Limitations of Rap, of Rock ,of music in general

One big thing I am often wondering about rap is whether or not it can ever successfully embrace "actual character acting" or not. What I mean by this is I wonder whether it's really possible that a rapper could come off as believable, if he or she were to rap a story not about the modern inner-city, but rather about topics of fiction, or even history.

At first, it sounds absurd to imagine a rapper talking about anything but the inner-city and being apart of some street gang, but whats weird is that, in rock and roll, as I have written before, this has all already happened -- to a degree -- and sounded completely believable. When Zeppelin sings about discovering the Lord of the Rings character Gollum, "in the darkest depths of Mordor", in the song "Ramble On", it sounds completely believable to me. This is the same case for a song like "The Wizard" by Black Sabbath, when Ozzy says things like "...misty morning, clouds in the sky, without warning, the wizard walks by...casting his shadow, weaving his spell, funny clothes..tinkling bell.."

In 1965 one might have thought that lyrics like this in rock would have sounded out of place, for the same reason they now seem like they'd sound out of place in a rap song: Rock music was being associated with the latest technology, with the latest trends in the big metropolises of the world, so how on Earth could we possibly start applying these ancient stories to it? How could we put a fictional wizard or a fictional dwarf in a rock song? A wizard in a rock song almost seems as ridiculous as talking about the problems of, say, a down home house wife in a rock song, as well. It just seems out of place. Imagine, for example, lyrics like this in a rock song:

"My baby been screamin' all night long

He just won't sleep, a woman is going mad!

My baby just keep screamin' all damn night long

Why won't he sleep? It makes a momma so sad!" 

Even in 2017, this sort of style rock song , about a momma struggling to put her baby to sleep, and getting upset over it -- to the point of screaming like Ozzy over it -- still seems sort of out of place. This is because it never really actually happened...we never really had a female character who sang of stuff like this in rock and roll... and so now, in our own time, what has happened is that the genre feels as though it can only write of certain stories. I have written of this at length in other posts, but basically a rock song has a few general topics it feels it can cover, and almost none of them include parenting or normal home life, more or less.That subject feels just as off limits in rock as wizards feel off limits in rap. 

Bob Dylan is considered a very down home writer, for example, and yet even the vast majority of his songs tend to have at least something exotic about them. He writes about far off places like Mozambique, he tells you stories of larger than life figures from the Civil War, he sings about "disappearing in the highlands of Scotland"...the list goes on and on. No, Bob never wrote of wizards or elves in his songs, but he still usually paitns a pretty "different" landscape than the "real world" folks are used to. It might sound odd to some readers, but many of Dylans songs were very foreign experiences for me, when I first began to listen to them. Why were they foreign? Because, before I heard him, most of what I was accustomed to hearing was rap music, and rap music is, as I keep stressing, always in the same place: The Inner-city. /End.

When listening to rappers like Juelz Santana, Nas, Biggie Smalls, or Puff Daddy, its a pretty rare thing to hear about anything beyond New York City, or some other place that is just like New York. Rap songs not only rarely take flights of fancy in terms of the imagination like Ozzy Osbourne did with Black Sabbath, they also never even really take flights of history , either. Rap music is ironically plain, in fact, in comparison to other genres. At first glance, it seems like so much is going on with the genre, because it's fast and vulgar and new, but rap music is very plain deep down. It never references anything that is truly outside of itself...more or less. It's as thoug history has never happened. I  find this sad. Very sad.

But then I also always find myself asking the question I asked in the first paragraph, as well: Would it even sound good, if a rapper tried to take flights of fantasy or history? Or would it just wind up sounding absolutely ridiculous? Would listeners really be able to make sense of it? And what would old school rap fans say if it were to happen? More likely than not, they would hail it as "the death of the genre". They would say that rap was finally being turned into a "product" , because it was leaving its "inner city" roots.

In a way, I again stress, this was also exactly what happened to Ozzy, originally, when Sabbath first debuted: People were very confused by the themes he was trying to delve into, in my opinion. They seemed out of place and weird. In the early days, rock songs were  supposed to be about going on tour, about flying in a jet, about getting chicks. Now Ozzy is here writing about wizards!   This confusion was even more pronounced when it came to a seminal rock band like the Misfits, from the States, who wrote almost solely about horror movies and ghosts, etc. The Misfits were particularly weird too, once you remember that, unlike Sabbath, they generally did not do heavy metal style songs....they instead just did 1950s melodies with distorted guitars! So this was very strange. It was the reworking of a genre that had been thought to be finished. Glen Danzig never writes any songs about the fact that he is, in truth, an actual rock star. His songs instead exist in a sort of "world within a world". He is constantly in character, it seems, when he hits the microphone. He is not a rock star when he sings, like Mick Jagger often was, he is instead a "ghoul" telling you ghoulish tales. Again, it somehow sounds completely believable much of the time, even in spite of the fact that we know Danzig is telling you the story using modern technology. It somehow still sounds very believable when he starts playing at a vampire who just wants to collect hundreds of skulls, etc....

So now I will tell my reader what I wish I could see when I look out into the world of femme rap that my blog is now obsessed with: I wish I could see girls who were rapping about the inner-city, sure, and the hard life, but I also wish I could see girls who, once they were succesful, could rap about other things too. I wish I could have a femme rapper who went in and out of character at will. For me it would not be a problem...it would be easily believable. I would love to watch a femme rapper with a name like, say, "BloOdY MaRy", debut, and I would love for the entire debut album of Bloody Mary to deal with nothing but horror topics in an extreme light. I would like to hear songs from her about how she's friends with wizards, black elves, white elves..about how she has traveled through the "Death Realms" and the "Highlands" ... how she's traveling through portals , seen Wonderland, all of it. Yet I know its going to be a damn long wait for all of this. From the looks of it now, it seems like it seriously might be another 30 years until something like this really starts to happen frequently in the music world. Which I think really sucks!

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