Rap Music

In The Conciousness Industry Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes:

"Too often the champions of inwardness and sensibility are reactionaries. They consider politics a special subject best left to professionals, and wish to detach it completely from all other human activity. They advise poetry to stick to such models as they have devised for it, in other words, to high aspirations and eternal values. The promised reward for this continence is timeless validity. Behind these high sounding proclamations lurks a contempt for poetry no less profound than that of vulgar Marxism. For a political quarantine placed on poetry in the name of eternal values itself serves political ends."

There's a movement within Rap that seeks to judge contemporary black music according to a set of aesthetic and thematic values known as "keeping it real." In the world of these Hip-Hop Heads (as they refer to themselves) everything is judged by how closely it can approximate the so called "Golden Age" of rap, roughly the decade spanning the mid eighties and early nineties that saw what was essentially an African-American folk style from New Yorks' outer burroughs become the dominant pop-music style in North America. It eclipsed Country as the highest selling genre, I think, in 1998.

Within this "Backpacker/Hip-Hop/Neo-Soul/Purist" culture there is very little room for experimentation

As many of my friends know, I sometimes listen to Rap Music. I can't stand anything, however, that attempts to be cerebral or concious or anything less. Have you ever wondered what people listen to in Baltimore ?
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