News-Record.com

"Time for CDs to burn"? You know what that will accomplish? It will increase the sales figures for the rap stars, that's what it'll do. You want to shut down rap? STOP BUYING CRAP. Simple, huh? The minute producing a rap album becomes a losing proposition, it will vanish from the shelves, just like disco.

I agree with you, Eric. Burning CD’s is not THE answer. It does indeed have to do with what human beings think and do: which is what the Scriptures attest throughout. And indeed, life and death are in the words we utter, which are spawned by thoughts. Jesus taught that a person has committed adultery if they even think it – in principle. Their heart is in that place when if they begin to entertain lustful thoughts for an extended time, they will most likely act on it.
I thought this quote was very interesting from the article:
“A few weeks ago, at a women's conference hosted by the Greater Allen AME Cathedral of New York, the Rev. Claudette Copeland said that we all have a capacity to either do great good or great harm. The former leads to experiencing God's ever-increasing glory and the latter just leads to misery. Rappers have that same capacity to use their ability to rap--which could be seen as a God-given gift--to glorify God, to edify people, and to spread love.”
Imus is just so not the problem here. He is just the lightning rod that all the concerns about racism and bad lyrics are now striking. Most all the hoopla flying about in the media is far from the mark. The answer is not cutting off the “symptom” of rap music or any other infectious evil influence. The answer is the Gospel – preached and believed - in other words, changed hearts. The heart in Scripture often means something like mind/motivation center. The lesson of history is that if a society allows evil to get a foothold and to run rampant the ever-increasing consequences will be geometric in scale. Hello! America. VT!
The blame is two-fold: the Church for being liberal. slack and self-indulgent / and the culture for being atheistic, lust-driven and materialistic. All that impedes the Gospel, within the church and without, fosters the general increase of sin, despair, evil and crime. Count on it. See it all around. Wachet Auf!!
In the end rap is a black cultural thing and will have to be dealt with by the black community primarily – although white kids are getting into it big time as well. But it’s not just rap, its white rock, grunge movies, internet porn et al., the drug culture and an educational system that has chosen godless humanism as its official religion.
But the sin-blinded mind just cannot see the forest for the trees. So, until eyes of faith are opened by the Gospel, we will most certainly continue down the road to perdition and chaos. Poor foolish Imus is just a puny little tree that got cut down, while we missed the big forest again. Par for the course.

It's nice to agree with Eric for once; all burning CDs would do is increase the influence and income of rap trash-talkers. As Jesus said, it is what comes out of a man that defiles him. I have never been able to understand the appeal of rap anyway. Vulgar, nasty sentiments recited in bad doggerel to a monotonous drum beat ranks with the elephant-dung school in my scale of "art." People who commit rap are no more artists than rap is music. How can there be "music" with no variation in pitch? If rap is music then reading an Italian newspaper aloud is opera. But if we don't teach kids to appreciate good art, they'll gravitate to bad art. Refusse to teach them good manners and they won't be civil by nature, they'll sink to the lowest level permitted them. Civility isn't in our nature, it has to be taught. Our natural bent is toward trash. You don't have to teach kids to be bad, they do that naturally on their own. I'm very grateful to my parents for exposing me to Chopin and Beethoven in my youth so that in my age they did not depart from me.
But I agree with Eric that the solution is not to buy the crap, a solution I've been happily practicing since the plague began.

I beg to differ about Chris Ofili's art, which incorporates elephant dung specifically to call attention to his family's heritage of traditions from Nigeria, where the dung is used in some tribal (Yoruban?) ceremonies as a sign of respect and honor. His art challenges people to learn about another culture, and is not intended to denigrate Christianity. Ofili himself is an extremely civil and erudite man.

Beethoven, that barely civil man, by contrast, would hardly quailfy as a nice bible-believing Christian. Audiences were perplexed and many deeply disturbed by his violent, flailing conducting of music he couldn't himself hear. Many, eventually, did admire the works, and he was gioven accolades, but not for "civility" in an age that embraced the Sublime. Still others never appreciated Beethoven's odd and dissonant Missa Solemnis, for example. As late as 1934, the critic A.J.B. Hutchings described both Beethoven's and Mozart's religious liturgical music (and he was hardly alone) as "vulgar". And the Second movement of the 7th Symphony (a personal touchstone for me) consists largely of monotonus repetition of a very simple line, barely qualifying as a "melody". The famous Fifth is nothing if not a maddened shout, a hammering on the door of Fate, an impassioned argument against the peregrinations of an indifferent "god".

I don't know about Chopin, other than his torrid affair(s) with the likes of Georges Sand, et. al..

I once knew a person who proclaimed that he would never again watch a movie with Rock Hudson in it, because Hudson had turned out to be gay. I asked him if that applied to all gay artists, like Tchaikovsky. So far as I know, he never responded.

I think most people are aware of the failures and fallenness of western artists over the centuries (maybe not); and the fact that their art was just that: their art, grounded in, and expressive of, their cultural traditions. Their personal deficits and eccentricities, given the weight and inertia of their cultural milieu, do not substantially detract from the artistic merits of their works.

The point, I think, that was being made is that European art music is light years ahead of rap, and other fertility-oriented rhythm genres, in its ability to lift the consciousness to higher realms of thought and emotion. Other cultural traditions are also capable of such elevation.

But give a culture a steady diet of rap and heavy metal and you may well end up with morally-degenerate primitives and misfits (the videos AND the lyrics tell the story). Unfortunately, this seems to be the case in our rapidly declining nation today. I’m not saying that all syncopation is “evil;” just that driving “hot” forms of it, where the goal is to stimulate sexual impulses, need to be avoided; especially if that’s the only diet one consumes.

The monotonous sex beat will take you somewhere: beats have consequences. Herr Bach always takes ME to a God place. That’s because I am a Christian. But I truly believe anyone, from any tradition, would also go to a high place. The same can’t be said to rap, et al. Syncopation, as a musical element, is an integral part of all musical expression, from Bach to Boo Daddy (or whatever). Many forms of jazz, which is a fusion of highly syncopated pulse schemes and Euro harmonic and formal traditions, are generally not in this category.

I too am grateful for my early exposure to elevating music. As a rock musician I went to places I would rather not visit again – ever! Some forms of rock, of course, are highly sophisticated, and do not use driving hot rhythms. The perennial problem with rock is its association with drugs and “free” sex. The key is to use wisdom and discernment in regard to syncopation/lyrics; not to freak whenever syncopation is heard within 50 feet.