/lit/ - Literature

Kate Bush

Yeah, I feel you. Steely Dan one of the goats. Great lyrics and the musicianship is jazz tier even if people call it "classic rock".

Fagen is great. I'll get shit for this but the dude from Protomartyr and Travis Morrison from The Dismemberment Plan are also exceptional.

>>16987157
Kate is a qt but what makes her /lit/ exactly?

>>16987142
>>16987157
>>16987169
>>16987173
Go back

I don't get why he's SO UGLY.
He looks 100% kino on The Nightfly but otherwise he does that weird lip-curl thing and looks like a banker

Bob Dylan
The Doors
Leonard Cohen
Joy Division
The Velvet Underground

I'm gonna jump in with the hip hop vote and say Vince Staples. It's difficult to parse on first listen, but there's a depth and subtlety to the expression that is rare. Best first work to enjoy it would probably be summertime 06, to "get it" would be FM.

>>16989889
Rap is a psychological warfare scheme designed to keep black people culturally backward. It is intrinsically limited as a medium and an artform and it has an entropic tendency to get dumber, so that even the talented or potentially talented musicians find themselves dragged down by it. White people who enable blacks to remain in this living hell, by thinking they are being charitable and giving them head pats for how "authentic" and "street" they are, are worst of all.

Black people are normal people just like you and me. They don't need special shuckin' and jivin' jungle rhythms nor do they need to sing in repetitive monosyllables about the grimy streets they live in or the petty crimes their neighbors commit. They need to elevate their souls with normal poetry, like every other person needs to.

>>16989929
Vince Staples understands this issue at a deeper (and obviously more genuine) level than you do. Listen to FM if you want to talk, but I really doubt you want to talk to anyone but yourself.

>>16989955
Man, whatever day, vibe, month it is
It just feels like summer
You know what I'm saying?
It always feels like summer in the neighborhood, man
When you get a chance to come in
You get a chance to lay back
You get a chance to laugh
You get a chance to chill
Best believe that, man
And being that it always feels like summer
Let's go ahead and make you feel like summer

Summertime in the LB wild
We gon' party 'til the sun or the guns come out
JB first one fouled out playing ball
Now the whole city love you, how?
Boy we know they wasn't down from the get go
Dirty got a dozen rounds, better get low
Lil Johnny gave his life for this shit
All he got was a plot and a bottle from the Winco
Still North Side, Parkside, Vince though
Two N's, new friends, we skip those
Try finessin' my way into Heaven
Might hit that gate, might fall from grace
Splat, on the concrete, real street runner
First month still feel like summer
Cold weather won't stop no gunner
Wrong hat, wrong day, I'll kill my brother

[Chorus: Ty Dolla $ign]
Ayy, summertime in the LB
Know it ain't shit a broke nigga gon' tell me now
Drop top with the top down now
All the bad bitches gon' feel me now, ayy
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah

[Verse 2: Vince Staples & Ty Dolla $ign]
Scared money don't make money, hey
White man wan' take from me, hey
White fans at the Coachella, hey
Never been touched, niggas know better, hey (Ooh yeah)

>Drop top with the top down now
>All the bad bitches gon' feel me now, ayy
>Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah

>Ty Dolla $ign

>>16989984
I know where you're coming from, and I really do see why you posted that, but I really hope you take a while with the album.

Here's a question, why are there radio interludes throughout the album? That should open things a bit if you can get past "because it's fun black music" or "he's from LA".

Again, you don't have to engage with it, but I hope anyone reading this would.

>>16990005
>why are there radio interludes throughout the album?
Because skits are an integral component of rap albums and he's ripping off Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle

>>16990042
>rap is inherently a limited media
>but skits are an integral part of some rappers' music and not others
U r brainlet.

>>16990042
>skits are an integral component of rap albums
this is not as superficial a detail as I assume you meant. if you look at the lyrics you posted there is a tension that's worth exploring further.

>>16990067
Do you think most of the listeners of Ty Dolla $ign are interrogating intertextual tensions in the booga booga rap song?

>>16990054
The addition of skits is more like a relic of older hip-hop music that the new generation implements either ironically or nostalgically. Most of them ignore skits altogether.

>>16990102
Context in case you care about the text: Vince's last work was an electronic album and the work before that a lyrical hip hop album with an LA flair. He doesn't make catchy trap music.

He chose this production style and that FEATURE (at least partially) to communicate something. What?

>>16990144
>FEATURE
What like a feature verse? Is he secretly making fun of retarded ghetto rappers by pimping them out on his album?

>>16990156
Bro I know you're trolling or fucking around but I hope someone sat with the work haha. I also realized something profound about what art can and can't be in this era. So thank you.

>>16987142
Chris de Burgh

>>16987142
Unironically Rush

obviously bill callahan. Obviously billy woods. rip david berman. etc.

>>16987142
based. I love Steely Dan.

>>16990144
You're missing my point. It doesn't matter either way whether he really had some meta approach that appropriates the impoverished medium of rap in a way that is itself a commentary on rap's limitations, if the majority of his listeners just hear shitty pop music. It also proves my original point that the medium ensnares and drags down genuinely talented people. The very fact that he has to do all these gymnastics to say something IN SPITE OF the medium, especially if that something is simply "rap is actually a pretty limited medium," proves that it should simply be abandoned. All of his effort is squandered on struggling against, critiquing, contorting, and transcending a pop music formula when he could simply drop it and explore other genres.

