November 01, 2004

eminem promotes gansta voting In other news, there's been a surge in the sale of black hoodies as younun's prepare to vote or face the wrath of P. Diddy and Hillary Clinton.
posted by trampnews 20 years ago
  • The hook and the video are pretty powerful. Em did this song on SNL over the weekend. Timely; I hope it does some good. Hm, Hillary's closing comment was "God Bless You." Trying to move in on W-leaning swing voters? ;)
  • It's a pretty awesome video For me to poop on. GO SOX! AGAIN!
  • Yeah, not so funny, ActuallySettle.
  • Definitely worth posting a second time. ;)
  • I am not in the target audience of Eminem's video, but I do have a (weak) affection for the poetics of Rap and Hip-Hop. One interesting thing to me is that Rap seems to depend heavily on the lax phonological constraints of languages like English. In much more constrained languages like Japanese, Rap produces a cringe-worthy syllable soup.
  • It's interesting how in different languages, the rhythms are noticeably different and that when people try to use the same rhythms that they have heard from English speaking MCs, it often falls flat.
  • French rap is actually pretty good.
  • dj, you're just not listening to the right people. There are plenty of decent MCs that rap in French (as Wolof mentioned), Japanese, Portuguese, Zulu... And as far as rhythms go, they are dictated more by style than language. I've been known to rhyme now and then in both English and Japanese. However, I'm decidedly wack and frequently bite rhymes.
  • A Chinese rapper once said that Chinese should be pretty good for rapping, since we've been doing it for thousands of years :) He likens the atonal chanting in Chinese religions (Taoism/Daoism and Buddhism especially) to rapping, which isn't as far a stretch as it sounds at first. Many think that religious chanting is just a monotonous "nurhnurhnurhnurh" ad inifitum. But there are actually interesting rhythms and inflections, even though the native tones of the words are flattened out.