Ray Charles - "Rap is not music"

Music is in the ear of the beholder. Any art form is subject to one’s personal perception.
There are some who might not consider paint randomly splashed on a canvas spread out on the floor to be "art", yet Jackson Pollock’s paintings are worth a fortune.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
Ray Charles feels that "Rap is not music"...

I mostly agree.
I find it ugly, arrogant, vulgar, ungrammatical and only occasionally has some semblance of melody, "sampled" from older tunes.

Ellingto said, "It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing".
So does that make Debussy’s "Claire de Lune" meaningless?
Of course not.

Music has devolved to a point where it is mostly computer generated drivel and it has lost the beauty and soul of the great blues and R&B artists of the past.
Black music, in particular, used to be rich with melody and rhythm back when the Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Aretha Franklin, et al., were in their prime.
Now... did you see Rhianna at half time?
Pathetic, and getting worse every day.
Truly sad.

But - is Rap music?
Perhaps it is - but just not something I care to listen to.

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Marc Stager

Nitwit sez:"Yet another overgeneralized and stuck in the past response.
Made even more interesting by the fact that Rihanna is not even American."

When something is worth listening to, I don’t care if it is a day or a century old, I will give it my time and attention. Rap is simply, vulgar trash. Rhianna not American? I know - so what? Does that make her music any more tolerable?

The music of lowlifes and criminals. Check out the stats of murdered rappers here:

Trash. Period.

Rolling Stone to Ray Charles: How did it feel to be labeled the Genius?
"I ignored it. I’m not a genius. Art Tatum – that man was a genius. Charlie Parker was a genius..".

Bet you never even heard of Tatum or Bird.

Rap/Hip-Hop is arrogant, destructive, ugly Ebonics drivel - ignorance, the bane of genius. It is not only not music, rap is a pervasive and debilitating form of mental illness.

Here are a few practitioners of the rap genre of whom Hip-Hop lovers can be proud...

https://www.ranker.com/list/rappers-who-killed-people/ranker-hip-hop

Is there any other form of music (or "music") which can even come close to claiming this distinction?

Nice Ad hominem, response, Nitwit.

Trash. Period.

I'm done here.