Eminem Is Right | Mary Eberstadt
http://www.policyreview.org/dec04/eberstadt.html
“If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music – the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before – is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers. Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Eminem – these and other singers and bands, all of them award-winning top-40 performers who either are or were among the most popular icons in America, have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. Surprising though it may be to some, that answer is: dysfunctional childhood.”

How Hip-Hop Music is slowly transcending its circular culture | Stefan Braidwood
http://www.popmatters.com/music/features/040728-hiphop.shtml
“Hip-hop started out as a counter-culture expression of pain-laced, defiant joy by New York’s penniless and angry. You make studio time and instrumental tuition too expensive for me, place me in ghettos I lack any means to escape or improve, cut off the power to my housing block, keep me locked down in a miserable job for pathetic pay and generally treat me as a politically powerless and racially inferior minority? I will mix records together with no respect for their discrete heritage or creators; set your anthems as backing vocals for the rhymes I’ve spent my fruitless hours of drudgery whetting with pent-up bitterness; paint your greyly hideous constructions wildly, vibrantly beautiful; and funnel the electricity from your streetlights into my decks and speakers, to dance with my peers in new and explosive ways that pay homage to our frantic, cooped-up energy. And I will tell my people that they are beautiful, and that you cannot hold us forever, for this raucous, rhythmic, illegitimate music will bring us together, and in its crude but irresistible power we will find and share our impoverished strength and soul once more.”

All to Blame | Sum 41
http://www.lyricstop.com/w/werealltoblame-sum41.html
“And now we’re all to blame/ We’ve gone too far/ From pride to shame/ We’re hopelessly blissful and blind/ When all we need/ Is something true/ To believe/ Don’t we all?”

http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com
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