Bingley: I find that our opinions diverge on this issue. Unusual,since I generally find myself in agreement with your posts .

On rap, I'm 100% with haertig. No need to add any further explanation he said it all.

Second , I'm no music snob. I had a Harvard Redbook higher education , taught by tough but stimulating Jesuits. Quite an experience for a 60s Boomer, Jewish kid, student activist. But I found that I loved it and I had the good sense to soak-up all that I could.

The Jesuits introduced me to Classical music and I learned to love the more powerful pieces. My parents, Great Depression / WW II kids, instilled a love for 40s swing , Big Band and 50s pop,like Sinatra, Ella, etc. That lead me to explore 20s-30s & 40s Blues, Rag, Dixieland and finally the whole BeBop and Modern 50s Jazz era, on my own.

Somewhere in all that and especially from older activists I learned the history of Gospel and folk as political speech and as expressions of spiritual yearning. To this day I revere Leadbelly, Big Mama Thorton, Odetta, Ruth Brown, Lady Day, Woody Gutherie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell etc. and of course the poet laureate , ( early) Dylan.

My own times brought my now developing tastes to the San Francisco Sound, folk-rock, CSN&Y, and Woodstock. While I enjoyed the British Invasion , it was mostly because it was reimagined American R&B. IMO really ground breaking musical invention died off after the early 70s. YMMV.

All of which is a long winded way round to restate my premise that Rap is mysoginistic trash noise. Rap glorifies the worst angels of modern life. I'm glad to see really gifted Black artists, like Beyoncé , moving away and creatively forward. I think my exposition proves that my opinion is not based upon racism or classism or conservative politics.

Let music be, you say. Well yes,of course, Free Speech is thankfully still the rule of law. But Justice Brandeis' corollary argument was that more and critical speech would drown out the "bad" speech. That's what I'm attempting in my expression of distaste for Rap.