Rap "Music"

In recent years, you will have noticed on nearly every radio station around the country that is broadcasting "yoof choons" (young people's music to you and me), 90%+ of all songs seem to have sampled (i.e. nicked) a bloody great chunk out of some older song. Usually the older song is far superior in every way, but people still refer to this butchery and robbery as music. Once the person in question has nicked this bit of older song, he or she repeats it ad nauseum and sticks an annoying repetitive drum beat over the top. You will also know you are in the correct genre of "music" as before anything has even happened on the song, the gentleman or lady who is "performing" it will have informed us on numerous occasions:

1. Their name.
2. Their name, again.
3. Uh-huh.
4. Oh-yeah.

and last and by very no means least:

5. You know what I'm talking 'bout.

This is all very well and good, but I mostly haven't got a clue what they are talking about, and to be brutally bloody frank, I couldn't give less of a toss if my life depended on it.

Now things get really bad. Not content with knackering a perfectly good older song they proceed to "talk" over what is left of it. That's right (you know what I'm talking 'bout - to coin a phrase), not sing, or dazzle us with musical virtuosity on some instrument, no they simply talk. What sort of things do they talk about? Something pleasant or time passing like the weather or how the match went for City at the weekend? No, it usually revolves around shooting people, slapping women around and the size of their own genitalia. The videos that accompany these noises, for want of a better description, usually involve the "artist" themselves, surrounded by lots of his or her chums, similarly attired in either combat gear, American sports wear or lots of brightly coloured fur coats. They shout and point at the camera a lot. Their jewellery seems to consist of the contents of several Argos catalogues, and one or two of them have their trousers at half mast. Now if someone turned up at your local hospital and acted in this manner, the psychiatric nurses wouldn't even let them home for their pyjamas. The finishing touch to these videos are the near endless parade of gargantuanly chested young ladies in minute bikinis who seem to find a man with his trousers round his knees and a hat on backwards stupifyingly sexually arousing.

What REALLY annoys me about rapping and the "music" that goes with it, is the way the music press and some serious newspapers treat it as an art form. Someone shouting about the size of their wedding tackle infront of a drum machine beat is, I am sorry to say, NOT an art form. It is simply musical dexterity taken to the lowest common denominator. You could possibly call it poetry, but poetry with a minute "p" and of the same level of dexterity and sophistication as E J Thribb aged 17 and three quarters.

The final annoyance of rap music with me is the way it turns all cultures around the world into the same run down "ghetto in the west side". You can be driving through the most delightful old English village, and there, slap bang in the middle of it will be three spotty teenage half wits, trousers at half mast, covered with cheap gold chains and wearing "Public Enemy" and "gangsta rap" t-shirts and hoodies. This sort of outfit probably looks pretty cool in the Bronx or Watts, but in Little Dozy-on-the-Wold it just looks bloody silly. To recompence matters I personally think we should insist that all modern day Huggy Bear types in the lower east side should be made to wear yokels smocks and play CD's by the Wurzels very loudly in their pimp mobiles. I suppose I am a little naive, but when the rap group NWA brought out their album "Straight Outta Compton" I imagined they were refering to Nether Compton just outside Yeovil.

Rap music is annoying, repetitive, repugnant and silly and fully deserves to be put into my Room 101 forever.