Rap Music

[p0lar_bear]

OK, so as this article describes, there are those who believe that rap music, independent of the lyrics, is immoral.

[url="http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0073.html"]http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0073.html[/url]

I do not agree with this, but I need something more than common sense to back my statement that as a style of music rap is morally neutral.

Since part of this website is devoted to Catholic Rap, I thought this would be a good place to ask...



edit: Hey, this is the first time I started a topic...

Edited June 22, 2004 by p0lar_bear

[cmotherofpirl]

Have Dust send them a CD

[phatcatholic]

pertinent paragraphs from the above article (which i provide b/c the article itself is rather long):[list]
[*]One question that logically arises here is whether rock can be reformed. Some seem to think it can be, that it’s simply a matter of changing the lyrics, or attaching the music to a proper cause. Thus teachers use rock in classrooms, and educational films are made with rock sound tracks, and thus we have Christian rock and even Christian versions of rock magazines. The idea is that the energy of rock can somehow be channeled toward virtuous ends. This hope, it seems to me, arises from a basic misunderstanding about the nature of rock. I have already indicated that though the lyrics are important, they are secondary. The music is its own message. No matter what the words might say, the music speaks the language of self-gratification. Rock can’t be made respectable. It doesn’t want to be respectable. A respectable rock is a contradiction in terms. “Some dreamers have hoped to harness rock to propagate the values of transcendent ideologies . . . ,” writes Robert Pattison. “But rock is useless to teach any transcendent values . . . Rock’s electricity . . . gives the lie to whatever enlightened propaganda may be foisted on it.” Pattison, who has written what is perhaps the definitive book on the rock myth, and who is himself a defender of rock, argues that rock in its essence is vulgar and narcissistic, based on a denial of any value outside the self. So, while it is possible to set a Christian hymn or a song about undying love to the beat of rock, it cannot be done convincingly. The music will simply subvert the words. The same holds true for rap, which, though it is different in significant ways from rock, has a similar beat. Some rappers preach positive antidrug, antigang messages in their songs. But it’s not a very good fit of words to music. The music is composed of explosive bursts of sound, somewhat like the sound of a semiautomatic weapon being fired. On an aesthetic level the positive lyrics don’t work nearly as well as the violent ones. No matter how many reforms are attempted, rock and rap will always gravitate in the direction of violence and uncommitted sex. The beat says, “Do what you want to do.”
[/list][list]
[*][b]1. [/b]Music that can be shared. Rock drives a wedge between generations. Parents and children can’t share songs like Prince’s “Darling Nikki” (about a girl masturbating with a magazine) or Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.” This divisive effect was evident right from the time Elvis first appeared on television — a moment of nationwide embarrassment for families gathered in front of the set. Our society needs to return (or “move forward,” if you like Phrases with a progressive ring) to music that brings families together in song: children’s songs, folk songs, ballads, show tunes, parlor songs, carols, around-the-piano songs. Singable songs. Songs that don’t need amplification, or stage sets, or a billion-dollar industry to keep them alive.

When the piano, not the television set, was the center of home entertainment, families enjoyed a common musical bond. The music belonged to everyone: not just to adults, not just to teenagers. But singing together is not merely an old-fashioned custom, it is a basic expression of family love. It is one of many rituals of participation that have been lost, and for which we have not found adequate substitutes.

[b]2. [/b]Music that channels emotions. The basic appeal of music is an emotional one. Education is not a matter of denying emotions but of civilizing them — of attaching them to fitting objects. This process of sublimation does not weaken emotions; rather, it gives them more power by giving them focus. And serious moral endeavors, whether individual or communal, need such channeling. One such example is the civil rights revolution of the sixties. Churches played the key role, and the music that accompanied this revolution was, for the most part, church music: hymns, spirituals, and gospel songs. Folk songs also played a part. Rock music did not. The civil rights movement was a movement of great seriousness and dignity. It was propelled by powerful emotions, but it was essential to the success of the movement that those emotions be controlled and restrained. Consequently, there was no part for rock to play even though rock derives from black music (the revolution that rock accompanied was the sexual revolution). The point is that in both public life and private, we need to be able on occasion to channel our feelings toward goals that go beyond immediate gratification. It’s inevitable that children will be exposed to popular music. It’s important that in addition to the pop sound, they sometimes hear a more profound sound.

[b]3. [/b]Music that shapes the soul. Morality is not simply about learning the rules of right and wrong, it is about a total alignment of our selves. Because music moves our whole being, it plays a major role in setting that alignment. Certain types of music convey a sense of order, proportion, and harmony. There is an ancient belief that the stars, the moon, the planets, all of creation, move to a heavenly music. The theme can be found in Plato, Plotinus, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. According to some legends, God sang creation into existence. And this harmony extends to human nature.

