Recommendations for hip-hop without braggadocio (or these other tropes)?

https://jukebox.openai.com/?song=802877581 heres some hip-hop with no lyrical tropes

god level trolling

Why not just listen to Japanese hip-hop, or Arabic hip-hop, or hip-hop in literally any language you don't speak? You can tell yourself they're rapping about anything you feel like.

I was hanging back from a morbidly curious distance for awhile but it now occurs to me that I might actually know something along the lines of what OP is looking for, and it’s this B L A C K I E album:
https://blackieallcapswithspaces.bandcamp.com/album/imagine-your-self-in-a-free-and-natural-world-2014

Best of luck

T. S. Eliot: 'the music of poetry is not something which exists apart from the meaning. Otherwise, we could have poetry of great musical beauty which made no sense, and I have never come across such poetry'.

I'll let you be the judge of this quote.

xp

i've narrowed it down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw

Quality trolling, good luck sir. May I recommend a different style of music altogether?

No, hold on, found it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGUjkvqkmQI

no he's clearly bragging about his rapping, we're looking for lyrics that are in no way self-referential or make use of metaphor or other imagery but aren't abstract and are about nice things like not being uppity or situated in any sociopolitical context whatsoever

Me, an intellectual: hmm yeah sorta like that but could you maybe make it a bit more non-idiomatic

Derek Bailey: *picks up instrument*

Me: bzzzt try again fool

I'd also like to also propose Shakespeare without all that unpleasant regicide and crime novels where the plot is someone asks a nice policeman for directions.. lol this fucking thread!

This one might be more your thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOgC8qp_I2Y

^^^bragging AND rapping about rap, why won't you people help a poster lol

Look, here is a rap about playing Zork, I hope everyone is happy now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

Your Eliot quote, pomenitul, may have been true of its time, Eliot had never come across such poetry. But then shortly thereafter the whole "sound poetry" movement took off, poets like Gerhard Rühm who wrote poems consisting purely of nonsense syllables chosen for the musical effect of the whole.

The suggestion that I listen to hip-hop in a language I don’t understand does seem like an honest attempt to answer my request in the OP, so thanks. But the problem here is that one of my biggest hobbies is language-learning, so I probably would not be oblivious to the lyrics for long. It is hard to invest in an artist if you know there is a big risk of disappointment at some point. I actually already experienced this with Japanese, where several of the artists I liked years ago before I learned Japanese, now make me cringe because of the lyrics.

"Where can I find jazz that has no little or no improvisational element?"

We did have this thread:

What's with that constant cymbal tapping in jazz drumming?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Unwanted_Song

fuck this troll, especially today

I am not from the USA … it is not clear why my preferences should reflect the specific societal tensions in some other country.

Could you address this, roxymuzak?

sure: police brutality and white supremacy are not limited to the usa, so get your head out of your ass

though the earlier suggestion for Japanese hiphop was based on not understanding Japanese, and op apparently does, it's not the worst idea. I think they imported pretty much everything but the lyrical themes. Here's a primer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDPVPc1thKE

i think the rap you want is

My name's Fred Flintstone and I'm hear to say
I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way

By the same token, should I scold American posters here for not enjoying the musical genre in my country which is associated with an ethnic minority that faces discrimination (and which isn't hip-hop)?

It is one thing to say that our political positions should be based on recognition of injustice everywhere, but I don't think people are under any obligation to choose the music they listen to for pleasure on the basis of societal problems.

He’s clearly bragging.

xp

Anyone who doesn’t listen to manele is a white supremacist imho.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXb6bjCCtuY

Anyone who doesn’t listen to manele is a white supremacist imho

you're probably right pom but i want to listen to manele that has no connection to Romania and deals with lyrics about urban planning in 1960s Yorkshire

I was being facetious, obviously, but in a Romanian context this is both true and not: some people explicitly hate manele because they view it as a stand-in for the Roma. But most people listen to it all the time and are racist pieces of shit anyway, so the equation 'I listen to music that expressly deals with the struggles of minorities in my country = I support these minorities' is too simplistic to hold any water.

sure, and thanks to the magic of global commerce and communication billions of people listen to music that originates from cultural, historical, sociopolitical situations that are not their own, and the back and forth of culture and the ways it gets refracted and adapted, adopted or rejected is fascinating and productive of beautiful new cultural forms and marketable cultural products, and it creates material change as it flows ceaselessly thru the channels of commerce and communication

on the other hand, wanting to consume an idea of a genre that is very specifically deracinated from its cultural birthplace but imagining that it is in some inexplicable way "part of" that genre is, at best reading, a fool's errand, and on most readings more than a little o_O

i guess we have to ILX crowdsource the song OP wants

^^^ I really want this to happen.

