Rap also has that. You don't get a lot of the more lyrical songs listening to the bullshit on MTV (but hey, that's true for everything on MTV) but it's definitely there. Some albums that exemplify this Liquid Swords, The Ministrel Show and the classic Illmatic, where the focus of the music is not so much the beat but the lyrics and the rapping itself.Of course, you could say that about rock music vs classical, and it would be absolutely true in that case as well. Classical music requires more talent than rock music. But in that particular case, classical music is also missing something that rock music has, ie- lyrics and the emotional impact that they can deliver.
You're a complete tool, but everyone already knew this. Rap isn't "talking over a drumbeat", and the only reason you would say this is because you don't actually listen to rap. I bet there is no way you could construct a good rap song that actually flows with anything more than the simplest of beats. Good freestyle rap especially requires an ability to think on your feet and construct (relatively) meaningful rhyming verses on the fly.Rap isn't music. Any idiot can talk over a drum beat.
Rap is an incredibly diverse and vibrant musical genre, with many different sub-genres, so if someone dismisses all of it with a wave of their hand or some faux-pithy saying like
you can generally tell that they're a douchebag who enjoys pontificating on subjects on which they have no knowledge. (Oh, and Rye, about the heavy metal thing, sorry about that) You simply cannot take the entire genre as a single entity; there are big differences between artists like Nas, Outkast, Lil Jon and Eminem (and if Johnny Rotten can be referred to as an "artist", so can Lil Jon).'Rap' needs a 'c' on the front of it to show what it truly is.
A lot of people also criticize rap for the "gangsta" aspect, and while it's been played up by MTV and commercialized because there's a market for it, I have to ask, what did you expect? Rap developed in the ghettoes, and a lot of successful rappers came from the streets. Of course they're going to rap about gangster-related stuff! The glamorization of it is an entirely different matter, but that's more due to the commercialization of the music than an instrinsic feature of rap itself.
I can see how you would hate the bling-bling culture, but that's not representative of all rap, just the stuff that's become huge with suburban white kids; a lot of rappers, even popular rappers, are not associated with that.Am I supposed to justify that opinion? Well, I suppose I could point out that I hate the idiotic bling-bling culture that it too often glorifies (the one thing I hate more than rap music is rap music videos). I could also point out that I expect to be able to sing along to music, and that normally involves a melody.
And I think it's a mistake to lump in all of rap with simply one "bling-bling" culture. Are you talking about the 50 Cent style stuff, which glorifies gangster violence and the street lifestyle? Yeah, I don't like that either. But the bling-bling culture could also be taken to mean pop-rap like the Ying Yang twins or Lil Jon, which is not about the "street" and just about partying, fucking, and having fun, and not different from anything rockers were selling in the 80's.
Now I can see how the lack of melody (rap isn't really about melody, but that doesn't make it "not music"; a lot of traditional African, Okinawan and call-and-response music doesn't involve melody) would put you off. That's a perfectly legitimate criticism; some people just prefer a melody.
A lot of people also get after rap for misogyny in the lyrics. Now, attacking rap in general for that is just another way of committing the mistake of treating it as a single indivisible genre. And, secondly, it's hardly unique to rap. The Rolling Stones were objectifying women long before the first turntable was scratched; hell, AC/DC put out a song about fellatio called "Giving The Dog A Bone!"
So, as for my opinion of rap, I think there's a lot of good stuff in there. Some of it's popular, and some of it's buried, and some of it you just might not like, but to tar it all with the same brush it pure idiocy.