Rap today is known mostly as moron music since it has removed melodic continuity from music, resulting in a one-dimensional experience based around the words of human voices just like deathcore and other cretin entertainment. Coolio was one of the last to keep its R&B roots intact.
Even more, he joins the list of pop celebrities whose defining works — their sub-footnote in history — are widely misinterpreted and prompted a legion of imitators who, much like the idiots burning down metal today for hipster cred, misunderstood the meaning:
Look at the situation they got me facing
I can’t live a normal life, I was raised by the street
So I gotta be down with the hood team
Too much television watchin’, got me chasing dreams
This is a requiem for those involved in a lifestyle and the title is ironic. The protagonist describes himself as being trapped, coming from the wreckage of the urban existence, and without a way out or an inability to stop damaging those around him.
Fool, death ain’t nothin’ but a heart beat away
I’m livin’ life do or die, what can I say?
I’m 23 now but will I live to see 24?
The way things is going I don’t knowTell me why are we so blind to see
That the ones we hurt are you and me?
The lyric follows more of a doom metal path of isolation and suicidal ideation than the people who took it as a license to praise criminality ever figured out, pointing out that those who are trapped and self-pitying end up simply perpetuating the cycle:
They say I gotta learn, but nobody’s here to teach me
If they can’t understand it, how can they reach me?
I guess they can’t, I guess they won’t
I guess they front, that’s why I know my life is out of luck, fool
The normies, who like rap music are one-dimensional, could not perceive any depth in this, and instead decided to idealize the lifestyle these lyrics portray as tragic, self-destructive, and ultimately futile. Typical normie things, one supposes.
Tags: coolio, criminality, hip-hop, rap
i liked kenan and kel when i was a kid
Kenan & Kel was great. Kenan should have brought Kel with him to SNL
There’s nothing “wrong” with metal today because metal was never in the business of morality, as its proper attitude is to do its own thing and not give a shit, much like rap really.
We have a variety of metal more than ever to choose from. Some of it is good, and some of it is not for everyone. If you don’t like it, then continue to cry a river because others are having a good time. Bitchasses like you prove metal’s original point – that is if somebody is whining about it out there, then it must be doing something right.
I love one shot, one kill responses. Here’s mine: if that were true, anything anyone complained about would be right, which includes murder, failure, AIDS, etc.
Your desire for egalitarianism renders you incoherent.
You carefully dodge the question of quality. One might ask and ¿cui bono? of course and the answer is hipsters who cannot make quality metal.
That is the surface-level one-dimensional judgment I talk about. “Oh look, this band has an oboe, therefore it’s a new genre.” But does it suck? And we might ask why you never, ever approach this question as if you are afraid of it.
That list made me go re-listen to Zyklon-B’s “Blood Must be Shed” EP.
They should have done a second EP on the theme of AIDS. Oh wait, Dimmu Borgir beat them to it.
They couldn’t have done it, because Ihsahn and Sammoth were saving it for the second Emperor LP.
Oooooh so why don’t you name some of these bands you’re having such a good time with? But you won’t because you know everyone will be laughing at the disposable crap you’re consuming. People here are looking for timeless classics or at least something that will hold up for a couple of decades. Could not care less about variety, DEPTH is what’s needed.
I would also like a list of these modern classics of metal. I really would like to hear all of these undiscovered great bands that you keep talking about. Maybe they will be as good as the second Nargaroth album. I wonder how many will be better than Stryper.
a child pretending to be an adult or an adult pretending to be a child?
Metal is less diverse than it’s ever been. All this supposed diversity is just a vast amount of sub-sub-genres emulating the sound of a single band i.e. war metal=blasphemy, cavern core=incantation Orthodox bm=mayhem symphonic bm=emperor. Older bands were trying out new things while new shit is just replicating, that or carelessly mishmashing genres to produce something “new” but has no coherence.
We see the end results of “diversity” into metal: lots of different genres get mish-mashed into one, producing utterly generic music with no inner core, therefore an indistinguishable grey race of metalcore-ish bands.
Multi-culturalism = uni-culturalism aka the death of culture.
Soon we will have a global grey race united by equality, sodomy, and consumer products. This iPhone kills fascists!
please show me the recent metal that is as good as the classics from the 80s and early 90s
Krypts second album.
Undergang most records.
Morbific first album.
They aren’t as groundbreaking as the seminal stuff but they are absolutely good.
We are back to 1987 when there are suddenly tens of thousands of speed metal bands, all neither groundbreaking or quality music, but good enough that people keep buying them but the most intelligent former fans are rapidly defecting.
Brett the hip-hop connoisseur.
Hmm the more you know.
Not really my thing, but… it’s an event, happening in the world out there, which appears important to people, so I pay attention to it. Hip-hop is terrible but not as bad as deathcore and metalcore.
I grew up on it in the late 90s/early 2000s so I keep up with it from time to time.
At least from a linguistic POV, the likes of MF DOOM, warrants some merit for the genre.
Hip-hop resulted when Jews ripped off and massively dumbed down Kraftwerk, applied negro vocals, and then dressed up the negro in drag, sodomized him on tape (Hollywood sodomites), and both continue playing victim to this day.
https://allhiphop.com/news/afrika-bambaataa-loss-civil-suit/
It came from NY bloc parties but sure, scapegoat jews if you must.
I don’t scapegoat anyone for rap’s existence as I don’t care if it exists or not. But like most everything that goes mainstream and sodomy, Jew producers pushed it to the top of the charts and had and continue to have a hand in the music itself.
i think you should eat a lot of magic mushrooms
Reality must expand until it reaches transcendental levels…
In my view, the Jew thing is a statistical error.
