Greetings. I am at least as white as many of you. I am a professional opera singer; can you think of a whiter profession than that? If so, please let me know, and I’m sure I could dabble in it. I’m here, as a subject expert in “established norms in music,” to tell you that rap is music. It’s sort of astonishing to me that I even need to say this, but after reading many comments on Habib Fanny’s absolutely wonderful answer, it’s come to my attention that many of you disagree with the objective fucking truth: that rap is music. To borrow from the lyrics of a great musician: “Now I ain’t sayin’ she a [closet racist], but she ain’t messin’ with no [traditionally white genres of music].” The standard critique of rap as music is that it lacks melody. Cool. Please sing for me the melody of the most famous section of Stravinsky’s famous The Rite of Spring, called the Augurs of Spring (audio below, if you don’t know what I’m talking about). Can’t do it? I didn’t think so. Whole genres of music are built without melody. Would you consider minimalist music not to be music? How about percussion music? And even on traditionally pitched/melodic instruments; think about the way solo banjo is played, or bagpipe music. Is anyone asking on Quora whether bagpipes count as music? (BTW, for those of you considering a cheapshot in the comments against bagpipes, that’s fair, but actually high-level bagpipe music is really cool). (The Augurs of Spring) “It’s not that it lacks melody,” I hear you say, “it’s that it lacks pitch and tone!” In the examples I give, those are all pitched instruments. Funny you should say this, because human voices rapping also have pitch and timbre. Have you ever considered why we can tell the difference between DMX rapping and Jay Z? The difference is far more extreme than the difference between a bassoon and an oboe—it’s not just pitch and expression, it’s a huge timbral shift. I’ve also heard the argument that it’s not about what’s embedded in rap, it’s about what rap is famous for: the fact that people like rap overwhelmingly for its use of text makes it not music. Cool. So does Bob Dylan still count as music, even though his music is almost 100% about text? The bottom line is that none of the arguments against rap as music are applied with any consistency. The same people who wish to categorize rap as something other than music due to these qualities ignore the same qualities in other, traditionally white, genres. In point of fact, rap is often the most sophisticated pop music around. Think about the way sampling is done in rap and compare it to borrowings in Handel, or to 20th century tape music. Rap has an extremely sophisticated musical lineage and heightens it in ways that huge numbers of high-level musicians find compelling. So this has been a fun little conversation that we’ve been having, but it’s time to stop. Rap is music. Often very high-level music. I appreciate that this issue gets a whole new segment of the population interested in becoming armchair music theorists, but this argument is totally racist nonsense.
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