What portion of your musical collection features rap?

[LouieB]

One tenth of one percent..do early beastie boys count?

 

 

LouieB

[skip]

 

Always intended to pick a couple of Public Enemy records but never did.

Edited August 19, 2006 by skip

[sureshot]

I love anything from the "Golden Age" of hip hop. Early-Mid 90's:

 

Gang Starr

Pete Rock/CL Smooth

Public Enemy (while Flava Flav can get on my nerves, Chuck D is unparalled)

De La Soul

Souls of Mischief

Group Home

The Disposable Heros of Hypocrisy

Tribe Called Quest

 

some new stuff is pretty good too:

Edan

Mavillain

Common

The Others

 

basically, if its jazzy im an instant sucker for it. also turntalbism (dj shadow, dj krush, rjd2, etc etc) im a huge fan of.

 

one of my all time fav songs

Pete Rock and CL Smooth- They Reminisce Over You (the horn loop is absolutely haunting)

Edited August 19, 2006 by sureshot

[Scalzunfield]

0 albums, one Beastie Song on a compilation and a few on a soundtrack.

 

I can't stand rap, don't view most of it as something that I would necessarily consider listenable music.

 

99% of rap I've heard is trite, radio-made junk that high school girls listen to, so I guess that doesn't help my opinion of it any.

 

That being said, the rappers I've been told are "good" by people whose musical opinion I respect I also have no desire to hear ever again.

 

I do like old Beastie Boys stuff, however. I just can't justify buying an album because hearing the occasional cut on the radio is enough for me.

[anodyne]

I appreciated the harder stuff of the time, like Public Enemy or NWA or Geto Boys, but that kind of rap was never fun for me like the east coast stuff was.

 

 

PE was east coast (nyc). anyone remember their remake of bring the noise with anthrax? rap metal should have stopped there because it gets no better.

[brianjeremy]

.0067% if you count the Beastie Boys. 0% if you don't. Those numbers are accurate +/- .001%.

[anodyne]

the dr dre instrumentals are pretty cool. look for those if you're download happy.

public enemy were pretty awesome.

early chili peppers (up to mother's milk) should ALMOST count as rap.

[TheMaker]

Probably around 0.01%, give or take.

[WildMercurySound]

Not as much as I would like. I go through phases where I intend to buy much more but never do. It's probably about 5% of my collection, although it was a lot more when I was younger. I was into commercial rap when i was about 14, now it's more of the old skool and underground stuff.

 

DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, Jurassic 5's first EP, The Roots Do You Want More?!?!!!, Tribe's Low End Theory and Nas' Illmatic are up there amongst my favourite albums of any genre though.

 

I think part of the problem is I've been working a lot of nights at the bar recently, where the DJs play a lot of really bad rap, speed garage, drum n bass etc etc and it's put me off anything with too heavy a beat!

[jhawk98]

I've probably got somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% rap of all the albums in my collection. Most of my stuff is 80's or 90's and is mostly made up of the big names of that time:

 

PE

Ice Cube

Run DMC

A Tribe Called Quest

Beastie Boys

EPMD

De La Soul

NWA

Dre's Chronic (after which I lost interest since he's tried to release this same album over again)

Snoop's first album

 

As for contemporaries, I haven't gotten into them as much but there are a few out there who are worth listening to:

 

The Roots (these guys are the best thing going in hip hop today IMO)

Jurassic 5 (just now got into them in the past month with their Power in Numbers disc. Great old school sound. I'll have to check out their new one)

Kanye West (has become sort of a media darling I know, but the guy actually writes decent lyrics)

Blackalicious

 

I think it's interesting the amount of people in this thread who are dismissing the genre because of the mainstream stuff they hear. Rap is no different from rock in that the mainstream stuff that is played today on the radio, or television is by and large absolute garbage. You have to dig deeper to find the good stuff just like any other form of music.

[bjorn_skurj]

Probably about 40 percent. If me, El F. and Sir Stewart got together, I think we would see just about eye-to-eye on what's good and what's not. For the record, I would like to say there is not a painful enough death in the universe for Eminem. The Saarlak is probably as close to a just punishment for that punkass as can be found outside of Satan's maw.

[JesusEtc]

Blackalicious

 

Good to see someone else is listening to him on here.

 

Rap is weird to me, because its one of those visceral feelings you get listening to music. I used to not be into rap at all, until people started to make me listen to it, and one day it just clicked in a different way than the rest of music. Some of these guys just have so much to say, its amazing. Also getting into the beat culture kinda made me appreciate it more. Being reading a lot of Kerouac lately, and rap goes well with it.

[airtaco]

Am I the only one who likes Jay Z? I don't find him to be a guilty pleasure at all, despite his fame.

