When rap came out 30 years ago I thought it was just a fad

 I really liked Run DMC,  and SOME of PEs early works, some real honest social commentary  but this was before RAP decidedly took a wrong turn with the likes of 2 Live Crew and their pornographic obscene objectifying of women, one of the original gangsta rappers. Didn't know who they were at the time but when I was visiting a job site and one of my workers was playing it through his boom box at higher than acceptable dbs, that is for all those that might object to that garbage to hear and with legitimate reason. The young man, who really was clueless and really a nice kid had to be told that not everyone was digging the rhymes as much as he was. THIS was my first negative impression of RAP aside from some of the talented groups that have come since, Black Eyed Peas? Kanye West epitomizes everything I distain about the RAP culture aside from whatever talent he exhibits.To publicly do what he shamelessly did to a fellow artist on a nationally televised major music award show,with his prestige demonstrates that SOMETHING is wrong either with him or the fact that he feels entitled to do it.

I was thinking about this, I always thought of Run DMC as the "first" rap group that I could clearly identify as RAP artists. Then it occurred to me that maybe it was THIS artist, maybe with a bit less funk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MJLi5_dyn0

I think low rider pretty much nailed it!
typical formula:
inner city "club" format that crosses over,then adopted by the suburban kids and then the ad companies swoop in and extend it beyond any real musical influence it ever had !

I guess it's easy to criticize any form of music. I don't like Rap but I also don't like Opera, Big Band, Punk (with a few exceptions), Pop, Avant Garde or experimental Jazz, Middle Eastern, Country.....the list goes on. While my tastes gravitate more toward rock and roll, I own and enjoy many different genres of music including Rock, Folk, World, Jazz, Blues and Electronic.  For me, I don't look (that's an interesting term because we can't actually see it can we?) at music in terms of its category but rather how it's constructed, the presentation by the artist, its creativity, the feeling that it comes from the artists soul and overall sound. I'm not a big Jazz fan but I think Patricia Barber is one of the most talented artists on the planet. I really enjoy her music and respect the musicianship of her band members. At the same time I do not like certain instruments such as trumpet (sorry Miles Davis fans) it just comes across as too "blarry" to me. Give me a smooth sax any day.

So the point here is that while there are many different genres of music there are just as many individual tastes and it's not for me to judge others tastes. Just as I don't understand how people like Rap, I equally don't get how people can enjoy Country or Opera. (Interestingly, I saw Phantom of the Opera and really enjoyed it. It is not classical Opera however.) So in regards to Rap, while my thoughts mostly align with other comments made here, it does have its audience. It just doesn't have mine.

Remember Blondie's Rapture? As a white kid growing up in the country, that was my first exposure to rap. Up until that point, I didn't even know it existed. When we first heard that song, we were thinking "What the hell is all the talking for? She's not even singing anymore." We thought she had lost her voice and was disguising it by using a delivery method that didn't require the ability to hit and hold notes.

Rap to me is street poetry. It can be artful or awful. It can combine real music done with real talent, or not.

The one thing about it that that makes it very popular is that, like video games, it can be picked up and performed by the completely talentless. It doesn't even require a real band, so it is much easier to create and sell. It's perfect for movies because you don't have to pay a real composer for a real score and then pay a producer to hire an orchestra to play it, record it, master it, etc. Think of the soundtrack overhead of the 50s and 60s. All the overhead that used to go to paying for real music can now go to promotion. Puff someone up with a cool name, cool clothes and a fake persona, shout a bad poem in time to the synthesized beat and you're in business. All you need is someone delusional enough to perform and not realize that they really suck, and there are plenty of them. They all want to believe they are special. That's what young narcissistic people do and now they have an avenue to do it that doesn't require actually singing a note.

It's really pretty brilliant. It's modern marketing through and through: Make crap, sell it for the same or higher price and pocket the difference.