Yo, Dawg, Lernin' To Get Down Wiff New Forms of Artistic expression

WHEN JAZZ EMERGED as a new american art form, early in the last century, it engendered immediate controversy and disapproval. It wasn't gospel, and it was black, and that in itself was sufficient to warrant its summary dismissal. Slowly, it caught on, and is now traditional and respected. Sinatra was, early on, the bane of the parents of teenage girls, but he settled in to a nice career as a perfectly respectable crooner among the middle aged and middle classed. Rock n roll got off on the wrong blue suede foot too, and Elvis was forced by popular demand to sneer and slick back his pompadour without showing his swaying hips on camera. Ed Sullivan had the same problem with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and a few other early rock bands; not suitable for the family. Hair over the ears and crude cockney accents did not fill the family bill. Elvis and the Beatles are now tame, if not downright passe, and the Stones, over the age of seventy all, are out on tour, as usual, filling arenas with multi generational crowds. We Americans can be a tad judgmental and narrow minded when we put our minds to it. Enter rap and hip hop, which, as far as can be determined, are essentially the same thing. Just don't try to tell an African-american that the art form was invented by a white female vocalist, Blondie, although it may have been. Rap has taken a bit longer to settle in and gain respectability, possibly because, like Jazz (an African word which means "to have sex"), rap is black. Tupak Shakur and Sean Puff Daddy Combs and Eminem have helped delay rap's acceptance among the respectable on account of some incidents of highly questionable personal behavior, such as brandishing weapons, hangin' with street gangs, and referring to women, sometimes their own mothers and wives, as "hos" and "bitches" (american slang words which mean "unsavory females"). Actually, rap is an important relatively new form of music, for one primary reason; it talks about anger and hatred and violence, breaking a barrier of silence, just like jazz and rock unleashed the forces of sex and drugs. Amid an avalanche of folksy, schmaltzy torch, love, and heartbreak popular music, somebody is finally directly addressing two of the most prominent components of human nature: anger, and hatred. Not to say there's anything wrong with a few pick up trucks, girls in tight blue jeans, dogs, and horses, but we need more. We need to talk about these things, all this anger and hatred which lurks within the mind of humanity, whether we want to or not, because its there, and other than rap, it aint hapnin'. Go check out the movie "8 Mile", in which Eminem, aka Marshall Mathers (not to be confused with Jerry Mathers, aka "the Beaver") plays himself, and you'll see. Its an absolute masterpiece of a movie, and Mathers does an Academy Award quality performance, while the film forces us to take a long, hard look at American urban socio-economics. In the words of Eminem, "we gotta lotta growin' up to do, yo, we gotta lotta throwin' up to spew".