[Beltmann]

Blackalicious

Didn't Nikki Giovanni herself recite "Ego Trip" for a Blackalicious recording? That's some good stuff; I listen to it often.

 

I was born in the congo

I walked to the fertile crescent and built

the sphinx

I designed a pyramid so tough that a star

that only glows every one hundred years falls

into the center giving divine perfect light

I am bad

 

I sat on the throne

drinking nectar with allah

I got hot and sent an ice age to europe

to cool my thirst

My oldest daughter is nefertiti

the tears from my birth pains

created the nile

I am a beautiful woman

 

I gazed on the forest and burned

out the sahara desert

with a packet of goat's meat

and a change of clothes

I crossed it in two hours

I am a gazelle so swift

so swift you can't catch me

 

For a birthday present when he was three

I gave my son hannibal an elephant

He gave me rome for mother's day

My strength flows ever on

 

My son noah built new/ark and

I stood proudly at the helm

as we sailed on a soft summer day

I turned myself into myself and was

jesus

men intone my loving name

All praises All praises

I am the one who would save

 

I sowed diamonds in my back yard

My bowels deliver uranium

the filings from my fingernails are

semi-precious jewels

On a trip north

I caught a cold and blew

My nose giving oil to the arab world

I am so hip even my errors are correct

I sailed west to reach east and had to round off

the earth as I went

The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid

across three continents

 

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal

I cannot be comprehended except by my permission

 

I mean...I...can fly

like a bird in the sky...

[awatt]

Early Beastie Boys--when they didn't have grey hair!

 

[nurfherder]

Mine equals 0.0% and shall remain that way for the foreseeable future.

[jahilia]

There seem to be a lot of people who are eager to dismiss hip-hop music around here just because of what they see on MTV or hear from Escalade speakers. I'll admit, I used to hate the stuff too, but alot of it is smart & socially conscious (Public Enemy, Ozomatli, Michael Franti/Spearhead), genre mixing (Gnarls Barkley, DJ Shadow, Portishead) or just plain fun (Outkast). Again, I'm no expert, but give it a chance...you'll be surprised by how good some of this stuff is.

[EL the Famous]

There seem to be a lot of people who are eager to dismiss hip-hop music around here just because of what they see on MTV or hear from Escalade speakers. I'll admit, I used to hate the stuff too, but alot of it is smart & socially conscious (Public Enemy, Ozomatli, Michael Franti/Spearhead), genre mixing (Gnarls Barkley, DJ Shadow, Portishead) or just plain fun (Outkast). Again, I'm no expert, but give it a chance...you'll be surprised by how good some of this stuff is.

 

Well put. I implore you not to judge the genre by what you hear on the radio or see on TV.

 

airtaco...I dig Jay-Z a lot, it's just one of those artists I have yet to really delve deep into.

[owl]

about .02%.

 

one Above The Law song called Freedom Of Speech.

 

good song.

 

nothing personal, just don't have a lot of rap.

[nurfherder]

One of the radio stations I work for is a hip-hop station so I hear it all the time. I still don't like it. The hip-hop style just doesn't appeal to me.

[Sir Stewart]

Prolly 25-30%.

[EL the Famous]

One of the radio stations I work for is a hip-hop station so I hear it all the time. I still don't like it. The hip-hop style just doesn't appeal to me.

 

It's all good. Again though, 'hip-hop radio' today is a poor representative of the art. Plus, 'hip hop style' can mean a million different things...just like rock, there are so many mutations of it.

[jff]

I pretty much ignore rap for two reasons:

 

I can't escape it as background music in my everyday existence.

 

I would have to neglect the music I love in order to delve into rap. As it is, I don't have enough time to enjoy what i already like. Denying myself one thing in favor of something else that I might not even like is not a worthwhile tradeoff in my opinion.

[EL the Famous]

Denying myself one thing in favor of something else that I might not even like is not a worthwhile tradeoff in my opinion.

 

that's pretty silly, maynard. how the hell you ever gonna' like something if you've never heard it for the first time? i mean, I get the whole time-crunch thing...i don't get around to checking out 75% of what gets posted on here because I just don't have time. but, i try to make some time whenver possible and the internets have made that a lot easier.

[Beltmann]

how the hell you ever gonna' like something if you've never heard it for the first time?

I totally understand the time-crunch argument, too, but you're right: The only way for our tastes to grow and refine are to keep giving unfamiliar stuff a shot. I'd be less happy if I had allowed my tastes to stagnate right around the time Pseudo Echo and Mr. Mister were on my tape shelf. (Okay, bad example.)

 

Generally speaking, most rap and hip-hop, even the more respectable, underground stuff, doesn't quite press my personal sensors the way certain other genres do, but if I had given up on it, I never would have found the rare exceptions that now mean a lot to me.