CDBurns

I once got into a debate with a music professor who said that rap wasn't music. I explained to him that it was that type of thinking that prevented the connection of rap to classical music and prevented people from actually accessing classical music and jazz. When one considers that scatting, (hidee hidee hidee ho) is considered jazz, then it seems logical to consider the call and response cadence of Hip Hop as music.

I also challenge the idea that Hip-Hop incites. All music incites. The Nazis played Wagner while murdering Jews. A lot of the crescendos in classical music are more driving in sound than rap could ever be.

But I get what you are saying. Music is definitely the universal language and like literature... if you want the new generation to appreciate the classics, you have to introduce them to the writing that is contemporary but is connected to the past.

Both are Jazz artists, as signified by their record label Blue Note. However, Jose James is kind of blurring the lines of genre. He flirts with jazz, kisses r &b, sleeps with neosoul, and cheats with Hip-Hop and electronic. These are real artists. I happen to think this current movement of young Black artists is one of the greatest things to happen in music. It's a quiet revolution. Look up Robert Glasper Experiment and you will see and hear what I'm saying. Add to that list The Foreign Exchange, and Gary Clark Jr. and there is a real rebirth taking place. The problem is it isn't reaching the radio at all. While Jay Z and Beyonce make 5 million on mediocre music, these artists are constantly on the road to remain, well, artists.

Cynique when I hear Jazz Fusion I immediately think Herbie Hancock and he is definitely a major influence on James and Glasper, but Gregory Porter seems to be a throwback. He's a male Cassandra Wilson and I love it.

What goes around does come around and being able to recognize the shift will be the difference and makes knowing all that more important.

I've bought GP for every person I know. I'm beginning to do the same with Jose James who is one of the dopest young artists out right now. On Gregory Porter it also helps that he is an Aztec (San Diego State) just had to throw that in there, lol. Liquid Spirit is the new album by Porter. It's a shame that these guys don't earn any radio play here in the US.

I really don't know if there is a simpler way of explaining this. I think it kind of falls on dead ears since most people simply use the internet as a pleasure device (yep in every way) and not as a business. This is the case in most situations where business is involved. The people who don't understand this, don't get our constant admonishment against remaining solely on Facebook, or they get it and feel that they don't have a choice in the matter and this is the only way to keep up with friends. It's a difficult game to play and a game that is further diminishing the power and importance of the consumer's dollar.

Wow, very nice introduction to this. I'd never heard of it either. Time to go to work.

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.

Troy, I'm a virtual encyclopedia of Hip Hop. I can bring up a lot of artists that should definitely be in the mainstream but have languished in the underground. Jean Grae has been around for a long time, but has never broken through and she even stated that this last album would be her last. I feel her pain.

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.

Harry, the writing instructor in me has to give you a critique. Do not write using all caps. Poetry is the conservation of language. Poetry allows the writer to convey thoughts in a form that utilizes form and meter in order to break down the conventions of society in a way that is both visually beautiful and creates music to the ear.

With that said when you use all caps, you remove the ability for certain words to take center stage because the eye is drawn to the capital letters. More important in internet writing, ALL CAPS = SHOUTING!!!!! and I don't think it's your intent to have each word shouted in this poem.

Also the great thing about the message board is it will allow you to use spaces and line breaks which allows for Caesura (pauses in the poem that occur naturally or due to punctuation of line breaks). Go ahead and use the return button instead of shaping the poem like one big paragraph.

Other than that I really like the allusion to Richard Wright in the title and would say immediately that a comparison to Brooks' "We Real Cool" would be a appropriate if it was written with better form.

Yep, that was the Ultimate Warrior. He had just signed a contract to get back into wrestling and was entered into the WWE HOF. Don't ask why i know this, I plead the Fif. Your shift into a discussion on non-violence in regard to violence as art with the ability to create catharsis, is interesting and worthy of a book itself.

I tend to think that in the black community violence as art, creates more violence. I think the breakdown of the black community was pushed along by West Gangasta rap and imagery that began with the film Colors and was given it's most attractive and sturdy building block in Boyz N The Hood and Menace 2 Society. This was reinforced with the most attractive looking gangbanger lifestyle created by Death Row.