....

The trouble is, it is not at all easy to specify what that rhythm sounds like. Aristotle and Plato use words like “harmony,” “melody,” “grace,” “order,” and “proportion.” But although it’s difficult to say what arrangements of notes have the effect of bringing order to the soul, it’s not as difficult to recognize them. We can hear this stately measure in Pachelbel, Handel, Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven. We can hear it in Gregorian chant, choral music, and the chanted Hanukkah blessings. We can hear it in ballads like “Barbara Allen,” in spirituals like “Go Down, Moses,” and in lullabies like “All Through the Night.” We can hear it in “Taps.” Although we may know the actual composer, such music seems to originate from a higher source. It seems to transcend the composer’s persona. Beethoven’s personal life was rather a mess, but none of this is apparent in his music.

[b]4. [/b]Music that has stood the test of time. The music mentioned above possesses another quality: timelessness. Thomas Day, in his short but instructive book Why Catholics Can’t Sing, observes of certain chants, choral works, and hymns that “the melodies sounded important, as if they had existed forever.” Many Christmas carols have the same quality. It is surprising to discover that some of them were written only a hundred years ago.

If I have been concentrating on sacred music, it is partly because rock invites the comparison. As Pattison writes,

The rocker lives his music with an intensity few nominal Christians imitate in their devotion to the faith. He goes to concerts and listens to his music with the same fidelity with which the Christian of earlier generations attended church and read his Bible. One of the most frequently repeated mottos in rock lyrics is “Rock ’n’ roll will never die!” — a cry of belief. The stars of rock undergo literal apotheosis: “Jim Morrison is God” is a graffito now perpetuated by a third generation of rockers.
The question of whether or not rock ’n’ roll will ever die is not one that needs to be settled in these pages. But we do know that some other types of music have withstood the passage of time. The forty years that have passed since the introduction of rock is a short time when you consider that the music of Beethoven and Bach is still alive, or when you realize that in churches and cathedrals all over the world, you may hear hymns composed 500 years ago by Luther, or chants that were sung in monasteries 500 years before that. This timeless quality is not confined to church music or classical music. Some of the popular music of the thirties and forties seems to have this time-transcending quality: songs such as “Night and Day,” “Stardust,” “Deep Purple,” and “As Time Goes By” , When the Beatles were in their heyday, they were hailed as original geniuses. But would anyone today argue that songs like “She Loves You,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” or any of a dozen others are in the same league as Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” ? Paul McCartney himself seems to be aware of rock’s limited scope. His recently completed Liverpool oratorio is in the tradition of Handel, not the Beatles. As McCartney said in an interview on the occasion of its Carnegie Hall debut, “You can’t be a teenager forever.”

[b]5. [/b]Music that tells a story. Music has traditionally been linked to story. The Homeric poems recount long and detailed stories, the traditional ballad tells brief and simple stories of love and tragedy, country and western music tells everyday stories of marriage, betrayal, and hard times. Even orchestral music is often composed with a story in mind. “The 1812 Overture,” Swan Lake, Scheherazade, and Peter and the Wolf are examples that come immediately to mind. Opera, of course, is the supreme blending of song and story. At another level the Broadway musical offers the same potent combination.
[/list][list]
[*]Non-narrative is not exactly the same thing as nihilistic, but it’s the next thing. Even the term “flow of experience” is misleading when applied to contemporary rock because the term suggests a connection or continuum. What rock presents, however, is not a flow but a series of disconnected episodes. This is also typical of rap. And the chief episodic unit is sexual intercourse. A representative example is a “tune,” which consists almost entirely of one repeated refrain, “it feels good,” accompanied by background groans which leave us in no doubt about what “it” is. There is no development of the story line beyond that single sensation. Every night, big-city radio stations play hour after hour of music that varies only slightly in sound and theme from “Feels Good.” If, as Plato says, “musical training is a more potent instrument than any other,” it means that many youngsters are being trained to see life only as a series of sensual episodes which they are not obliged to connect.
[/list][list]
[*]In summary, music has powers that go far beyond entertainment. It can play a positive role in moral development by creating sensual attractions to goodness, or it can play a destructive role by setting children on a temperamental path that leads away from virtue. Other cultures have found ways of helping the temperamental self keep time with the social self — that is, with the self that must live responsibly with others. That synchrony no longer exists in our society. Until it is restored, the prospects for a moral renewal are dim.
[/list]

[MorphRC]

No music is immoral, its the person who presents it as immoral. This is like saying well, speaking is immoral to, since we swear, beat each other up etc with words. Therefore you could go as far to say that speech is immoral.

