Dreiko said:
See, I like metal because of its energy, it infuses me with a positive go get things done epicly attitude. Rap I like when there's smart rhymes and other linguistic tricks but from a musicianship level while a lot of metal has basis in classical music rap seems to be not nearly as focused on instrumental performance. Having studied piano for years, it feels kinda unfair to metal to even compare it with rap due to how much more work it takes to play all those instruments that well.
Well, that very much depends. Some metal genres are incredibly easy to play, just stick a bunch of power chords together and have a vocalist who doesn't mind not being able to speak in ten years. Heck, the kind of things which a lot of metal fans tend to interpret as denoting musical "skill" (particularly guitar solos) are actually not too difficult to acquire. If you pick up a guitar and only practice guitar solos, you'll get good at it quite quickly, but you won't be a good guitarist in general.
While you're right in a sense about musicianship, in that rap (as the name suggestS) comes from spoken word poetry and wasn't originally a musical genre at all. I think you're straying a bit close to some commonly held beliefs about electronic music which I intensely disagree with. A lot of people who either play instruments or prefer instrumental music seem to have this idea that making electronic music is incredibly easy or requires no skill, like you just press a button and the computer generates a song for you. I mean, I loathe the whole "cult of the DJ" mentality in electronic music whereby "celebrity" DJs are held up as irreplaceable geniuses or treated like rock stars because on a basic level electronic and instrumental music are different (and also because it's a cancerous relic of the Ibiza club scene, which prejudiced me against electronic music for a long time) but making electronic music still requires technical skill, and while American hip hop may quite often treat music as immaterial that isn't true in all rap genres (it's occuring to me at this point that the word rap is really archaic - it's not uniquely American and in many cases it's not rhythmic or poetry).
But yeah, it took me a very long time to appreciate rap mostly because I grew up surrounded by suburban white kids listening to American hip hop (I suspect that doesn't really happen any more, thank god). I was living in London when grime got really popular, and it was more acceptable to me because of the stronger emphasis on rhythm, because it sounds more like other electronic music and also I guess because I was using to hearing MLE at that point so the lyrical content was more accessible.
On the subject of lyrica content, sure, flexing about money or glorifying violence may not be particularly polite but on a level it's not supposed to be. That's what I'm semi-seriously calling the "brutality", that in rap these things aren't heroic or mythic battles between good and evil, they're stripped of any kind of deeper metaphysical meaning altogether. To put it bluntly, money is "mundane crap" when you have it. Poverty or violence are uninteresting when you've never experienced them. Not implying I have in any real sense, but the older I get the less time I have for escapism in this sense.
