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Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous
but again all those are your opinions, clearly the guy feels like it represents himself as an artist. you keep insinuating its something akin to a publicity stunt, i disagree. i think the guy just put out a gangsta rap record and honestly i can't understand why you're choosing this particular record for the brunt of your anti gangsta rap criticism.
i respect your feelings and opinions, i just don't understand the trigger point, we've talked about other gangsta rap records before no big deal.. why now?
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I'm honestly not entirely sure why this has bothered me so much, but I have some ideas.
Mostly, I think it's about timing. Again, this is 2016. You're right, we talk about a lot of gangsta shit, and I've always been largely ok with it. But part of the reason I'm ok with, I think, is that almost all of it is in the past. The pretty distant past, in hip-hop years. It's like, 2pacalypse now and Me Against the World and Ready to Die and Life After Death, 36 Chambers, and so on... These albums are all part of history at this point. It was exciting and nervy and maybe even socially necessary for rappers to make hard, violent, scary music back then. Socially necessary because it had been a while since white America associated blackness with power or strength. It was novel, and it scared white folks, and that was excellent. But it didn't turn out all that well in the end, and despite the many classic records that fall under the gangsta sub-genre, it may have actually had a negative overall impact on hip-hop and cultural discourse alike.
But still, it happened, and for a while it was good, and I listened to it, and I still can listen to it to this day, partly because that era is very much over. There's nothing to worry about at this point. And the genre seemed to learn a lesson from that era, and now rap that's informed by that lifestyle is coming in more diverse and thoughtful incarnations.
To have a something like this drop NOW, it just feels tacky. I guess not everyone did learn their lesson. In other words, golden era gangsta rap is historically important. But to put out a major label, long-anticipated album and make it a Gang-focused ode to Bloodness just feels wrong. We already HAD the '90s, and we already HAD the whole thug life thing. It feels like a devolution of rap, or a complete disregard for the history of the art form. It also feels lazy.
Another reason why I think this pisses me off so much is because of the last minute change to the album name, which turned "Brazy" into a headline word, and definitely acted as a advertisement, whether that was the intention or not. Oh hey, this just in, new YG album now called Still Brazy... Why? Well, because .... and then it becomes a focal point, and more people know about the culture and more people learn that YG's a banger.
ALSO ... Do you even listen to YG?
This is not the kind of artist who raps about his painful experience so he can process it and create art. This is a self-proclaimed heathen, debauched, and unapologetic, reveling in excesses and the "krazy" shit he does. My Krazy Life was like the Bizarro Good Kid, mAAd city; it had nothing to do with art. It was just about being loud and wilin' out, and celebrating being an absolute thug. And it was a pretty goddam good album for what it was. (
For what it was)
You assume that he thinks of his music artistically because you think about music that way. You assume the imagery/symbolism/whatever has some artistic purpose because he's
technically an "artist" in the colloquial sense of the word. But I promise you, YG is not that kind of artist.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm just sayin how I feel man...