[phatcatholic]

when i read that article, i latched on to one particular sentence:[list]
[*]Rock music allows us to indulge in expressions of strong emotion while freeing us from the obligation of doing anything.
[/list]let me tell you why. the summer i turned 21 i was clinically depressed. i mean, seriously and utterly depressed. no eating. no sleeping. no leaving the house. just crying. as a "sensitive male" i had inside me many feelings of anger that i knew not how to express. i didn't even know how to express anger. genuine anger, like get-pissed-off-for-once-in-your-life-instead-of-crying-all-the-time anger. rock music was the only way i knew how. i honestly think it saved my life. why? b/c it allowed me to express my anger in a non-destructive way. i didn't have to hit anyone, break anything, lash out at someone, or any of the other positively (as in direct action) ways in which men express anger. i could just listen to a song, and it all came up and out of me. and it was ok.

i think its what you do w/ the emotion that the music brings out that makes all the difference. in that sense, the author is right. the music is more about bring out the emotion then it is about helping you channel that emotion into a positive good. but i don't see that as the role of music, and i actually think that is is beyond the scope of music's power. even the feel-good, lets-all-gather-around-the-piano music that the author described doesn't actually make you do something. it merely arouses the emotion of solidarity and comraderie, and we take that emotion and say, "hey, lets gather around the piano." essentially, the music elicits the emotion. period. other factors determine what we do w/ that emotion.

for this reason, i don't see music as responsible for the horrible actions that have been done, apparently b/c of music (like killing or raping someone, or tearing up stuff). emotions are not inherently evil. none of them. the "goodness" or "badness" comes w/ how we act on those emotions. and this is determined, not by the music, but by environmental factors and genetic predisposition (nature AND nurture).

--the environment we are raised in
--the moral code that develops w/in us
--the dictates of society
--learned behaviors
--temperments and dispositions genetically passed on to us

so, rather music is redeeming or destructive depends not so much on the music as it does on the listener. i guess that's my point.

this was all written "on-the-fly" so i am definitely open to correction on this matter. i haven't really sat down and thought it out to a great degree.....

pax christi,
phatcatholic

Edited June 22, 2004 by phatcatholic

[Jake Huether]

[quote name='phatcatholic' date='Jun 22 2004, 01:43 PM'] when i read that article, i latched on to one particular sentence:[list]
[*]Rock music allows us to indulge in expressions of strong emotion while freeing us from the obligation of doing anything.
[/list]let me tell you why. the summer i turned 21 i was clinically depressed. i mean, seriously and utterly depressed. no eating. no sleeping. no leaving the house. just crying. as a "sensitive male" i had inside me many feelings of anger that i knew not how to express. i didn't even know how to express anger. genuine anger, like get-pissed-off-for-once-in-your-life-instead-of-crying-all-the-time anger. rock music was the only way i knew how. i honestly think it saved my life. why? b/c it allowed me to express my anger in a non-destructive way. i didn't have to hit anyone, break anything, lash out at someone, or any of the other positively (as in direct action) ways in which men express anger. i could just listen to a song, and it all came up and out of me. and it was ok.

i think its what you do w/ the emotion that the music brings out that makes all the difference. in that sense, the author is right. the music is more about bring out the emotion then it is about helping you channel that emotion into a positive good. but i don't see that as the role of music, and i actually think that is is beyond the scope of music's power. even the feel-good, lets-all-gather-around-the-piano music that the author described doesn't actually make you do something. it merely arouses the emotion of solidarity and comraderie, and we take that emotion and say, "hey, lets gather around the piano." essentially, the music elicits the emotion. period. other factors determine what we do w/ that emotion.

for this reason, i don't see music as responsible for the horrible actions that have been done, apparently b/c of music (like killing or raping someone, or tearing up stuff). emotions are not inherently evil. none of them. the "goodness" or "badness" comes w/ how we act on those emotions. and this is determined, not by the music, but by environmental factors and genetic predisposition (nature AND nurture).

--the environment we are raised in
--the moral code that develops w/in us
--the dictates of society
--learned behaviors
--temperments and dispositions genetically passed on to us

so, rather music is redeeming or destructive depends not so much on the music as it does on the listener. i guess that's my point.

this was all written "on-the-fly" so i am definitely open to correction on this matter. i haven't really sat down and thought it out to a great degree.....

pax christi,
phatcatholic [/quote]
That's an excellent analysis, Phatcatholic!

