Jonah to Kanye: Nigg@, Please...

Here's a perfect bromide 'gainst the tedious claims of victimhood by those who have every reason to expect to be rewarded, not punished, for their actions:

Clearly borrowing from the same press release, publications across the country proclaim that the "outspoken rapper defends his brash attitude inside the magazine."

Ah, yes. It's about time. After all, it's so rare to find a rapper with a brash attitude. Normally they're shy, retiring types overflowing with modesty and humility. I was particularly enamored with the "aw, shucks" Andy Griffith personalities of Niggaz Wit Attitude and the late Tupac Shakur.

My personal opinion of Kanye West is hard to describe, because I don't have one. I know he's been billed in some quarters as the savior of rap, I guess because he uses his real, actual name instead of a street handle (course, I might be wrong even on that). But that makes me at best indifferent, because I'm at best indifferent to rap music, and always have been.

This isn't racism. I'm a big fan of black music: jazz, blues, R&B (real R&B, not the singing-over-beats that gets passed of as R&B today). But rap is about as simple a form of music as you can get: musically speaking, the real artists are the producers, who try to stuff as much ephemera as they can onto a track without stifling the beat.

I'm not one who says it takes no talent to do that. As post-modern noise collage, it's interesting. But the people who do that, are by and large not the people who rake in the fame and adulation (this is me separating rap, or hip-hop, from techno, electro, and any other producer's medium that doesn't have people stone-cold rhyming over the top of it): it's the guys who talk HARD who get famous. And I never understood what they were famous for.

Look, I get that 90% of pop music stardom is image. I'm fully comfortable with denouncing the majority of rock music as garbage, too. But it doesn't take much to note that for all the emphasis rapper's place on words, they almost never say anything.

My brother and I came up with a term for it: S.R.L. or Standard Rap Lyrics. Most songs start with a declaration of combativeness, proceeding from the rappers awesomeness and a boast about his mike skills, move on to declare that this king of the Mike is backed up by an equally cool crew, then touch on the rappers skill at procuring female companionship and his favorite mind-altering substances. All of which is repeated around some basic catchphrase.

A second variety involves what I call R.T.B. or Rapping the Blues. This involves a lament about something or other, and usually follow a formula similar to something Robert Johnson would have understood. This is slightly preferable, but still inhabiting a well-worn groove.

My point is, a musical form that lionizes lyricism should be demanding about the lyrics that lionizes. Lacking that, it becomes but a new form of bling-enhanced shucking and jiving.