Repent Replenish Repeat

Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip

I can hip to the hop. I can hip hop. See? This is hip-hop. Rapping and cussing an’ that…

Okay, it’s white guys from England. If it’s hippy or hoppy it’s in the long hair and beer ways.

I have been, lately, feeling like my selections on this here project have been a little…patterned. I don’t know if it’s visible. To me, I see my explorations staying inside certain boundaries and hardly venturing outside of them.

I thought I’d try something hip-hop.

I have been known to say the words, “I don’t get rap.” It’s a falsehood. I do get rap, the same way I get Taiko drumming. There’s a philosophical similarity. If you give me music that’s a study of certain parts, leaving other parts aside, I get that. Taiko drumming is all the percussion and only the percussion. Rap is percussion and poetry. Philosophically, emotionally, I get that. Words and tempo. I get that the same way I get early surf rock — tracks like “Rumble” by Link Wray which is all melody with no poetry and underplay on drums.

I get rap.

I often don’t enjoy rap.

I think that a good deal of the rap I’ve heard, though, is a vessel for anger and aggression. It’s repetitive and formulaic, with greater emphasis on the emotion than the art.

I should get that too, because that’s how you’d describe punk.

What I’m concluding is that I’m a fan of rap, on a conceptual level.

So maybe I don’t enjoy rap on a different level.

Except…know what’s weird? I say that, but every rap that I’ve ever made a point of actually listening to I have liked. I like the little bit of Biggie Smalls I’ve heard, for instance. I love Beastie Boys. And whenever there are rap breaks in Gorillaz songs, I bop along with those.

I begin to wonder if the rap that I don’t like is that triple-platinum, recognized by the Grammy Awards stuff. And that sort of phrase is, usually, the phrase I can apply to music in other genres that I don’t like too much.

All right, ramble done.

Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip are self-described “angsta” rappers. Clever, right? It’s okay to say, “No. That’s silly.” It is silly. They know it. Anyway, they’re shouty poets, shouting poetry to a synthesized backsoundtrack. They’re rapping, even if they’re too British to be called “hip-hop.”

I enjoy them. And, maybe, they’ll help me learn new ways to appreciate things I haven’t learned to appreciate till now.

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