Tone deaf and talentless

Wisdom of the week

[Reprinted from Issues & Views November 1, 2004]

In an exasperated kind of diatribe, Nicholas Stix, writing for Mens News Daily, spills the beans about "rappers" and "hip-hop" entertainers. Claiming that a "rapper" is typically a talentless person striving only to be subsidized, he declares:

Rap, aka Hip-Hop (r/h), has refuted the racist stereotype, according to which blacks have "natural rhythm," and revealed that the average black cannot sing, dance, compose music or write lyrics any better than the average white. Rappers' rants often consist of nothing but narcissistic self-promotion, where the performer brags about himself in the third person. When r/h recordings do include something recognizable as music, it is invariably through plagiarizing someone else's earlier recording, which is known in r/h by the euphemism "sampling."

Why would anyone pay for r/h? When Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald were the world's greatest singers, there was no question why fans would buy their records, rather than those cut by any random drunk warbling from a barstool. But with r/h, the hierarchy of talent, from tone-deaf amateur to virtuoso, collapsed. But worse even than in an aesthetic democracy, in r/h, the tone-deaf pretend-artist is king, the virtuoso an outcast.

The great singers of the Big Band Era and the Great American Songbook loved America, and in spite (or because) of having had to work like dogs before becoming rich, tended to have an attitude of gratitude for the blessings that had been bestowed upon them. Rappers, by contrast, are strangers to hard work and talent, and tend to revel in racism, violence, misogyny and anti-Americanism. . . .

But r/h is more than just an uglification movement. It is a moral counter-revolution, in which everything good and true and beautiful is turned on its head: Tone-deafness is musical, lies are true, and the savage is a saint.

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