, he has the image of being uber-nerdy and conservative, so the idea of him rapping seems like a contradiction.
I've heard others make that argument about melody. I don't think it holds, though. The songs end up having melody and/or harmony even if the vocals don't, because the samples (which are often from quite melodious 1970s music) carry them. Even the lyrics that don't always attempt to hit a note still obey musical conventions about tempo and quiet/loud, fast/slow distinctions.
ReplyDeleteStill, it's an argument. One might criticize it as pretentious, but whether you treat the art as a sort-of music or a sort-of poetry or even a sort-of rhetoric is less important than recognizing that it is clearly an art form.
I think it's similar to lyric poetry in the Homeric tradition, although Homer was a particularly high form of that art. I would refer anyone interested to Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales, which predates hip-hop by quite a bit, but treats Milman Perry's work studying Turkish lyrical poets around the turn of the last century who were clearly in the Homeric tradition. There's a lot of the mechanics of such poetry that is shared by hip hop performances, especially those termed 'freestyle' that are improptu and improvised.
I'll go along with that. I have always tried to avoid debates about what "real art" or "real music" or "real literature" is. I've never understood the point.
ReplyDeleteIt can go too far the other way as well, where all quality is denied in art forms; any work of art (literature, music) is just as good as any other work.
Singer of Tales sounds like a great book. I'll have to check that out.