Life Sucks said:
What really bothers me about hip hop is the attitude in the music. It's so in-your-face and irritating. Some other people I have talked to have agree with me about this as well. As I said, I get irritated when I hear some asshole brag about how much pussy he gets and how much money he has in his lyrics.
Dude that's what half the '80s metal was about! Haha!
I have nothing against those themes, to me lyrics don't have to be meaningful to be good, they can just be exciting and fun. Just listen to Motley Crue, Spread Eagle, Vain, Ratt, Warrant, Roxx Gang, etc! It's all about rock & roll, pussy, strippers, sex, money, fame, Sunset Strip, stuff like that! It's awesome!!
That said though, I do hate new hip hop & rap and partly it is because the homeboy attitude these days just does nothing for me. But I have nothing against it really. Good on 'em for trying to make the best out of their situation and being smart enuff to cash in on it haha. I just hate the sound of hip hop...
That said though, I can tolerate and respect some of the late '80s & early '90s gangsta rap because at that stage it wasn't anywhere near as glorified or commercial as it is now, they weren't posing as homies to be cool (I remember in around 93/94 kids at school who liked rap were picked on! A few years later it was the in-thing). Rappers like Ice Cube, Dr. Dre and even Snoop Doggy Dogg on his first album actually were lower class thugs who had to grow up in a violent & dangerous life and some like Snoop had actually been in and out of jail for years and their music basically dealt (very explicitly) with that lifestyle, and making it in the music industry ended up being a way out of the ghettos for them. Good on them for using it to their advantage.
Just a shame that once it became popular, people were stupid enuff to think living that shitty ghetto life was a good thing and all suddenly all these middle class white kids
wanted to be drug dealing gangbangers in a ghetto with like a 1 in 20 chance they would be shot in their lifetime which is just ridiculous. At least the early ones were born into that situation against their will and they were smart enough to make the best out of a bad situation and use it to get out of the ghettos and get rich.
Snoop Dogg is definitely among the huge number of really bad hip hop stars today and I hate his music now and also hate him, but I can certainly listen to his debut as a fascinating snapshot of a violent & crazy life he was stuck in as well as a slice of music history.