Emma Hair
Staff Writer
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I try to avoid listening to the radio because I’m not a fan of the more popular music of the day; call me old-fashioned, or just plain weird, but I much prefer Disney and Broadway soundtracks.
Regardless, I am sometimes unable to avoid the radio or “popular” songs, and there’s a trend that I started noticing earlier this summer that, for me, began with Katy Perry’s hit song “California Girls”. That trend would be the featuring of popular rappers in songs such as the aforementioned Katy Perry hit, Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie”, and B.O.B’s “Airplanes”; there are others, but those are just the first few that come to my mind.
This new fad is really starting to get on my nerves for multiple reasons:
1. I don’t really like rap. I’m not saying that it’s a terrible thing that no one should listen to; I just don’t care for it. It’s hard to understand what they’re saying most of the time, and you can’t sing along to rap.
2. It makes the artists seem lazy. I mean just listen to “Love the Way You Lie”- how much did Rihanna actually have to write lyrics and music for?
“Just gonna stand there
And watch me burn
But that’s alright
Because I like
The way it hurts
Just gonna stand there
And hear me cry
But that’s alright
Because I love
The way you lie
I love the way you lie
I love the way you lie”
That’s about it; the rest of the song is Eminem rapping, which is essentially just a poem set to rhythm. True, there is some music in the background and Eminem sort of has a certain set of pitches that he assigns each word, but it is a lot easier to write a rap than it is to write an actual song.
The same thing could be said for “Airplanes”; the only part that could be considered part of a song is the chorus.
The reason I get so frustrated when this sort of thing happens in the music industry is because these artists are getting truck-loads of money and all they did was sing a few lines of music and then have some rapper come and do the rest of the lyrics. Can it really even be considered a song when the majority of it consists of some guy rapping?
3. The song title always says Ft. [insert rapper’s name here]. With the exclusion of “California Girls”, most of the song is performed by the rapper, so shouldn’t it be the other way around: Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie (Ft. Rihanna)”. Now, I do understand that that isn’t how it works, and that it’s Ft. [insert rapper here] because the other artists actually wrote the song, but I don’t like the rappers aren’t given more credit; I’d want more than just a little shout out in parenthesis if it was me.
Hopefully this “Rap Revolution” the music industry is going through will soon be over because I’m getting tired of my humming and singing being interrupted by background noise. I’m sure many of you disagree with me on this, but every man (or woman in this case) is entitled to their own opinion and I really don’t like rap.
There are some songs that I occasionally hear on the radio that I really wish would get more air time because they are devoid of rappers and have catchy melodies, but not annoyingly catchy like the “It’s a Small World” theme song; these songs include: Sara Bareilles’ “King of Anything” and Michael Buble’s “Haven’t Met You Yet”. Maybe one day these songs will be the popular ones and the raps featuring a little singing will be the songs you hardly ever hear, but this is one dream that I fear will probably never happen. Oh well, at least I still have a CD player in my car!
