Rap or Country

Rap or country? That was our main focus this week in Popular Cultures class where we discuss how very different those two genres of music are. After reading Chuck Klosterman's Toby Over Moby and Brent Staples' short article on How Hip-Hop Music Lost Its Way and Betrayed Its Fans, I thought about how those two genres are so different from one another. Let's start with rap music. First off, and in my point of view, I personally don't like rap music and only have heard bits and pieces of it while changing the radio station in my car. I don't understand what the rappers are trying to say in that music and I know that I don't know much about Eminem or who is who in the whole rapping music community. Much of the time when I do find that I'm listening to it, willfully or not, I find that it gives me a headache because I'm trying to catch what is being said. To me, rap music is not music at all. To me, it's just someone screaming about drugs, racing, or who is killing off who. In How Hip-Hop Music Lost Its Way and Betrayed Its Fans, Brent Staples writes that much of the rap music today is encouraging rappers to say something in their music which will provoke rappers and/or real world gangs to do drugs or take part in an all out gang war that will end in one or more deaths. Whether this is true or not, I don't know. I don't care for rap music or listen to it but know people who do and do enjoy it. I am unsure if it causes violence among rappers or anyone else so if you enjoy it, that's fine. Music is music and rap music is just that.

Now country on the other hand, I do enjoy. I can't say that I'm a huge fan of Taylor Swift, Toby Keith, or Reba, but I know that I do enjoy Blake Shelton, Carrie Underwood, and Brad Paisley. I have been enjoy county music probably ever since my mom first turn on the car radio. It was probably the only thing we ever listen to while in the car and I later find that I got a bit tired of it whenever I was with her and wanted to listen to something else but I soon discover the use of old personal hand held CD players and had a wonderful little collection of pop CDs like the Backstreet Boys, a few Now CDs, and Britney Spears' very first CD (when she was still a levelheaded kind of girl and not the airhead that she is today). Of course, my little collection of CDs grow over the years. I enjoyed the stories that are being told in country music. Country music almost always has some kind of story, sad or happy, silly or serious, love or hate. So between rap or country music, I think I would pick country music over rap.