Disagreeing with a culture is not racism/bigotry

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I could see it making you an idiot for taking music far too seriously, but I don't see why it would be racist.

That ragtime music just encourages kids to hold hands and bounce their hips. Or, God forbid- give a peck on the cheek. It is highly un-Christian

I know exactly what culture does and does not refer to. The question is do you understand how cultures are formed?

What if the reason the culture has ended up that way is due to external influences?

Are the external influences evil for creating it or is the culture evil for "being evil"?

To an extent, that's definitely true.



They might well be. I don't think it's necessarily required, though.

Is not the pervading drug culture in America largely attributable to the messages of the music of the sixties and seventies? The voices, Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, Robert Plant, the music, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, John Bonham, the groups, Cream, Yardbirds, Grateful Dead, such talent, such creativity, such tragedy, such addiction, so many deaths!
Music can and does affect us, people DO get pulled into lifestyles that hurt them.
Ask Brian Jones.
or Amy Winehouse.
Or Janis Joplin.
Or Jimi Hendrix.
Or Jim Morrison.
Or Florence Ballard.
The list goes on.

Sylkat

I hate to point this out - but you might want to consider exactly what part your own culture played in shaping theirs since yours happens to be the dominant culture, as well as to what extent it shaped it.

Slavery, racism, classism, socio-economics, politics, Christianity and the dominant culture in general throughout that time all played a part in shaping the culture into what it is today.

I am referring to the entire American continent (north and south) in that particular part. In much of South America in the subculture you are talking about, the same style of music is popular, and the violence promotion is prominent within it. I hardly think that the same phenomenon would evolve in multiple countries in such similar ways without these external factors playing a very large part.

Last edited by Kjas on 17 Apr 2012, 12:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Oh THATS what this is about.

Im over a certain age, so you dont need to apologize for not likeing rap to me!

Go ahead and hate it. Doesnt make you a racists.

Because you hate the sound of it, because its not recognizable as music, or because you dont like the content of some of the lyrics, or because of whatever. Dont even need to give a reason!
Just go ahead and hate it.

It doesnt make you racist!

Know African Americans (including one party deejay) who hate it too.

In my experience love or lack thereof of rap music correlates with age, and has nothing to do with skin color anyway.

My own take: I can see the value of rap, but I can also see why some people dont value it.

Now... I used to have a friend back in the nineties who hated the group Boyz-II-Men. Thats different. Hating Boyz-II-Men is like hating motherhood and apple pie! And he was a notorius racist.

some of those wouldnt have had it any other way, despite how unhealthy it was to them.

some would.

Honestly, I think that beach music ought to be almost a model as a form of music to be played by a minority to a dominant ethnic group. There is nothing in history that did more to win over white teenagers during the 1950s than beach music, the best of which was played by black musicians who had an R&B background. Black people in the Southeastern USA owe A LOT to black musicians who played beach music.

And why? Because it was wholesome, fun music that genuinely made people feel good. It wasn't about how tough you were or how much money you had, and the love songs from it were about silly infatuation, not about broken hearts. It was honest music. It made young white folk really seriously start to think, "a black guy was there when I fell in love with my wife. So why can't he be there when we go out to eat or go to a movie? Or be my coworker?" It really helped change the world.

Slavery in the U.S. ended a century and a half ago, and it was ended completely, and wilfully by the "race" who started it.
Countless laws have been changed and added to bring equal treatment for all since that time.
If the great-great grandchildren 150 years later are still steaming mad, literally about to boil over, so that they feel they must call for violence against other sets of great-great grandchildren who had nothing to do with slavery whatsoever... that isn't because of slavery. By this time, in the 21st century, with laws enforcing equal rights to the extent that laws can (which is quite a significant extent indeed), anger of that peaking level is a personal issue that needs to be dealt with internally, and by and within the communities where it is found. (We can all use that.)

If slavery 150 years ago makes people steaming mad to the point of praising and recommending racial killings and rapes, then how beyond anger should a Jew be, seeing that the Holocaust was only half that long ago? Yet, Jews don't advocate murders and rapes, or anything equivalent.




Welcome to Earth. All parties must take responsibility for their own actions, and that includes stopping the hate where it starts: in their own hearts. Violence or the advocation thereof does no one any good. He who lives by the sword will die by the sword. The answer is in love and forgiveness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War



Try "children" or "the people themselves" - legal segregation persisted into the 1960s, which is well within the lifetimes of a large percentage of people living today. Inequality persists after laws are changed.



I don't know quite what this all is getting at but I don't see how objecting to violent lyrics is objectionable. I don't know what culture revolves PRIMARILY around violence, though, except for gangs, which have lots of police forces tasked with monitoring them and keeping them from committing violence.

Its my civic duty as a deejay to translate this for non Southerners.
He is NOT talking about what Yankees mean by "beach music" which is usually either California surf music by the likes of the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and Dick Dale. Nor does he mean Jimmy Buffet.

He's talking about mid-fourties to mid sixites Black R+B music. Broadly- the era of Louis Jordan up to and including sixties Motown by the Temps and the Tops. Its a category of Black music that existed in the minds of white people in the south. In your workaday world you would listen to country, but when you went to the beach you would cut loose and listen to funky r+b. Since it was associated with going to the beach in the south they came to call it "beach music".

The heyday of Beach music was around 1960, and it geographic locus was myrtle beach South Carolina, where you danced "the shag"(akin to swing/handjive) to the Tams, or to the Drifters, and of course the song "Sixty Minute Man" by the Dominoes.

Great stuff.

Actually it wasnt always squeeky clean. Much of it ( including the defining beach music song "Sixty Minute Man") was actually rather raunchy, but that was part of the artistry- the raunchiness was cloaked in much more clever wordplay and double entendre than the raunchiness of modern rap.

I can relate.
I am often accused of being anti-semitic, when it is the politics of the state of Israel I disagree with.

are you calling a culture evil? or the people within a culture evil? or their actions evil?

the music isn't taking any actions on its own, it is simply the way that some members of the culture advocate their cultural values. so i am not sure what you mean when you're saying that evil has no right to exist.

i'd appreciate if you did not respond sarcastically to me as you did to Kjas. it is disrespectful, unnecessary, and bad form in debate.

Hate and violence are wrong. Promoting it gleefully in songs is wrong. Racism can go from and to any ethnic people. (I've heard that last one denied before, by the way. Maybe you will deny it too.)

Requested Ragtime Phrase Repetition in Same Thread #1 of Many to Come: As I said earlier, I am against any "culture of violence". As a feminist, maybe you could actually agree with me that rape is bad, and shouldn't be promoted in popular and thus highly behavior-influencing songs? I want less rapes. You want less rapes. Let's agree to agree. Less songs praising rape equals less rape -- I don't know how much less, but less, and less is a good thing.


Sarcasm is quite common in some of the greatest debates in history, but I wasn't employing it with Kjas. Sometimes it's only in the eye of the beholder. I'm not being sarcastic in this post, by the way. I'm being overly literal, because you often (extremely often) request me to explain my posts. In fact, no one on WP comes even close to the number of times you ask me to explain my posts. So I'm being extra clear, that's all. After all, there's a power differential here.

this is not actually true, and once again you are turning the debate personal - just like i pointed out in the other thread. you are going to want to work on that as it prevents you from properly addressing people's actual arguments because you are choosing to focus on them on a personal level.

when you say that promoting violence gleefully in songs is wrong, that is different from disagreeing with an entire culture. so i am not sure what your point is, exactly. are you thinking that you should be permitted to disagree with an entire culture because some songs by some members promote violence?

by the way, this was sarcasm: