Can hip-hop really be considered music?

"Ask a rapper to sing another song and they'll fail miserably"

FALSE

Missy Elliott
Queen Latifah
Angie Stone (she was a rapper first)
Bone Thugs N Harmony
Cee-lo Green
Lauryn Hill
Andre from OutKast

can all sing.

and rap is based on sampling. You do realize they need permission to use someone else's work?

A lot of artists who get sampled by rappers or parodied by Weird Al Yankovic consider it an honor.

Plus Hip-hop is not the only genre to use samples. R&B Is also full of samples. Hip-hop originated sampling but they're not the only genre to use samples.

Fall Out Boy, Jessica Simpson, Gwen Stefani, Rihanna, Janet Jackson, Beyonce, Bon Iver, Mariah Carey,

to name a few non-rappers are all guilty of using samples.

Plus, Salt-n-pepa's sample in "Whatta man" inspired the original performer to come out of hiding. the original "What a man" Singer Linda Lyndell was in hiding because the song got her death threats from the kkk

"I told my man I'm going to get a pap smear. he said 'bring me one no mustard'" - Adele Givens

This topic is posted by ignorant rednecks every few months, so you're posing nothing new here.

Go back to whistling show tunes, Hillbilly.

No one Gives it to you...you have to take it

Tell you what: Google the lyrics to 'Rapper's Delight'(1979). I bet that you can't even begin to keep up with those MC's rhythm, cadence and diction. You think rapping is easier than singing? Try it.

Do the same thing with making a hip hop song with samples. You can download a free trial version of Reason or FL Studio. It will take you hours to even chop up a single sample to match the drum programming - if you can even get that far.

As far as pimp and gangster posturing, it's called characterization. Outkast made "pimp music" when they started out, yet Big Boi and André 3000 are devoted fathers / family men. Only a complete moron would listen to say, 'Player's Ball' and think they're promoting abuse of women.

You don't like hip hop, fine, but to say that it's factually not music is flat out stupid. It's your opinion, nothing more.

I don't know why people even bother responding to the OP, who calls himself "Literally_Hitler," for crying out loud. Notice how he hasn't even been back to this thread? Like most online trolls, he's just looking to get some entertainment out of spouting off some rhetoric that he thinks will incite people.

That's more of an attack on his user name than his class.

He's the one that posted this generic thread, so it all but asked for it.

No one Gives it to you...you have to take it

Any rapper you ask to actually "sing" any other song will fail miserably.Queen Latifah disagrees.

I'm an Old School Hip-Hop head to the death, but some of these new cats out now are very musically gifted, with pretty decent singing voices - cats like D.R.A.M., Anderson .Paak, Tory Lanez, Raury, Ty Dolla $ign, etc.

All forms of American music is created by "borrowing" sounds and melodies from other forms of music. From creating melodic sounds, by blowing through a reed with holes in it, or beating a goatskin wrapped around a hollowed out tree trunk, or strumming a guitar, or stroking a synthesizer, or programming sounds into samplers and drum machines, the way music is created is constantly changing and evolving but it's still nonetheless music.

If I really believed all P. Diddy, or Mannie Fresh, or J. Dilla, or Alchemist, or Pete Rock, or Kanye West did was play instrumental tracks of some other persons music and just talked some words that rhymed on top it and called it music to become rich and famous, don't you think I would have hopped on that gravy train a long time ago?





"We alive be we ain't livin'..." - Liberation

I grudgingly respect rappers if they do it well. I'm an amateur musician and I've always hated rap, but there's a guy I know who raps and I have to admit that even if I don't fully consider it music (it's more like oration), I do respect his skill and even force myself to enjoy the way he rattles off these rhymes without skipping beat.

It's annoying at best though. Hip-Hop seems to me to be defined by a claustrophobic lack of musical texture - it never seems to "go anywhere." I mean, typically there's a canned drum beat with little variation, a guy rapping with no melody, and then maybe a sample or two from another song. These samples are usually the only melody the song has, and their bursts of actual musical notes and diverse instruments promise a diversion into something interesting which never happens. It just goes back to the monotonous drum beat and rapping as before.

I think Hip-Hop resonates with those who grew up in extreme poverty, something about its utter lack of texture must speak to those who grew up with nothing in an urban area. I respect that. What I don't respect is that the sht they rap about is typically so fckin crass and juvenile, it's basically a thirteen-year-old bragging about himself. It's ugly and boring.

I don't mind the Hip-Hop that folks call "B-Head," there was a track called "Swan Lake" that was total legit Hip-Hop but its vibe was cool. He was rapping about real sht, just the mundane struggles of living, but without this like underlying viciousness or melodrama.