Deb--I have your problem with most hip-hop myself. Check out Michael Franti and Spearhead, very political and melodic; Outkast, fun and musically interesting; Kanye West, incredibly smart and listenable. Not 1996 hip-hop, but it is stuff I think you'll actually dig.

Fay, remember to watch how much you post, if you're planning on selling it to a publisher. That's what your WIP readers are all about.

nods

Yeah, I pretty much figured as much, but thanks for mentioning it anyway.

Spearhead and Franti, new to me. Outkast is hysterically funny to watch, but I can't identify them or tell them apart from anyone else doing similar stuff (see below). Kanye, alas, leaves me cold; like Jay-Z, he's a friend of my daughter's and I've given him a shot.

One major problem I have is, literally, telling a lot of these guys apart. The drone structure has been what's stopped me, every time, on the visceral level.

Best example was watching the Grammies, the year Eminem released 8 Mile. It started out well: his backing band for the show was AMAZING, just killer musicians. They were out there alone, just tearing it up, a a rhythm section that reminded me of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare and some groin-twisting jazz rhythms going on with the guitar. Kewl, says me, maybe this is going to break through the sameness, because these guys, whoever they are? Hot. Just killer stuff.

And the crowd is polite but it's obvious they're waiting for the Big Name. And here he comes, and you know what?

Same physical moves as every other rapper I've ever laid eyes on. Same vocal structures. Same damned vocalisms, for that matter: there is nothing unique or even musical about "Yo!" or about manipulating your audience with a semi-circular hand wave. His voice was pitched to the same drone and breath stops as basically every other male rapper I've ever heard. Only thing remotely different about him? White dude. That, and a killer band.

Didn't get through one full verse into the song, and it was probably a great song. I just couldn't tell it apart from anyone else. Had I heard it on the radio, without a visual reference, there was no way I could have said who was singing.

Daymond was talking about how, where he came from, it's about respect. I need to find a meeting ground and arrange a hookup between some portion of my innards and the music itself. Because even though the book is not about the music itself, the music is the bridge between the street anger and the mainstream, which is why Daymond, by filling a crossover market niche with FUBU, can have his girlfriend's mother chauffered around in a Maybach and offer me Kristal to drink.

All of which needs to be part of the flavour of the book. Gah.

Oh, duh. Did not understand that he was Mr. FUBU. Should be interesting books. Actually, I don't want to overexaggerate my level of hiphopness...I came to what little I know through my taste for urban drama, so kind of backwards.

Did not understand that he was Mr. FUBU.

Daymond.

The face fuzz is long gone today, though. And he generally dresses in jeans and tees. Nor did I see any sign of the godawful glasses; I think he was styling for the PR shot.

That's what he looked like when I saw him on TV...it's been years, though. Jeez, it's kind of good my characters are detectives, not me. A little slow, that was, on my part.

What was that song Eminem did just before the last presidential election, Mosh, or something? I saw the video on MTV once and could not take my eyes off of it. The first time I saw a bit of hip-hop/rap that told me this was something that could frighten the establishment--and which I could get behind at that. I had a moment of "this is how it is when you reach the point of no return, this is what makes normal hard-working folks say No more, and take to the streets to demand a change."

Edit out the stuff about how many girls some playa got pregnant or how brave they are to shoot a cop or something, and a lot of rap I can deal with.

Musically--it's still better than country. Except for bluegrass. Bluegrass will always have a home where I am.

connie, since I don't watch live TV anymore (anything I watch these days, and for the past few years, is pre TiVo'd), I missed it at the time. I did catch it later, thought the lyrics were good, shrugged, and moved on. I applauded him for doing it - excellent political sensibilities there - but it didn't catch me or get hooks into me at all.

Rap has always had one other major stumbling block in my path, and that one comes as an old political protestor: damned near impossible to take "we're from the ghetto and we're coming after you rich muthafuckas, yo!" seriously when it's coming out of the mouth of someone wearing a sixty thousand dollar diamond in each earlobe. Add that to the same guy strutting around on stage singing about how he wants RESPECT, yo! while surrounded by half-naked women he's treating like meat, and the net result is me wanting to write a little ditty with lyrics inclusive of "Yo sexist asshole hypo-CRITE, eat hot crossbow DEATH, respect this, yoyoyo" just before I pin his ass to a tree.

It's a thing. Of course, said thing is going to make this one seriously interestingly edged series of books.

damned near impossible to take "we're from the ghetto and we're coming after you rich muthafuckas, yo!" seriously when it's coming out of the mouth of someone wearing a sixty thousand dollar diamond in each earlobe

Snerk.

Coming in late to the rap discussion, but rap's origins are usually traced back to the aftermath of the Watts Riots in the late 60s, when a group out of the Watts Writers Workshop took to the streets with a fusion of poetry and African percussion, calling themselves the Watts Prophets. At almost exactly the same time in New York City, at the Harlem writer's workshop "East Wind," a similar group called the Last Poets appeared with a fairly similar schtick. The Watts Prophets probably have a few weeks on the Last Poets, but the Last Poets put out what's generally considered the first rap album, "The Last Poets," in 1970.

Both groups are still around, and I've had the honor of meeting both of them.

ETA: I'm mistaken. The Watts Prophets first album came out in 1969. Which embarrasing for me -- I usually teach a unit on the history of rap when I teach poetry in high schools.