Lets stop the negative views on Illegal immigrants.
People that fight hard to make something better for themselves and for their families, people that would gladly take your citizenship that you were born into.
Lets imagine that the world is one, theres no countries or borders,
no races or sexes.
That we are all just people that all deserve a similar lifestyle.
I am tired of seeing people that make the statement that rap is not music. Let me begin my rant by giving a textbook definition of music. Music is organized sounds and silences.
Lets make a checklist for rap:
Organized sounds: check, this would be those drums and other instruments you hear in rap. This is also the melody.
Organized Silences: check, this goes hand in hand with the first. This is the pauses in between the sounds.
This is my slightly incoherent viewpoint that I posted, you don't have to agree but please do see that there is some fact to it:
No matter how much you hate it, raps quite beautiful and can be very deep. Need I say that Tupac has more emotion and feel for his music then most of the 80s hair bands had. Not just Tupac either, there are a good number of other rappers that I feel superior to a lot of rockstars.
And the fact of the matter is that rap music is not easy to compose. There is plenty of effort put into mixing a line and creating melodies. A producer has to go through many steps in layering every piece of synth, drums, bass, guitar, and any other instrument. Most other genres of music's writings consist of a lot less layers and tends to be easier to compose. Plus there are some rappers who have some of the deepest lyrics and still manage to fit them into three syllable rhymes. Not too many songwriters can manage this successfully.
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I want to speak on the lyrical content a bit.
I have numbered to give it a bit more structure.
All the lyrics are about is stuff like: 1. Money, 2. Drugs, 3. Girls, 4. The Ghetto, and 5. about how bad there life are and stuff.
1. Money, the root of all evil. This can be a very good topic to write a song on given the correct context. I personally do not like when in rap a song revolves around the central theme of getting rich and stacking paper. One can argue that most rappers rap on the above theme, I say not. The main audience of rap music is black men and women, they feel that they can live a dream through a rappers lyrics. They find hope when a rapper goes on about how his car sits on 33s or how he has stacks of 100s. These are the songs that get big and are constantly played giving them the light in the eye of general media. I feel that most rappers prefer to use money as a theme of struggle, struggling to survive. They don't want to stack paper, they just want to make enough money to eat and make the life of their family and community a little better.
2. Drugs. This is one of the hardest for me to grasp. I see it used as a positive and a negative in so many rap songs. Lil Whyte has gotten famous off of purely writing songs on how he takes drugs for recreational use. This is the kind of rapper that gets attention because he plays up the badass look and little teenage boys listen to him and think they can be him. Most of the rap songs that I listen to about drugs are more on a struggle to kill an addiciton and quit using or at least get away from using them as an addict. Though this changes nothing, recreational drug use is common amongst rock songs as well.
3. Girls. This is a pretty easy one. A very common topic among any song. In rap it is primarily used as having a plethora of girls or a struggle to gain the love of a single girl. Once again, a good majority of mainstream rap used the image of a lot of pretty females to influence the minds of listeners. But there are still a great majority of rappers that spit on the struggle of showing a girl the love and care she deserves, and the pain of losing her as well. Here is a song by Immortal Technique that speaks perfectly on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv7w200rrcs
4. The ghetto. One of the strongest topics in rap. Rappers have a respect for where they come from and want to show it. As with most songs, there is always the struggle. A struggle to try to escape the ghetto which is not as common. Then the most common would be the pride of the hardships and conditions that they grew up in in the ghetto. These can pack the most emotion into one song. This goes far beyond rapping a line about a scraggly ass kid sitting on his mama's porch.
5. How bad they have it. I will refer back to the ghetto. Conditions in the ghetto are not the worst in the world, but certainly not the best. Lyrics, they are all about a struggle, in one way or another. Being raised in a ghetto on a foreign land with racist people that still try to oppress them is no cakewalk. I believe that all humans have a right to let their emotions out through music. This is no different than a country singer constantly bitching about things much more trivial or a rockstar getting pissed cause he spilled his beer.
Sorry for these rants but I just wanted to address this problem or bias against rap that I am constantly seeing. If you feel that I didn't fully explain myself please tell me and ask questions, because I know I didn't cover all the aspects.
The topics he touches on and the ways in which he goes about it are simply amazing. His poems may not be the longest are the best structured, but they all contain a certain feel and emotion to them that I don't see achieved very often. I know it seems like I am just going off on him. Tupac was an amazing rapper and an amazing poet.
"The Rose that Grew From the Concrete"
Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? Proving nature's law is wrong it learned to walk with out having feet. Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air. Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared.
This is more for me than you, though you can probably learn a thing or two about me from it.
These are all the memories from my life that I can think of and stand out as significant. Some of them I obviously can't remember but are just important dates from my life.
February 11 1993: I was born into this world. I can't remember much from the first year. Actually nothing, just I was a baby.
February 11 1994: My first birthday. I can't remember it and probably never will. I also don't remember much from this time.
February 11 1995: My second birthday. Was still a youngin incapable of understanding the importance of my date of birth. This year is blurry but I remember I had diaper changes
February 11 1996: Third Birthday. I had officially became a toddler and as beautiful as it probably was I don't remember much. I think I was dropped on my head around this time. Also I was babysat by my mom and had a puppy love with a girl named Debbie.
February 11 1997: Fourth birthday. I can remember this bitches. I started pre-school at Hahira Baptist and had a teacher named Ms. Janey. We practiced our ABC's and played on the playground. The strongest memory is meeting one of my friends Brandon, also we cooked moss and killed red bugs.
February 11 1998: Five years old. I started kindergarten somewhere in this time. My aunt Guyla taught me. I still remember getting my pin moved into the red because I ran around in the middle of class when a girl tried to kiss me. I met one of my friends Jonathan Teal at this time and got reunited with Debbie. I enjoyed nap time.
February 11 1999: Six years old. I was in second grade with Mrs. Fleming. Strongest memory was when I got caught cheating on the vocabulary test, I didn't know it was wrong. Made good grades and a few good friends. But for the most part stuck with Brandon and Jonathan.
February 11 2000: Seven and in third grade. Had a cool teacher named Mr. Miller. He used to sing us moral lessons and had a cool record player we used to play with. Still good grades and good friends. Also I met my friend Drew Duren, we weren't close at this time but now we are the best friends.
February 11 2001: Eight years old. Started Fourth grade. This is arguably(with myself) the best year of my life. I got my first girl, that I truly felt a care similar to love for. Her name was Lori. I got a best friend Matthew. Me and Drew slowly started getting closer. I started to get worse grades and stayed on the phone with Lori every night. A little drama, but overall an amazing day.
February 11 2002: Nine years old. Was in Fifth grade. Drew and Matthew were my best friends. I started to fall away from Brandon and Debbie. I dated Lori, but then Matthew messed it all up. I fell away from Matthew
