Shay Riley: OF COURSE Hip Hop Has Been Bad for Black America

So in my series of posts on rap, I’ve tried be somewhat complimentary before laying out the critiques, fair and balanced, appreciative of a few of the classics , etc . . .

. . . and then here comes Shay Riley of the black center-right site Booker Rising, who answers the above question as follows:

This is a no-brainer. Oh, let me count the ways! A very shallow, coontastic musical genre (95% of it, at least) which utterly runs the once-rich black American culture into the gutter, taken a group of people from being America’s best dressers to grown men showing their underwear as a prison homage, promotes ghetto thuggery/murder/drug dealing/hoing as “quintessential” blackness, is misogynistic and objectifies women, influenced so many kids that now their every third word is a cuss word or the N-word, promotes rabid colorism and anti-black-women views in its videos, rampantly steals the beats of real entertainers, serving prison time is considered a badge of honor among rappers, and it lyrically has virtually nothing to offer except the same retarded ignorance. Besides, virtually all of the “rappers” (Kanye, Drake, Minaj, etc.) out now can’t even rap. Did I miss anything?

He begins by linking to a more balanced and extensive article, one that posed the question, by Courtney Garcia, but maybe the real bonus is that he links to a video by a 9-year old rapper named ‘Lil Poopy! Here at pomocon we strive to keep you all up-to-date on pop-culture matters.

In my posts I eventually do get around to saying that the mainstreaming of self-referential N-word use by blacks has been the spiritual heart of the overall impact of rap, so I’m not exactly afraid to put it on the line, but still, it’s good to see the more blunt articulation.