I guess I need to explain: In Menace 2 Society you had one of the most handsome young actors in Black Hollywood portray an out of control psychotic killer in O Dawg (Larenz Tate). Girls loved him, boys wanted to be him. Likewise with Boyz. It wasn't Laurence Fishburne's role that stood out was Ice Cube's Doughboy role that was the most compelling. I think John Singleton made a very big mistake by giving Cube the last words in the film and fading him away instead of actually allowing the Doughboy character to be shown physically being murdered. The same with the O Dawg character. At the same time, Snoop Dogg had the song that solidified his career in Deep Cover. You talk about a systematic integration of LA Gang Culture into the Psyche of Black America. Within years you had Crips and Bloods in Little Rock Arkansas, and as far away as New York!!!

This introduction of gang culture throroughly wiped out the LA Peace Treaty and the Same Gang movement and then removed the attention from East Cost Hip-Hop which tended to have more variety conscious lyrics. Remember when The Chronic was released so was Digable Planets album Refutations. Talk about two music forms that balanced each other out in Hip-Hop. That was the last year that two albums garnered both critical and commercial success that was from two different extremes in Hip Hop. Since then the West Coast dominated the culture with gang culture and the Hyphy movement and then the South has taken over since then with the Trap rap/Drug culture. New York hasn't really had a huge voice in Hip-Hop which has coincided with the neutralizing of the power of Hip-Hop, save a few emcees like Common, Talib Kweli and Mos Def (Yasin Bey) and even those artists didn't get mainstream radio play. Actually it took Dave Chappelle to really give those artists a bigger platform (kind of).

All of this is to say that the cartoonish violence in Game of Thrones and even Boardwalk Empire, the sex in Californication and murder in Dexter have very little effect on Black America or America in general. It is allowing a purge, but I think it is simply entertainment because the people watching tend to understand that this is television. In Black culture however, the sex, trap rap, glorification of commodities is taken more literally which translates into the actions that are carried out in Chicago, LA and other places on a daily basis. Is poverty the underlying cause of crime and murder, yes, but if the images in our community were less about drugs and needs, I do think we would have less murder and mayhem.

I'm okay with it becoming main stream, I just hate the silencing of the music. Early 80s = Crack Killed Applejack, White Lines, White Horse, The Message. Mid to Late 90s = Stop The Violence Movement, Human Education Against Lies, Early 90s = New Black Panther Party, LA Peace Treaty/We're All In the Same Gang and since then the voice of the people has been silenced. Becoming mainstream is a logical progression, but the systematic removal of the 5% and conscious emcee from the mainstream is the problem.

All music is co-opted but strains of the original form remain on the air and in the top 40. Not Hip-Hop... Hip-Hop has been co-opted (See Macklemore) and the emcee who speaks truth to power is basically muzzled (Lupe, Talib, Pharoah Monche, Jean Grae). Speaking of Jean Grae the removal of the female voice coincided with the removal of the conscious emcees. In the late 80s early 90s, Queen Latifah dropped Unity, Ms Melody was a part of BDP and MC Lyte made strong songs that were lyrically incredible. On the West Coast Yo Yo started the IBWC movement and empowered young girls. Since then, we have Trina and Nikki Minaj. No one even knows who Jean Grae is. It's sad and unfortunate that we allowed mainstream to do this to the music by continuing to tune in instead of tuning out and forcing change.

As with anything like this, there has to be a caveat. Violence in the adolescent mind is a completely different thing. I do agree though that porn, violence in movies and buffets (yep buffets) do satisfy the need to overindulge and that the overindulgence can be cathartic to those who live a day to day existence that doesn't include being creative in some fashion.

