Muthaeffing Bootylicious Blah Goes Blat

Rap music sales are in the toilet – the very place where the often violent and misogynistic practitioners of this musical genre happily excrete their pearls of wisdom – and all I can say is that it’s about muthaeffing time.

The Telegraph of London reports that rap music sales have dropped more than twice as fast as overall sales in a profit-hungry industry that is pretty much on its knees – and deservedly so – because it has clung to the good old days when CDs ruled and refused to acknowledge that the future is here.

I am a music lover’s music lover and there isn’t a genre that I don’t enjoy listening to. Except rap. (Okay, a half hour or so of polkas a year is enough and I never got behind disco.) But I can listen to soul, bluegrass, rock, hip-hop, folk, R&B, reggae, classical and jazz of all kinds forever.

Rap has been a conspicuous exception. Even understanding its anger-driven ghetto roots, it seemed hopelessly and boringly one dimensional to me from the first time I heard it and nothing over the last decade or so has changed my mind.

For the life of me I can't understand why it has been so wildly popular among whites and middle-class blacks. But then I didn’t think that the sport utility vehicle boom would last so long, so what do I know?

Ed Morrissey over at Captain’s Quarters, who brought the Telegraph story to my attention, goes for the rap jugular in writing:

"Listeners have tired of misogynistic lyrics, crude paeans to violence, and the garish jewelry that once fascinated America's youth.

"Some see this as a period of adjustment for a long-lived art form, which began in the late 1970s and exploded in the following decade. Michael Dyson, a professor of African and religious studies at Penn, says that 'horrible hip-hop has to die so that regal hip-hop can live.' Most others are not as sanguine. Even media outlets that have feasted on hip-hop over the years have begun pulling away, such as Ebony magazine removing Ludacris from its cover, and Verizon dumping Akon after his simulated sexual assault of a fifteen-year-old fan on stage."

While I don’t disagree with the Captain, I just don’t see the violent and pornographic nature of a lot of rap as responsible for plummeting sales. Country crooners have been singing about lost loves and pickup trucks for decades and country sales aren’t tanking.

No, I think it's the legs thing – as in rap just doesn’t have the legs to be a sustainable musical form. Rock keeps reinventing itself in interesting ways. So does jazz. (Didja know that jazz legend Chick Corea is touring with banjo maestro Bela Fleck this summer?)

There just isn’t enough to rap to reinvent.