What's new

Stormzy should replace Mozart in UK music classrooms, study says

It always has, always will.




Not that this is anymore "advanced" than hip hop or any other form of Pop.

But rap takes itself too seriously, everyone knows rock/metal is just pantomime? Surely all educated ppl agree on this. Rap brings nothing but famine and disease.
 
Blondie did the first successful rap cos she run out of melody, supposed to be a piss take, then Everyone who had a mouth and attitude jumped the wagon and made a career from it.
 
But rap takes itself too seriously, everyone knows rock/metal is just pantomime? Surely all educated ppl agree on this. Rap brings nothing but famine and disease.

There are some pretty funny rap tunes (some more scatological than others). But I do sympathize with the idea that rap is more vérité than metal.

That said, metal got pretty serious itself back with the church burnings in Scandinavia circa 1991.

I thought Rapture was actually kinda fun. And I might be the biggest art music snob here.
 
There are some pretty funny rap tunes (some more scatological than others). But I do sympathize with the idea that rap is more vérité than metal.

That said, metal got pretty serious itself back with the church burnings in Scandinavia circa 1991.

I thought Rapture was actually kinda fun. And I might be the biggest art music snob here.
Helps when Blondie’s singing.
 
Rap has replaced Rock n Roll as rebellion music IMHO. When I do accidentally stumble across Rap & Hip Hop songs, I am sometimes pleasantly surprised by all the little melodies and hooks going on in the background, musically busy, and complex in it's own way. It's not all just rhythm and beats.



Just for a laugh, I've always liked this little catchy tune

 
If I recall correctly that was mainly one dude, and he has a youtube channel now.

There were several involved in the burnings (I was hugely into that stuff back then). There were also murders (one of which might have been a suicide), involving Burzum, Mayhem, and Emperor.

It's actually a really interesting development imo. The book Lords of Chaos (though not exactly objective) documents much of that time.
 
Hip hop/dance music is mostly producer and engineer's music. They have so much to do with the final product it tends to eclipse the recording artist's input (even when the latter has a songwriting credit).

At least that's from my experience producing and engineering.

But I must respectfully bow out of this topic. I don't want to disparage music people like, music can and should be enjoyed by everyone. Doesn't matter the listener's taste...

as I mentioned before, I try to listen and let listen.
 
There were several involved in the burnings (I was hugely into that stuff back then). There were also murders (one of which might have been a suicide), involving Burzum, Mayhem, and Emperor.

It's actually a really interesting development imo. The book Lords of Chaos (though not exactly objective) documents much of that time.

You were into church burnings? Just kidding! Yeah, I probably got some of the details wrong and we'll never be certain of the real truth of what happend anyway.

They recently turned Lords of Chaos into a movie, which apparently is a complete joke and has none of the music from any of the bands involved, because they all told the makers of that movie to go fvck themselves...
 
Hip hop/dance music is mostly producer and engineer's music. They have so much to do with the final product it tends to eclipse the recording artist's input (even when the latter has a songwriting credit).

This, by itself, does not disqualify a track from being musical, but it is a different set of talents, and I think (my experience anyway) that is one of the driving factors behind a general distrust/dislike of these genres.

Some might even argue that producers and engineers are in the drivers seat because the number of musicians (by conventional definition) is decreasing, or possibly that it is so difficult to master an instrument.

I'd argue that the challenge of mastering an instrument is part of the fun - but that is a separate topic.

There are good, and bad, examples of music in every genre. At least to the extent that one can judge these things.

Then there are tracks that offend a large (and vociferous) portion of the population. When I was a lad it was rock and roll, today it is HipHop and Rap and related styles.

Do these style offend to protest, or offend for the fun of it? Does it matter.

The one big difference - to me - is that while my buddies and I were "studying" rock and roll we were also studying the classics, and jazz/big band, and even film music. Today that seems to be changing. If I really were a curmudgeon (wait, am I?) I'd suggest a certain laziness on the part of the students.

And when I say studying rock and roll I am only half joking - while we had the Mickey Baker and Joe Pass books for jazz we had "Live at the Filmore", "4 Way Street" and too many others to mention for the rest of our studies. I mention those two because my friends and I spent countless hours dissecting them.
 
As you may be able to tell by my avatar I'm a rap fan/producer (amongst other things). So, I think rap is music and can be as complicated and intricate or basic and mornic as you are willing to make it. The issue, from a music education standpoint, that I would have is that most rap (and most modern "popular music") isn't very harmonically varied, doesn't change much (keys, scales, chords, etc.) and most of it just goes until it ends without much happening other than layering on more sounds. There are a million exceptions to this less when you are dealing with mainstream rap/electronic music.

One of the challenges is that modern electronic music making tools allows anyone (musically trained or not) to quickly make good sounding (from a production standpoint) music. This is a great thing but the things that these tools do to make writing simpler for the user (quantization, forcing notes to scales etc.) makes it so that the simplest path is to pick a key, never leaver it, start a beat, never change it, etc. Great producers don't do this but a lot of the more popular producers do. So you end up with a 4 min song, with sometimes no harmonic changes, no melody, one key, and lines/drums that repeat without changing for the length of the song. Not a lot to learn there. All this to say if you want teach using hiphop you would need a teacher familiar with both modern electronic music and more traditional structures who could pick modern music that students can learn from. It is out there.

The obvious solution is to teach only using Wendy Carlos' Switched on Bach.
 
I have to say the fact that Rap is (somehow) still knocking about, the best and true form was the 80's when you had actual artists with vision with something to say. Today the dead horse flogging must stop. It just sounds so tiring, like the endless HZ clones.
 
I have to say the fact that Rap is (somehow) still knocking about, the best and true form was the 80's when you had actual artists with vision with something to say. Today the dead horse flogging must stop. It just sounds so tiring, like the endless HZ clones.

I don't know about that, I'd argue artists like Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino and Kanye West have vision and something to say. Stormzy also has something to say as most of his raps are political in nature. Same with artists like Akala and Immortal Technique. In fact I think a few of their songs and music videos are some of the most creative forms of artistic expression out there at the moment.

I still think more can be gleaned from an educational standpoint with an average jazz/ orchestral song than from an average rap song.
 
IMO. the problem is not so much the content of the lessons, but the uninspiring teaching. A talented teacher can make anything and any subject interesting. Unfortunately there are not enough talented teachers (in all subjects) to go around. I don't think the improved "results" shown in the study reflect that people shouldn't be studying Mozart. They reflect that struggling children need to have interesting opportunities and special attention. This could be stormzy, but it's the attention and interest that is important.

The second thing to note is that whilst not studying the "classics" may make lessons temporarily more interesting, one has to be careful not to shut off options for people who want to make a career out of music. I was lucky in that lessons were free. If my parents had had to pay for lessons, I wouldn't be where I am today.

It has also been known for a long time that studying an instrument usually makes children better students at other subjects. In the end it doesn't' matter what that instrument is, as long as they get something out of it. So, if they were to study stormzy, as long as there was studying, it miught not be such a bad thing for many children.
 
Top Bottom