There has been quite a bit of talk about the SB halftime show from last Sunday. For some strange reason, a bunch of old while liberal men are obsessed with proving their left wing credentials by coming up with reasons why it was bad to not like Kendrick Lamar's show. Their starting place is that those who didn't like it are racist.
I'm going to start with the obvious. I (and virtually everyone else on the planet) do not like all types of music or artists in various genres equally, and that is perfectly acceptable.
Further, I tend to prefer music with at least a minimal level of melody and lyrics that I can understand. Again, this is a perfectly acceptable position to take on a subject as subjective as music.
Do I hat all rap/hip hop, no. Do I hate all black artists, no. Did I find Kendrick Lamar's halftime show to be boring, unintelligible, and un entertaining, yes.
As I've done a few shows over the last few years, I've come to realize that the goal in putting together a set list (for the most part) is to be as entertaining as possible for the maximum number of people. Sometimes that means ignoring the music nerd inside of us, and picking songs people know and like instead of some obscure/cool b side.
I understand that Lamar has lots of downloads, which may or may not be the most accurate measure of popularity, and that's fine. To each their own. I also understand that the SB halftime show is not about pandering to people in my demographic. This seemed like a "FU" to anyone who's not a Lamar fan. Again, that's cool, but don't pretend like those of us who tuned it out are de facto racists because we did.
I think what made it worse is that the game was in NOLA, which has its own rich and diverse music culture and they couldn’t get The Meters, more of Trombone Shorty, or even a single Neville brother.
2 comments:
Unless it's a "song" meant to be comedic...the point being to arouse laughter...there's not a single hippity-hop "song" of any artistic value...dance-able beat notwithstanding. There's a market for it, and thus otherwise talentless people are able to make big bucks, but it's all crap just the same. It's "music" the way "Piss Christ" is art. That is, it ain't.
But sure, my dislike for it means I'm a hard-core racist. Yeah...that's obvious. Never mind my love of music by Sly and the Family Stone, Lionel Ritchie, Pattie LaBelle, Aretha Franklin, Nat King Cole, the Mills Brothers, Jimmi Hendrix, Barry White, the Staple Sisters, Chaka Khan, Living Color, Bill Withers, the Isley Brothers, Michael Jackson, the Temptations, the Four Tops...I hope the lefties are getting the point. It's hippity-hop. It sucks. Can't not suck.
I think it was AMC which ran a documentary "The History of Hip Hop", and in the trailers for it, one interviewee proclaimed someone "changed the world". I doubt he explained that over-the-top hyperbole, but I wish I knew how to zero in on only that explanation if he did, but there was never any chance I would submit myself to sitting through the series of find out it only hyperbolic nonsense. If that crap changed the world in any way, it wasn't a good change given the messages spewed by way too many "artists" of the genre.
Anyway...rant over.
Thus my point. You don't prefer certain types of music for whatever reasons, and that's perfectly normal. I might disagree with your musical taste, but that doesn't change the fact that we all have certain musical tastes that can be wildly different. Because one doesn't like a particular style of music doesn't mean anything more than that.
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