People don't have to be suicidal to tattoo their faces and talk about how they're going to hell and taking their fans with them, but I bet it helps.

> Hip Hop can be a very powerful weapon to help expand young people’s political and social consciousness. But just as with any weapon, if you don’t know how to use it, if you don’t know where to point it, or what you’re using it for, you can end up shooting yourself in the foot or killing your sisters or brothers.

-- Assata Shakur

People stumbling around mumbling about "syzzurp" and "xans" and whatever else... rape and drugs and abuse and violence... don't rinse, just repeat.

If it's harmless to like something [and listen to it over and over and over again] and not agree with it, then it would also be harmless to listen to stuff one agrees with. Or still disagrees with, but which at least doesn't frame everything as a matter of theft and violence, or the sterilized product of both, mad stacks of money, life as nothing more than a drug-riddled tunnel either into the gutter or commercial success with all the soul-removal that entails... while sucking up to one's own fans, in a spiral of infantilization mixed with sex, drugs and violence.

Like the streamer business model, mumble incoherently while you do something badly, and when someone donates, say "you guys are awesome". The rest is facade, that's the mechanism. People get uprooted and scared off from being themselves, then they identify with things that will never give them ground to root in, and make their own identity a bunch of sliders and checkboxes in a character editor. I say this as someone who has been listening to rap for over two decades and writing it for over one. I don't claim to be a head, far from, or to be very good at it, even further from, but I'm also not just repeating Fox talking points or whatever, FWIW. And now it's all turning to "mood" and "party", where earlier bullshit notions had to be smuggled in with nice flows and rhymes, it now can be mass produced at a whole other level. The way I see it it's a temple, full of merchants and their customers, and everybody is so thick by now you can take a bull whip to them and they don't even realize it.

There is no culture there, either. That is, large parts of the culture that is there, discredited itself by not screaming bloody murder at these clowns... "that's the game", "that's how rap is", any number of excuses, the ultimate being "but I like it, leave me alone". There's a lot of synthetic BS docking on to receptors for culture, sure, making sure there is no culture by and for people. It's like sterilized mosquitos, come to think of it.

> What really hurts me sometimes is that there’s not a lot of consciousness in their music. There could be a whole lot more. Rapping is communicating-it should be an instrument for our liberation. We don’t have time to talk about being players and hustlers and gangsters. We didn’t come off of the slave ships that way. We need to become proud Africans again and stop running around in Shirley Temple curls talkin’ ‘bout how we’re pimps and players. A lot of the symbols that are in rap records and videos are indications of decadent consumerism and in a very real sense, those gold chains, hundred-dollar sneakers and T-shirts with a designer’s name on it underline how much they’ve become enslaved by the consumer mentality in the United States-consumer slaves.

-- Assata Shakur

As for Hamlet, well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#C...

All three paragraphs are fascinating, and "desecrating the memory of a Werther from which Goethe had distanced himself in the meantime" is kinda the sanctimonious way some fans/artists defend stuff they either can't explain, or, when the meaning is obvious, don't agree with but like.

It's like saying "it's just a prank and/or a social experiment and/or a joke and/or art", so really not important or solid enough so it could be criticized... but with the other side of the mouth it's so important and holy by mere virtue of people liking it, that any criticism is filed under "hate" and never even looked at deeply enough for any of it to sink in. Rap isn't special when it comes to that, of course, but it's also coated in it.