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The cannibals are new because they are being grouped by the people on the outside of the wall to prepare an attack on the Watch and Jon Snow. Opening episodes have so much work to do they are very rarely as engaging as the rest of the season. They are laying out the upcoming issues of course. The Roots had a song named "It's In The Music" that speaks perfectly to what you are saying Troy. I've always written that when our parents and the previous generation danced, they danced to My Girl by the Temptations. The song was a beautiful ode to women. Today women dance to Ludacris' "I Got Hoes" or Trina's "Baddest Bitch". Every song uses the N word so liberally that you forget if the song actually has a point outside of diminishing the status of Blacks. If people are willingly seduced by the negative songs and feel that is commonplace, then it becomes common. Ice T is interesting, but Ice T is actually one of the most positive rappers ever. While he had his Pimp persona the majority of his songs were about the dangers of street life. In a sense he was a real reporter telling the stories taking place and he didn't really glorify as much as he wrote the narrative and told people of the outcome. All people saw was Cop Killer which was in the twilight of his career and an attempt at going a different direction in a changing Hip-Hop culture. Cop Killer was and is a relevant song when you consider we have Fruitvale Station right now. Ice T is actually doing documentaries on Hip-Hop now and calling today's rappers to task which is what elders should do. The problem is he isn't being given any real attention and young rappers are considering him the angry grandpa. See the ice T vs Soulja Boy beef. Troy there is fantastic music coming out of this generation Jose James, Gregory Porter to name a couple, but they have to go abroad to earn a living because Black people aren't the primary buyers of their music. It's the same with rappers who are attempting to say something. They won't be played on BET or MTV. In order to get any range on television you have to have cable and get VH1 Soul. I once made my students go home and do a survey on music. I asked them to watch the VH1 top 20 music videos and then watch the BET Top 10 videos and tell me what type of songs were played. While it was short lived it was one of the most important teaching moments I had. On VH1 (white music was a diverse range of dance and party songs mixed with clever love songs celebrating the fear of falling for someone or the joy of meeting someone. The top 10 songs on BET were drug influenced, ass shaking odes to the female body, braggadocio about what I have and own, and false female empowerment songs where the women were wearing next to nothing saying they were independent. What was the message? White people are a diverse group with music taste that range from rap, rock to pop, while Black people only have fancy cars, hoes and drugs with false identities. White people can separate themselves from their art, blacks can't because our art is so thoroughly woven into our DNA that we are our art and we become what our art is displaying to the mainstream. We do not have the privilege of anonymity and there is the danger in how we deliver our art to the world.

I don't consider Rap, per se, as music. It's spoken word and I have always believed that it is a throw-back to the African griots, and a verbal form of improvisational jazz. Music soothes the savage beast but rap incites it with its hypnotic cadence. Not surprising, I never got into gangsta Rap or Rap as political commentary. I like the carefree renditions like "It was a very good day" by Ice Cube and the "I got my mind on my money and my money on my mind" by Snoop Dog. And I do like Lil Wayne's rhymes because I think they are very clever. He a good punster, too, and I love puns. Tthey tell me Kanye and Jay-Z are masters of the art, and I assume this is true. My generation goes back further than the Temptations. It goes back to the extremely melodic ballads of the 40s and 50s which compile the "Great American Song Book", old standards as interpreted by vocalists like Nat Cole and Ella Fitzgerald and Johnny Mathis and Sarah Vaughn - Frank Sinatra and Nancy Wilson and, of course, Billy Holiday. And the thing about these songs is that their lyrics are so exquisite that they stand on their own without a melody. Compare the zeitgeist of that era with its music and there is a correlation. So, music does define a generation. I remember when I first heard "When Doves Cry" by Prince. It left me cold. No base line;sung in a monotone; cryptic lyrics. Of course, my kids loved it. Guess why? Me, I preferred "I wanna be your lover" and When you were mine", naturally. Prince, however, is in a class by himself. But he's a terrible rapper, IMO. Music is the universal language. For me it is divinely Zen. It fills the spaces between the lines.

I agree Troy. I've been checking it out, but today was the first day I felt compelled to write something. I'm hoping others begin leaving critiques and spending more time on the site.