NV, for sure, which is why my 'beef' with Melomane isn't so much the initial request, which I think is intriguing in its own right, as the implication that other forms of hip-hop (i.e. for all intents and purposes, hip-hop itself) are somehow inferior to this counter-referential subgenre that has yet to see the light of day (and even when it does, as in Aesop Rock's case, it doesn't quite meet OP's standards either). Still, I am most amused by this thread.

For real, though, where's deej when you need him?

even the backpackiest of backpackers - which isn't exactly AR imo - is grounded, perhaps inevitably - in the history and context of what rap is and where it comes from. and now i've allowed Sunday distraction to make me engage way more than i wanted to, roxy otm.

Where did I make any claims of superiority or inferiority? This is purely about what I personally want to listen to. Other people should listen to whatever music that makes them happy, and if it is typical hip-hop, then I'm happy that they are happy.

I too am mainly interested in the musicality of the language which is why I check the lyrics to songs before listening to them to protect myself from accidentally hearing something about the black experience. It’s actually very normal

Also, they are called cLOUDDEAD, fill your boots ffs

I find the braggadocio tiresome: for a performer to rap about how he is a great rapper just seems so lame. I also have no interest in mentions of weed or how life on the streets is tough.

QFT

Sure, you can frame it as a purely subjective preference, but things are never quite so simple, are they? If I meditate on why I dislike certain types of music, the answer is usually more extensive than 'it just doesn't do it for me', at least if I'm being honest with myself.

Oh yeah, cLOUDDEAD is a good one. I'd completely forgotten about those guys.

New Kingdom is another one i'd compare to cLOUDDEAD, but still fuck the whole premise of this awful thread.

Don't push me because I'm close to the edge
Of the building I'm standing on, so if you push me, I'm dead
But that's not what I'm here to talk about today
The weather is beautiful and it looks like later there will be a parade

You know what else rhymes with parade?
Glade
Made
Jade
Sade
WAit no that's "Zha day"
But who am I to say
That doesn't rhyme
parsley page rosemary and thyme

Bitch

Wins suggests that the "black experience" necessarily has to be reduced to a handful of issues which have become hip-hop tropes, which I think does the African diaspora a great disservice. Ethnic minorities are just as capable of writing lyrics which are not overtly related to struggles they face, and for any ethnic minority you can find a poet who has chosen that approach, so why couldn't a hip-hop artist do the same?

Also, if a performer is not himself black (because hip-hop has now been taken up by people of every race around the world), then it is unclear why that performer should be conveying the "black experience". Indeed, when performers who are not black (and perhaps not even an ethnic minority in their region at all) draw on themes and metaphors which derive from the African American experience, can that not be criticized as a form of appropriation? That seems to me a good reason for certain performers to come with a different lyrical approach entirely.

rakim talking about how dope he is at rapping is one of the greatest things that ever happened to the english language

I can take a phrase that's barely heard
Flip it
The success of what I did is up to you to decide and I'm no better than you

Here you go Melomane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBwAxmrE194

rejecting anything that mentions weed offhand even if fits the other dubious requirements here is just ridiculous. listen to something else

rolling down the street
without indo
smoking weed makes me puke

Complaining about rappers rapping about rapping is like complaining about rockers singing about rocking.

As far as dealing with a negative self-image goes, Root Manuva's track "Crying" is a much better example of what I’m looking for, inasmuch as that track's lyrics are abstracted from the musical genre in which they are performed.

― Melomane, Saturday, May 30, 2020 7:36 PM (yesterday)

I'd never heard this song before. Now that I have, I'm pretty confused about what you're looking for, or rather what you're finding wanting in the rap you have heard. How are these lyrics "abstracted from" rap? They're like a quarter-step from "don't push me, 'cause I'm close to the edge."

I was going to suggest Shabazz Palaces, but I'm sure that fails the remorseless precision of the keyword test too. Maybe you should just listen to beat tapes

For Those About to Rap…