Superficial Trends

Rap's roots lie in some seriously disturbing racial contexts. The cities and slums during raps inception were a pretty terrible place to live, and a lot of the songs described the horrors and hardships of living in the ghetto. Progressively, though, as with all music, rap began to differntiate into what it is now, a conglomerate of different styles. One of the things I have always liked about rap, is that since it is made electronically it isn't pigeon hold to one style of music. One song may use a jazz sample and another a classical sample. However, this digression holds no bearing on the actual point that is: A lot of rap today is glamorizing the ghetto. I have a serious problem with this. It's different when you hear wu-tang essentially playing out a scene in which one of there friends is stabbed in front of a corner store, to what now jay-z, rick ross or kanye west seem to ellude to it as some sort of right of passage. That's garbage. One shouldn't NEED to be from the ghetto to be able to rap. It's often an insult to other rappers to say they aren't from the ghetto so they couldn't possibly understand rap as a genre. The distinction here is that, a group like wu-tang just uses their experiences as lyrical material. However, other groups use it as a selling point. "I'm from this ghetto therefore I'm really hardcore and good at rapping." That's utterly ad hominem and I won't stand for it.