I think we all have those violent tendencies that become very apparent when we are driving, or on hold with customer service. There is an underlying anger when we are crowded or forced to stand in lines. It's like the cut scene from a film where the person imagines gunning down everyone around them. Does watching these type of things decrease violence? Who knows and it's up for debate, but I think there is a limit to what type of violence is seen. The violence in the Human Caterpillar, Hostile, Saw 3 and on, snuff films, I think are all detrimental to the psyche and can push people over the edge. That type of violence is not the same as the HBO stuff which is comically gratuitous, but not quite horrifying. It is stunning (especially the Red Wedding!) but it is not repulsive and disturbing. HBO does a great job with creating the character and framing the violence in the context of that character.

I agree totally. Funny enough the decline of conscious Hip-Hop is a myth, but it is accepted because the mainstream is dominated by ignorance and party music. I was thinking about what happened in Hip-Hop yesterday and I've chalked it up to the movement to silence the 5%. In the late 80s  and early 90s, Hip-Hop was dominated by lyrics founded on 5% philosophy. As the mainstream began to remove the ability for those emcees who brought consciousness to the artform the amount of emcees who are/were 5% decreased dramatically and so did the lyrical content. This is definitely a longer discussion, but I was wondering if anyone else saw this occur? By this I mean, the reduction of 5% in Hip-Hop coinciding with the decline of Hip-Hop.

I just reread what I wrote and had to amend what I said a bit. The decline of conscious Hip-Hop is not a myth, it's reality when you compare the number of positive artists in the mainstream in 1990 vs today.

I just added this to my social group as well. I'm going to start doing that a lot more and maybe it will improve the search qualities.

Booooooo, I was expecting a more fierce Troy! Just kidding. I think Delano should visit that really long thread on here and read why Facebook really isn't beneficial as popular as it is. Unfortunately the masses, remain shackled (intentional use of that word) to Facebook to their own detriment when they finally realize they want to start a business or a serious discussion of some kind. Hey I just realize that Bing actually shows the public posts of people on Facebook in searches on their sidebar... it's kind of disturbing. This is not a simple thing at all though.

Now that's an interesting idea. Kind of like the poorly made Purge movie that could have been so much better. I don't think I agree, but I saw a new thread and will shoot over there.

And here comes the boom, lol.

Okay, I did say Happy Birthday, I thought I didn't.

I tried to write Happy birthday earlier, but I wasn't logged in and didn't feel like rewriting Happy Birthday, lol.

Awwww lighten up Troy. It's just television ( I actually wrote an article in complete opposition to what I just wrote, lol.) Seriously, I watch Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, Scandal (yep that again) and a lot of different shows. I watch them as a writer and as a fan. I enjoy the story lines. Like any show or book that stays on for too long, you eventually have a storyline that loses its power. Except in the case of Breaking Bad. That show was good from beginning to end.

The gratuitous sex, drugs and mayhem doesn't bother me so much since I've always been a big fan of gore and horror (classic gore and horror, not this crap like Hostile and Saw- Saw 1 was actually okay but it was downhill from there). I think if you allow yourself to watch as a fan and not a critic you can kind of disengage and let it go. The shows do stick with you though. The same tension that the characters feel is the same tension that I often feel when watching, which in some ways I agree it can't be a good thing.

I guess the solution is to make some bullshiggidity app and pitch to some Sillycone Valley tech guy, make a bunch of money, fail miserably and make a movie about it. btw Happy Birthday Troy, if it's really your birthday since I saw that on Facebook and didn't want to write it there.

I'm still trying to figure out how to organize my book campaign. I have to finish the sneaker stuff first, but I'm still afraid that nothing I can do will get people to pick up a book again, especially since my books are not very over the top.

I guess the good thing is that someone actually attempted a literary tech startup.

It definitely sounds a little muddled. I'm just amazed at how people throw money at these tech startups that are not completely fleshed out.

You are not alone. Yep, all of my responses have been music influenced. We are officially shutting down the house to watch tonight's season opener. it's perfect timing to since the Walking Dead finished last week.

You have a fellow fan riding with you Cynique!  Lannisters always pay their debts.

Peep this article. I'm not really clear on it, but I wanted to share it and see what you think. http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/screwpulps-launch-may-be-the-salvation-of-book-reviews

I think it's an interesting concept for e-books. Free until there are 25 reviews and then an increase in cost after that. I should research it a bit more.

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