Loving the medium, hating the message

This is my personal problem with so much music generally but especially a lot of 'urban' music, hip-pop and the brand of rap music that focuses on celebrating material wealth and often decadence but more often self-congratulatory empowerment. I can pick several examples of tracks I think sound great in terms of sonic effect and the way they are structured and produced - Snoop Dogg's 'Snoop Dogg', numerous Neptunes stuff and also on the UK front recent attempts to emulate the style of the ultra-slick supermodified hybridised r n' b sounds of the States - take Mis-Teeq's best single yet 'Scandalous' and the new Lisa Maffia track 'All over'. These tracks SOUND great to me, i like the beats, the fx and the general voib of them. what i don't like is the message, the lyrics, the themes addressed - cliched though admittedly not dated. i don't like the repetition aspect in that there will always be songs written about the same subjects everytime, in ALL genres of course. and it would be ridiculous to criticise acts like this for writing the songs they do, but whether you identify any logic in this or not its what keeps me from buying or downloading these tracks i supposedly like - at least until the hype dies down and they become lost in the swamp. i can hear Mis-Teeq and Lisa Mafia pretty easily without having to download or buy them for example, and when I hear them I think 'nice beat, groove etc.' and it intrigues me because this is not like hearing a song and listening to the words being sung and thinking 'wow thats a great lyric' or whatever. i can never relate to the lyrics like i can to the music, bizarrely. the points i'm trying to make are

1) is it worthwile making such a big deal about lyrics and messages you don't like in what is supposed to be feelgood pop music to make you dance to, drive to, NOT think about and generally appeal to people younger and sexier than you anyway?

2) why am i so bothered about the message side anyway? i think it is because i like the musical ideas so much and find them relatively novel and inventive that i am disappointed the lyrics can never be quite as original (is it not feasible, even possible, for artists to write about something different to 'just got paid, this party got it goin on, girls/boys over there look hot' with this style of music?)

3) if you like this kind of music, what appeals to YOU the most about it - the music, the message or the combination? or do you just like it and really do not care what they are talking about?

i just realised that if 'All Over' was by Miss Dynamite i would probably like it more because then it would be a bit more detached from the So Solid thing which irritates me a lot because it all just seems like everything they do is a response to whatever American acts are doing - and their 'badboy' schtick is incredibly tedious. i admit this is probably not very logical either, cos its obviously appealing to 13 year olds - and i may well have liked it when i was that age (but its tricky because there was never a UK equivalent to the hard rap acts from the US at that time)

the interesting thing about the Lisa Maffia video is its a deeply contrived attempt to say 'hey we London lot can party up like Diddy and co.' by copying that exactly, tho it does actually look the part - there's even a cameo from the producer tho i think he's actually a scrawny Oxide-esque guy who looks a bit out of place in the club surrounded by the So Solid massive. i think this might be something quite unique to England - the whole urban music scene in this country has always been well-mixed racially but often it tends to be the white producers lurking in the background while the black MCs and performers take centrestage and this only interests me because its that 'white producer lurking in the background making hip hop influenced music' that i often aspire to. un-necessary stigmatizing there perhaps - but its very common for guys like me to be into this music BECAUSE of the music rather than the things that go with it. obv. guys like Oxide (as was the case with Liam Howlett) are not as interested in being stars as they are in being successful producers.

anyway these thoughts open up more questions, like if you think about all the hip hop and modern r n'b you love, which theme out of crime/violence, sex, politics or self-praise/celebration is the most common? and how much should be read into that?

this whole idea of liking the music but not liking the message can be applied to other music too of course (esp. in my case) but I singled out hip-pop because it seems to be the one that niggles me the most. and i hope this doesn't all seem lime vague gibberish on a Sunday afternoon.