Kulam Medabrim al Arie's Thesis

Arie is writing a thesis on Israeli hip hop. If you want to read it, feel free. It's 80 pages and academic. If you want to know what he thinks, read the blog. And make comments. Cause if he didn't care what you thought, he wouldn't make this blog. For real.

Name:
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel

So I made aliyah. And I have a real job. I wonder why I still keep this blog.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

The Premise

So people say that hip hop is the CNN of Black America (Chuck D said it first, but people love to quote him). And they love to say it's the CNN of the streets (and misquote Chuck D); or of the youth, or of the information age (what the fuck? isn't CNN the CNN of the information age? Was there CNN before the information age? ). And somebody, somebody I like no less, says that hip hop is the CNN of the third world. Now that's all well and good, but whites listen to hip hop, and so do adults, and so do people who don't really know what the streets are. And I'm willing to bet that people in the first world have a lot more access to hip hop than people in the third world (to buying it, seeing it on MTV, downloading it off the internet, etc).
Fine, Arie, you say, so people listen to hip hop. But Chuck D meant that because more blacks make hip hop. Sure, that's true, but who does CNN belong to, the broadcasters or the viewers? There are a hell of a lot more viewers. And there are a lot more listeners of hip hop than there are artists. And a lot of these listeners could give two shits about what happens in the streets or the third world. But they do like to hear the word play, the beats, the samples, or whatever their local Clear Channel urban station tells them they want to hear.
So guess what. Israelis listen to radio. And they watch TV. And they sometimes like what they hear/see. So some of them started to rap. And Israelis liked listening to people rap in their own language. With lyrics as deep as "hummus makes you stupid," who blames them? And then a few of them decided to deal with problems. Because that's what musicians, poets, and most people who express themselves do. And then, a few had the brilliant idea to talk about their problems only after they became popular. So people listened to them. So they see hip hop, and they see NWA dealing with life in the ghetto, and they go, the ghetto started with Jews. We live in a ghetto. We're surrounded by people who are different from us! Let's be like the Americans and make our hip hop like that. And Israelis like that. So that's what they do.
So whoever said that Israeli hip hop is an oppressor turning the tool of the oppressed against them, you're an idiot. And to all those people who think that you need to be a minority or oppressed or silenced to do real hip hop, check it out. In Israel, everyones a minority, and everyone's oppressed, and nobody listens to each other, so they may as well be silenced. So Israeli hip hop makes perfect sense. To me anyway.

1 Comments:

Blogger Ari said...

It's really starting to fucking piss me off everytime someone has to fucking ask how Israelis can rap when they're not black. For, all you unenlightened fucks out there, rap is not genetically linked to skin color. I guess that's all.

1:19 PM  

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