R9brasil
03-08-2007, 10:53 PM
I really respect the opinions on this site, so I would really appreciate your opinions on this essay. I wrote it when someone asked me to write about rap. I changed some details, like the eleventh grade thing, it was more like seventh, but its all the same. Please let me know how you feel. All feedback, whether negative positive, or neutral, is appreciated. Thanks and I hope y'all enjoy.
Who would have thought that in age of Mp3s and Ipods, a worn out walkman handed to me in 1st period physics would provide me with my most profound musical experience. But right as the withered tape began to play I knew it was special. I heard rap records before, but never had the first few seconds of an album, of any genre, grabbed hold of my attention with such an unrelenting and forceful clutch. I listened closely as several friends discussed, in prose, the ills of the current rap culture. A young, brash, laid back voice summed it all up in one fell swoop, “When it’s real, you doin’ this even without a record contract… but niggas just don’t listen.”
Thirty-nine minutes of pure hip hop magic later, I was hooked. It was not the aggression, the violence or the synthesized beats, which attracts more mainstream listeners, that captivated me. It was the ingenuity of the lyrics, the clever wordplay and the complex rhyme schemes exhibited by NaS on illmatic that made me want to delve deeper into hip hop and become a coinsure in the art of rhyming. To widen my palette, I scoured all over the internet and various record stores, building the most influential and definitive collection of lyrical hip hop records. I collected close to seventy five, and I immersed myself in each for weeks.
Despite the obsessive qualities I have developed for it, rap has had an exclusively positive effect on my life. The creativity and lyrical dexterity that I require in my hip hop has permeated into all aspects of my life. When writing essays, I often compare them to raps. Is this essay like a multi-syllabic, internal rhyming metaphor from GZA, or is it a bland 50 cent verse with a nursery rhyme hook? I ask myself. I used to despise poetry and art that was abstract, but the enigmatic rhyming of Ghostface has shown me the beauty of abstract thought and the difficulty of channeling it into a conventional medium. The meticulous evaluation that I put each record through has made me more aware of the subtleties in all walks of life that separate the good from the great.
Since discovering NaS’ illmatic in the eleventh grade, I have listened to the landmark record almost every night. However, illmatic did more than just give me a way to drive my family insane at all hours of the night: it changed my life; it converted me into an avid fan of hip hop, a genre that has a plethora of creativity underneath the negative façade that many around it have erected. Recently, the exploitation of hip hop has lead to its mainstream acceptance, but has robbed most rap of its imagination. Despite the artistic funk that hip hop has hit, I continue to listen because the next artist I hear might be the one who is “doing it for real”.
Who would have thought that in age of Mp3s and Ipods, a worn out walkman handed to me in 1st period physics would provide me with my most profound musical experience. But right as the withered tape began to play I knew it was special. I heard rap records before, but never had the first few seconds of an album, of any genre, grabbed hold of my attention with such an unrelenting and forceful clutch. I listened closely as several friends discussed, in prose, the ills of the current rap culture. A young, brash, laid back voice summed it all up in one fell swoop, “When it’s real, you doin’ this even without a record contract… but niggas just don’t listen.”
Thirty-nine minutes of pure hip hop magic later, I was hooked. It was not the aggression, the violence or the synthesized beats, which attracts more mainstream listeners, that captivated me. It was the ingenuity of the lyrics, the clever wordplay and the complex rhyme schemes exhibited by NaS on illmatic that made me want to delve deeper into hip hop and become a coinsure in the art of rhyming. To widen my palette, I scoured all over the internet and various record stores, building the most influential and definitive collection of lyrical hip hop records. I collected close to seventy five, and I immersed myself in each for weeks.
Despite the obsessive qualities I have developed for it, rap has had an exclusively positive effect on my life. The creativity and lyrical dexterity that I require in my hip hop has permeated into all aspects of my life. When writing essays, I often compare them to raps. Is this essay like a multi-syllabic, internal rhyming metaphor from GZA, or is it a bland 50 cent verse with a nursery rhyme hook? I ask myself. I used to despise poetry and art that was abstract, but the enigmatic rhyming of Ghostface has shown me the beauty of abstract thought and the difficulty of channeling it into a conventional medium. The meticulous evaluation that I put each record through has made me more aware of the subtleties in all walks of life that separate the good from the great.
Since discovering NaS’ illmatic in the eleventh grade, I have listened to the landmark record almost every night. However, illmatic did more than just give me a way to drive my family insane at all hours of the night: it changed my life; it converted me into an avid fan of hip hop, a genre that has a plethora of creativity underneath the negative façade that many around it have erected. Recently, the exploitation of hip hop has lead to its mainstream acceptance, but has robbed most rap of its imagination. Despite the artistic funk that hip hop has hit, I continue to listen because the next artist I hear might be the one who is “doing it for real”.