[the lumberjack]

I AM HIPHOP...

music is at the very soul of every person...whether it is audible or the type that we can only sing to God from our soul...our lives are a living song of praise to Him.

man....I love the Lord and all the music He gives us.

ESPECIALLY HIPHOP!

[dUSt]

The Church has always, historically and traditionally, embraced all types of art and music, and used it for the glory of God.

This is what phatmass is doing with hip-hop.

Hip-hop didn't start out immoral--it was taken over by immoral people. Phatmass is trying to take hip-hop and use it in a way that glorifies God. The same as the Church has always done with all types of art.

[phatcatholic]

dUSt,

but what about this paragraph? (just playing devil's advocate)[list]
[*]One question that logically arises here is whether rock can be reformed. Some seem to think it can be, that it’s simply a matter of changing the lyrics, or attaching the music to a proper cause. Thus teachers use rock in classrooms, and educational films are made with rock sound tracks, and thus we have Christian rock and even Christian versions of rock magazines. The idea is that the energy of rock can somehow be channeled toward virtuous ends. This hope, it seems to me, arises from a basic misunderstanding about the nature of rock. I have already indicated that though the lyrics are important, they are secondary. The music is its own message. No matter what the words might say, the music speaks the language of self-gratification. Rock can’t be made respectable. It doesn’t want to be respectable. A respectable rock is a contradiction in terms. “Some dreamers have hoped to harness rock to propagate the values of transcendent ideologies . . . ,” writes Robert Pattison. “But rock is useless to teach any transcendent values . . . Rock’s electricity . . . gives the lie to whatever enlightened propaganda may be foisted on it.” Pattison, who has written what is perhaps the definitive book on the rock myth, and who is himself a defender of rock, argues that rock in its essence is vulgar and narcissistic, based on a denial of any value outside the self. So, while it is possible to set a Christian hymn or a song about undying love to the beat of rock, it cannot be done convincingly. The music will simply subvert the words. [b]The same holds true for rap, which, though it is different in significant ways from rock, has a similar beat. Some rappers preach positive antidrug, antigang messages in their songs. But it’s not a very good fit of words to music. The music is composed of explosive bursts of sound, somewhat like the sound of a semiautomatic weapon being fired. On an aesthetic level the positive lyrics don’t work nearly as well as the violent ones. No matter how many reforms are attempted, rock and rap will always gravitate in the direction of violence and uncommitted sex. The beat says, “Do what you want to do.”[/b]
[/list]your thoughts?

pax christi,
phatcatholic

[the lumberjack]

[quote]The music is composed of explosive bursts of sound, somewhat like the sound of a semiautomatic weapon being fired.[/quote]

ok, first, thats ridiculously stupid...

second,

[quote]On an aesthetic level the positive lyrics don’t work nearly as well as the violent ones. No matter how many reforms are attempted, rock and rap will always gravitate in the direction of violence and uncommitted sex. The beat says, “Do what you want to do.”[/quote]

a beat is like a train. it won't drive itself. it needs someone at the controls. and if you got a GOOD emcee at the mic (aka THE CONTROLS), your song will be a "tight banger" without the carp that comes along with all the garbage of pop mainstream rapstyle music.

God bless

ps Kanye West is catholic.

[phatcatholic]

[quote name='the lumberjack' date='Jun 23 2004, 10:35 AM']
ps Kanye West is catholic. [/quote]
no joke!! maybe THAT'S why he's so freakin dope.....

"got a light-skinned friend, look like Michael Jackson. got a dark-skinned friend, look like Michael Jackson."

hehe

[dUSt]

[quote name='phatcatholic' date='Jun 23 2004, 02:02 AM'] dUSt,

but what about this paragraph? (just playing devil's advocate

your thoughts?

pax christi,
phatcatholic [/quote]
I don't really see any arguments based on anything other than a personal opinion of what rock/rap is.

The same objections were made against the ceiling of the sistine chapel in it's time.

[dUSt]

[quote name='the lumberjack' date='Jun 23 2004, 10:35 AM'] ps Kanye West is catholic. [/quote]
Not practicing, that's for sure.

Where did you get this info?

[the lumberjack]

his song called "School Spirit"...

Rocafella chain, thats my rapper style
Rosary piece, thats my catholic style
Red and white ones, thats my Kappa style

my co workers has his album and played it...at work nonetheless.

and I'm pretty sure that he says Hail Mary in another song...

[dUSt]

Very interesting...

Maybe I'll send him a phatmass t-shirt to rock in his next video. haha