Life imitates art. This was top-down. Not bottom-up.
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I've been saying this for 30 years. I was a young teenager when gangster rap blew up, and I could immediately recognize that it was intended to corrode and divide our culture like psychedelic music did in the 60's. I hated being around it in the 90's, but my friends wouldn't stop playing it. It made them feel strong and confident, but it quickly took over their personalities. I knew many kids who ended up dead or in jail after adopting the gangster lifestyle. I had a schoolmate who was 16 when he got himself shot in the head and killed after a dispute over a drug deal. I had a childhood friend from church who got himself sniped and killed by the SWAT team after breaking into a house and wouldn't surrender. I was friends with one who joined a gang at 18 then later imprisoned for life for executing a rival gang member in cold blood. I knew another kid who at 18 went to jail for drug dealing, then got out at 21 and chose to get suicided by cop instead of going back to jail. All except one of these kids were white, and they all came from middle to upper class families.
But what this music did to inner city black culture was worse. Before gangster rap, black music was funk and R&B, which were fun and beautiful. Gangster rap took that culture down a dark path that arrived at this current point where over 50% of all murders are committed by less than 2% of the US population which are young black men in the city. It's the largest contributor of the decline of black culture after government welfare programs.
And all this runs through my head whenever I see that amoral piece of shit Snoop Dog doing Corona commercials.
It's infuriating when I see good people jamming out to gangster rap and reciting the lyrics. Of all the revelations that come out of the Great Awakening, I want the true intentions of gangster rap to be popularly known.
Contender for post of the day and it's only 8.30am in the morning here. 'Gangsta rap' and all its subsequent offshoots are protozoic sewage - when something is aurally alone so ugly, aggressive and inculcatingly tribal, there's not much hope for its contribution to culture.
I also felt this way about what I call 'angry white boy music'. They're both garbage.
Someone pointed out a few years ago that one of the reasons rap, particularly gangsta rap took off with whites is because it was the only masculine thing they were allowed to like.
The angry white boy stuff doesn't glorify murder like gangster rap. That's what made gangster rap especially evil: Kids suddenly believed murdering someone was admirable. I saw that and couldn't believe the culture I was living in.
Grunge was good. It stemmed from Gen X'ers dealing with the fallout of their Boomer parents doing drugs and divorcing. It was honest music with masculine grit that flushed away the party music that was hair metal.
Lyor Cohen - The Tall Israeli who runs the Rap Industry
https://youtu.be/EuuvJK7qMDA