They are overrepresented in a lot of deested things… but they are overrepresented in a lot of bigger containers for those, like starting businesses, law, politics, etc.
The Jew hate is a dodge for seeing that diversity of any type is terrible. America worked as a WASP Nation; it did not once they started bringing in Irish, Africans, Italians, Hispanics/Amerinds/Asians, Slavs, Jews, Arabs, and the Irish. These groups cannot all be all bad, therefore the problem is diversity itself, as we would expect when people replace a single culture with many.
He recently said the poet Auden may have inspired Burzum and he once said Darkthrone were inspired by the author Céline. Seeing a likeness and shooting from the hip. So I think we can take the lyrical analyses with a grain/mountain of salt. ;-)
I think I pointed out similarities. Given the prominence of these authors… it is not unlikely to think that this is the case. Unlike 56%er Murkans, lots of Europeans took their classical education seriously.
You can’t be serious.
Education in Murka is mostly terrible. And stop calling me Shirley.
You might have got the Murka part right, but you are way overestimating Yuropean edumacation.
Not in the 1980s.
There’s that.
Then there’s how it reeks of self-pity because the lifestyle is tragic, self-destructive and ultimately futile.
But compared to one-note rap, it’s a goddamn revelation, true.
This sounds accurate to me. The sense of fatalism is vast: he sees himself as a product of the streets, so he can do nothing but produce more mean streets, and while he feels bad about it, his fatalism serves as the reason he will never stop. It is like a noir take on NWA.
Guys stop taking these trolls so seriously. It’s obvious they’re bored at work and want to stir shit up in this dead blog because they can’t anywhere else (i.e it’s easy to get banned from discord or any other public place).
And yes, putting up a hiphop article here is such a bait, as if the sister site amerika wasn’t such a parody already.
It is not intended as bait. The point of the article: normies misunderstand music and turn it into a moronic version of itself. Yes, I am aware that hip-hop is dumbed down music, but it’s still not as bad as metalcore.
While reading a single article on amerika.org, I decided to take a shot of whiskey every time I read the word ‘diversity’. I thought it would be a fun game and maybe I’d get a little buzzed.
I am now dead.
I don’t see the point in discussing something just because it’s not the worst of the worst. We are here to talk about the best aren’t we? Or does it count if something is the best of the worst, I.e. Coolio? I suppose as long as it’s the best of something, even if we’re still talking about stupidity, it’s still promoting the best?
This article is less about Coolio, and more about how his lyrics were misinterpreted and turned into a stupid(er) normie trend.
Weird Al’s Amish Paradise is more in line with your views
I do not believe any of these “Benedict Option” plans are going to work at all.
Hey Brett, what do you think of this?
https://dyingartproductionscn.bandcamp.com/album/night-master
I think it is unlikely that Céline and Auden were ever mentioned in Norwegian highschools. Ibsen, Hamsun, Shakespeare, Lord of the Flies and Hemingway most definitely, but I doubt the curriculum went much deeper than that.
Did they mention Tolkien or Lovecraft?
Tolkien and Lovecraft have inspired metal music since Black Sabbath. Have Céline and Auden?
You’re ducking the point. If they didn’t learn about those in school, they took educating themselves seriously.
Your point was clear and I thought mine was as well: Vikernes and Fenriz obviously did not learn about Tolkien or Lovecraft in school, but that does not mean they took on educating themselves on literature. More likely, they found out about Tolkien and Lovecraft in the lyrics and imagery of earlier metal, where those authors had already been a staple for some time. If Céline and Auden were also a go-to source for earlier metal bands, that could perhaps justify the connection you’ve seen, hence my question.
Not necessarily: people read outside of school, and often have interests in literature, as many of the metal musicians I have talked to over the years have indicated. The point is that metalheads seek to be well-read even outside of school influences, as we even see from Slayer lyrics. You are running down the genre by implying it is full of subliterates.
That interpretation may stem from my thinking your phrase “took their classical education seriously” was referring to public education. I was evidently wrong since you later rephrase it as “took educating themselves seriously”, and of course I agree that people, metal musicians included, read outside of school.
It’s not an impossibility that our favorite Norwegian musicians have read our favorite authors, but I’m fairly pessimistic and find it more likely that they adapted their reading to the musical genre rather than the other way around, i.e. they specifically looked up authors and filmmakers of horror and fantasy to fit the themes of metal music from the last two decades. Perhaps I’m blinded by memories of trudging through Immortal’s nonsense texts, but even Vikernes’s and Fenriz’s lyrics seem too “DIY” to have been influenced by French novels or English poetry.
At what point does education become limited to public schooling? These are independent thinkers, not like today’s metalheads.
Presumably around the time you finish school and spend your entire days listening to old speed metal albums.
For underground metal, this does not seem true. These guys kept reading or at least liked to use a lot of allusions.
The only rapper that can stand toe to toe with Varg V. and Craig Pillard is DMX. Every other poser is overrated garbage. Especially Eminem. Tupac was somewhat of an innovator in his own way, I guess, but too one dimensional to reach the heights of the true master DMX. Curtis (50 Cent) is ok, but more like an “also ran” than anything transcendental.
I like Necro and Ill Bill. Necro’s “Death rap” has that Death Metal spirit. Impressive record, me that I was absolutely ignorant in rap.
Necro lol. Doesn’t make me feel like I’m being buried alive or blasted into space
I can listen to black moons first album every now and then. Maybe some Gucci or eazy e
Only works with prostate stimulation.