Rap music on high-end speakers

Nilthepill, you continue to speak volumes about yourself by bragging about how an engineer at Boeing runs about in his car blasting rap music into his neighborhoods and proud of it. Frankly, none of your abusive comments deserve any attention, and will get no more in the future.

The lack of any substance to Psychicanimal's babblings in response to my thread are only further reinforced by his next thread which fails to address any of the valid points made by Rlwainwright. As far as his baseless comment that "You call yourself a professional musician but you don't know much about music," what are your credentials, Psychicanimal? Do you read music, do you play numerous instruments, do you thoroughly understand the structures of harmony, chord structure, polyphony, harmonic progression, orchestration? Have you sung and played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus?

Your diatribe about "Scared White People", this has nothing to do with anything being discussed here.

Rap is not music -- it is polluting noise. It doesn't have melody, it doesn't have harmony. To elevate this trash to an artform or to deign this to be music only exposes the ignorance and lack of sophistication of the writers in this thread.

Obviously some people have a serious problem with rap/hip-hop. More than just not liking the music, they seem to dislike what rap represents. I suspect that rap artists wouldn't have it any other way. As a form of expression rap music is created by a cultural underclass. They are a group of people who have little or no place in the dominant society. Is it surprising that this underclass strives to offend all the values of the larger society? It makes some people uncomfortable that young black men have figured out a way to make large sums of money telling America, in effect, to go fuck itself.

Nahhh, I'm from a barrio, unsophisticated...only sing in the shower and inside my car...but got a scholarship to an Ivy League university and took a class in musicology (Sound, sense and idea). I was taught in that class what you cannot comprehend with all that classical Western upbringing: WHAT IS MUSIC EXACTLY?

As for my musical talents, I'm no professional. Took a year and a half of piano and three of accordion. Before leaving the Caribbean I was undergoing an apprenticeship in steel drum building, tuning and playing with master Jack Warren of Antigua. Bet you probably think that's not a musical instrument either...it's made from scrap--right?

About music and fear: it's related, not 'babbling'. If you'd been at the Vicente Fernández concert in Allstate arena you would have seen DOZENS of scared Rosemont police officers. Just because the Mexicans were having a good time. The cops would encircle themselves like cows in a corner...outside some six or seven jumped on a kid because he was smoking pot. I couldn't stand it anymore and I yelled at them if that's how many of them it took to arrest a kid. My Mexican friend panicked, but having been a former Federal law enforcement officer I just didn't give a s***.

Sadly, this is what's going on...

BTW, after you guys finish attacking rap, please move on to Mexican "Corridos" and then on to Dominican "Bachata", Lesser Antilles' "Soca", Colombian "Cumbias" and anything else is not in your taste.

Look what I started. But I am glad I did. To bring the worst in Kevziek, since his "Classe" thread, where he spoke volumes about himself. TRASH all things Classe and now Rap without doing enough research and much with prejudice. Stop bragging about your artistic highness already.

Since my response, I see a good discussion coming out on the topic ( although that was not Tru's intention). I say keep it going with intelligent responses (no bitching)like Onhwy61 and Psychicanimal has been providing. I urge Audiogon to sensor responsibly.

Tru:

At the risk of getting slandered myself by someone (or a group of persons) who have elitist stigmas attached to them out there (and I hope and pray that they aren't any on this board), I am kind of like you also. I listen to R&B, Jazz, Fusion, and Rap/Hip-Hop as well, but my tastes in audio equipment is definitely high-end. Even though, I listen to the same type of music you listen to as well, the thought of owning anything made by Technics, Bose, Pioneer (unless it is an Elite model), or Sony (again, unless it is an ES model) is enough to make me cringe, if not make me puke altogether. While I cannot afford any Mark Levinson or Krell gear, I am not going to settle for any mass market crap either. The way I see it is this, if any audio component that calls itself a "high-end" component, then that tells me that THAT component strives to put accuracy and presentation over "tizz, boom, and sizzle" each and every day. The component in question should be able to reproduce the musical piece EXACTLY the way the artist has intended it to be reproduced. It should NOT add anything to it, NOR should it take anything away from it. It should reproduce the piece EXACTLY AS IS. It's all cut and dry when you sit down and think about it. The component in question should be able handle P Diddy, T-Pac, and WuTang just as well as it would handle the Mozart, Jimi Hendrix, Fleetwood Mac, and the Stones.

And just for the record, I listen to the same stuff you listen to (LL Cool J, Naughty By Nature, 2 Pac, Nortorious B.I.G., P-Diddy (including the stuff he put out when he was addressed as "Puffy"), DMX and Lil Kim), but I do has some Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie (and some other Jazz artists) as well.

And I listen to it on THIS system:

KEF Reference 102 with KUBE Equalizer
Adcom GFA-545 MkII
Adcom GFP-750
Magnum Dynalab FT-101
Pioneer Elite DV-37 (has a surprisingly good audio section)
JVC XL-M509TN
MITerminator 2/MITerminator 3 Interconnects
MITerminator 2 Speaker Cables

I also listen to rap music on a "high-end" audio system, and I see nothing wrong with it. Be true (no pun intended) to yourself. Listen to what you want, and do so on any system you feel like buying and listening to. Any one who cops an "elitist" attitude toward that, then I say, screw them. This is 2002 right now. We're supposed to be way beyond this kind of crap.

--Charles--