Think About Rap
by Herzog, Hannover West-Germany


I am refering to the `Rappers`article of Joe/E.B.F. published in Zine issue 4. Joe draws a pretty wrong picture of rappers which I cannot accept as I am deep into rap and the history of it. What he calls rap is nothing like music that is very superficial and does not have anything to do with the purposes of black rappers. It is absolutely wrong to call the music that `Technotronic` creates `rap` for the simple fact that it is only written for entertainment and gain of fame and money.

Rap music always contains information about the social circumstances blacks live in and is supposed to bring out blacks` problems of e.g. discrimination, drugs, cops etc. Kurtis Blow is not famous because of the lyrics he made for the fact that he was one of the founders of `the new rap school` which mostly cares about the music style like scratching, mixing and stuff like that. I am one of the only two guys in my school who like rap music and so I have a hard time defending myself against others offense saying that rap is primitive and boring and can be created by anybody witout any problems.

But it is pretty hard to make these narrow-minded kids changing their minds. They can`t see the real purpose of rap music as they do not care about the contents. Most of them cannot understand the lyrics told in rap-songs. It is hard to make good music when the message you want to bring about is more important than the musical composition. I want all of you to see that rap music is not just sampling shit, programming drum computers and scratching records. Think about it!

This article originally appeared in the Amiga diskmagazine "Zine #5" by Brainstorm 1990.

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