with DeadSun

You've seen him in Fan Speak all around the antiMUSIC network, now DeadSun gets his big show as the host of his very own talk show,  The Not Quite-So DeadShow ! Forget Oprah and Dr. Phil, DeadSun knows how to liven up a talk show. 

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled Not Quite-So DeadShow for this special Deaditorial from Dead Sun.

That�s an interesting quote, coming from Eminem, and I think that he might be onto something. It�s interesting because it resonates with a debate that has been raging for more than two decades. Can rappers or DJ�s be correctly called musicians? 

My take : generally speaking, NO. Not by definition. The primary reason is simple, because the lion�s share of those involved in the rap entertainment industry cannot play an instrument in real time. Period. Turntables are not instruments. Deal with it. Turntables are a piece of equipment designed to play BACK pre-recorded music. In what sense does this qualify a turntable operator as a musician? None whatsoever--- unless you are ready to say that ANY PERSON who can play a record somehow becomes a musician as they do it. Let�s be logical, they don�t. 

Look--- fiddling around with slides and knobs on a turntable is little more than what we all do when we adjust our stereo controls, folks. Maybe it can be done skillfully, and that can be reserved for personal taste, but that isn�t the issue. Cueing up a recording isn�t playing an instrument. Ever. The proof is in the pudding. The very reason why one observes such a pervasive occurrence of pre-recorded and sampled music when dealing with rap, is the very reason why they cannot be musicians--- they cannot write their own music. What little �music� these songs contain are, more often than not, the by-product of a computer program, or else a copied recording of a bona fide musician�s hard work and creative output, i.e., a sample. 

Apologists will try to twist and turn their way around this all day long, because they would love to be able to place their rap icons alongside those who are able to not only craft a structured song, but can play that song LIVE, on demand, and in real time. You know--- the truly creative, gifted, talented MUSICIANS.

Bad news, �playaz�, they can�t--- and they don�t. 

Apart from the dirty nursery rhymes, rap doesn�t have a creative bone in its Pro-Tools dependent body. Programming a computer to do all of the sequencing doesn�t necessarily earn you the title of �musician�, either. Let me put it this way, if I push a button and a house shoots up from the ground, am I now �a carpenter�? NO, because in theory, I don�t know the first thing about how to put a house together, nor do I know how to use any of the tools necessary to do so. If I can push a button, and create 288 measures of an electronically simulated and looped drum beat, does that necessarily make me a drummer? Well? No it doesn�t--- yet there are some who seem to believe otherwise.

This brings me to the act of rapping. Rapping, in and of itself, is hardly an instrument. I know what you�re thinking--- the human voice is an instrument. Only under a specific set of circumstances, friend. The lady on the nightly news can speak with inflection, and with cadence, too. That doesn�t make her a musician, though, does it? In rap�s early years, there were two pieces of equipment involved which shaped it, fueled it, and gave it the identity that it has today--- the turntable and the microphone. Neither, under any sort of serious consideration, are musical instruments. You don�t play a microphone, nor do you necessarily sing into a microphone. You can speak into it, scream into it, whisper into it, take your pick. A microphone merely aids in the amplification of the human voice, and the fact that I can speak the phrase �yo slap deez laydeez, bustaz be all up in dat, pow pow, suck on deez nutz� --- into a microphone--- doesn�t mean in ANY WAY I am now a �singer�. It simply means that I can 

a. ) Speak.
b. ) Make a colossal jackass out of myself.

You can even RHYME into a microphone without singing.

Rhyming : THEE central ingredient to rap. A rap lyric is a story of sorts. It almost always sticks to a pattern whereby words either rhyme outright, or they contain a slant rhyme. You know something--- we already have a term used to described a pattern of rhyming words set to measured time, and we don�t call it music, just in case you can�t see where this is going. We call that a �poem�. The Beatniks of days gone by often recited their poetry to background beats or sound. Then again, we never declared them to be musicians, did we? There�s a reason for that, so STOP insisting that the men and women who are presently doing the SAME thing are musicians. They aren�t. They�re correctly called poets--- if you want to have any kind of rational honesty with yourself. 

NOW, whether or not one believes this poetry to be insightful, when held up to the works that this form of expression has given us throughout the course of history, is your own affair--- though I somehow fail to see HOW any sort of equivalence between the likes of Yeats, Rimbaud, Plath, Sissman, Elliot, Rilke, Collins, Bishop, Williams, Cummings, Frost, Kerouac, Baudelaire, et al, can be considered in the same breath as 50 Cent, Jay Z, Missy Elliot, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Tupac, Notorious B.I.G., Eminem, Lil� Bow Wow, Usher, and Ludacris--- can be honestly weighed. Do you?

What is rap?

Objectively speaking, rap is :

A form of entertainment, a stylized vocal expression, rhymed in a poetic format, in measured time.

Rappers can therefore be called artists--- but they are not--- by and large--- musicians. It is possible that I am utterly incorrect, and so in the spirit of fairness, I am willing, under certain logical developments, to be converted from my view. Here is my �conversion checklist� :

When I can be presented with the sheet music for rapping, I will concede that rappers and DJs are musicians.

When someone points out how a record player is--- by definition--- a musical instrument, I will concede that a turntable is a musical instrument.

When someone can logically argue how sampling someone else�s music is innately creative, requires ANY musical talent, and demonstrates musical acumen, I will concede that rappers are musicians.

When someone can demonstrate how reciting what often amounts to little more than dirty, juvenile nursery rhymes over a singularly repetitive, electronically sequenced percussion loop is on par with the often under-appreciated talent required to master an instrument in real time--- I will concede that rappers are musicians.

When someone can explain how patch-quilting pre-existing beats and electronically sequenced bass lines--- requiring no real time effort on the part of programmer--- is to play an instrument, then I will concede that programming is necessarily playing an instrument. That would be like me strolling into a museum of fine art with a pair of scissors, cutting up pieces from differing paintings, then putting the differing pieces together and declaring myself �a painter�. 

Until that day dawns : they�re poets--- and ( to me ) typically uninspiring ones at that.

I�ll leave you with the very same words that I came to you with :

�We ain�t a band, bitch. We don�t play instruments.�

--- if Eminem has the intellectual facilities to grasp it, this should be like putting one foot in front of the other for the rest of you.

DS