Let's think about it more concretely. Look how resistant I am to investigating it, how incredulous I am. Because even if you're right, and keep in mind I've had a thousand effeminate hipsters from Berklee try to convince me of this same shit for trap mumble rap and pop filth, even if you're the odd one out and you're actually right: it's still rap. It's prima facie worthless, ugly dreck and a chore for me to engage with, so no dialogue is forthcoming unless I'm willing to push past all my instincts, and your condescension to boot, and take the risk with my time and energy.

Ok, fine, suppose I'm a philistine or a racist, and disregard all that. What about the black youths listening to it? Suppose they do have the epiphany you seem to imagine they're capable of having, though you still haven't answered my question as to what percentage of the audience you think is really doing this. Suppose some black kid does have this epiphany, that rap is both capable of poetry (by the way, no one is disputing this, it's just designed to be a poor poetic conductor, so that it always demands more creative energy input than it outputs in return, and dilutes rather than refines meaning unless it's manipulated just so by rare geniuses). Why is this epiphany, that rap is limited, not better and more easily had by simply exposing the youth to other media? You might say "he can do that too," but where are the black poets leading the charge? This rapper could be showing blacks how to discover Yeats and Coleridge, and just as important, showing them that it's not gay or "white" to do so.

To summarize, even if we accept your dubious claim that this is somehow brilliant poetry subversively disguised as rap, 1) likely only a minority appreciate this, while the majority just get fed more surface level crap, making it effectively mumble rap for them, 2) only a minority of rappers are capable of doing this, so for every one step forward of brilliant subversion of the medium there are a hundred steps back of garbage pop rap enabling and necessitating such subversion in the first place, 3) no utility superior to that of simply studying real poetry has been demonstrated anyway.

>>16990194
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iY0m43Hmiw
The truth is that hip-hop is just as primitive as the delta blues. There were much more talented musicians who came before, and there were much more talented musicians who came afterwards. It just so happens that lots of people like listening to it, pushing "authenticity" to the forefront which is why so many rappers glorify street life and coming from poverty. The record labels know this business model works.

>>16990221
The real red pill is realizing that all those racists in the early century were right about "negro jazz" and right about the black man as a symbol of the massification of the west, but it wasn't the black man's fault. No one is wondering that people emerging from slavery galvanize around folk culture, what sucks is that this wasn't allowed to be the healthy youthful period of an emerging people, but frozen in place as a commodity by capitalism, and sold to white people who have always had preconceived notions of the negro as a jive jungle tarzan.

The whole culture is implicated in this fascination with black people. White guilt, ultimately rooted in feelings of superiority (the guilt comes from brutalizing an inferior, thus relatively defenseless opponent), white hate and fear, leftover victorian sexuality that uses the black person as a symbol of the bestial and unrestrained. All these are frozen so they can be commodified and sold as cheap thrills and bite-sized bits of pathos, thus never integrated and moved beyond.

But all of this would be irrelevant if black people had genuine autonomy, white fascination with blacks as symbols would be irrelevant if blacks exceeded the symbols, which is why it was important to make blacks fascinated with themselves, or with their symbolic selves as seen through white eyes. Rap is black self-fascination as a form of arrested development.

>>16990270
I think black civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey had the right idea in terms of the direction African-Americans should go. Forced integration into white institutions and systems of governance removes any sort of autonomy from the black community and leaves them with a choice: Uncle Tom or Project Nigger. Nobody hates successful black people more than the black community itself.

>>16990194
The central thing here is that you think art should be used as a way forward, which I disagree with. I think art should function as a cultural microcosm that people who wish to find a way forward can look to. Sorry I couldn't say more, it's a pretty clear difference in our ways of thinking.

Also that thing is not that "rap is a pretty limited medium", but good try. Sorry that I came off condescending, I thought you were meming. Anyway, this whole thing of "hold your criticism until you get it bro" is a bit cringe, but I was trying to encourage you to be open because openness is my personal bias.

I don't think you're a philistine or a racist, but the thing about the audience is key to understanding the piece. The vast majority of his audience sees him as a smart class clown type for the rap game and little more. This is also important to understanding the piece, as even the metanarrative is a part of a portrait of the artist which is built throughout his discography (not compelling in itself but it was CERTAINLY considered in the making of this album).

etc etc context context, but no, most "black youths" will not take the time.

Overall, I encourage you to sit with the piece until you get an interpretation that is deeper than literally something you were already thinking about. haha.

>>16990332
Who is his target audience then? White neoliberal college students with too much free time?

>>16987142

momus
its momus
all of you dumbasses should check out momus

>>16990332
>I think art should function as a cultural microcosm that people who wish to find a way forward can look to
based. auden:
>Let us leave rebellions to the choleric
>Who enjoy them: to serve as a paradigm
>Now of what a plausible Future might be
>Is what we’re here for.

>>16987142
I've noticed Mark E Smith has been called 'Joycean' on a few occasions

>>16989862
Very good list. Would only add Arvo Pärt.

https://youtu.be/sp2oxWdRMuk

>>16990538
You mean Comus right?

>>16987142
Home At Last is LITERALLY about the Odyssey

Mayo Thompson. Everything else here is gay.

>>16987243
Wuthering Heights for one you tard

>>16987142
Dragonforce

obviously joanna newsom