04w13:1 Dirapideerap Posted March 22nd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 13 number 1 (dirapideerap) ——————————————————————— Rap’s last tape | Nick Crowe http://tinyurl.com/3727b “[…] even farmers in Devon have swapped their overalls for Adidas trainers and puffa jackets […] For a genre that is 25 years old this year, hip hop has little to show for its maturity. While its influence has stretched into the shires and beyond, walk down any megastore hip hop aisle and scowling back at you is a line-up of the same kind of hardmen as a decade ago. […] Repetitive images of material excess and recidivism continue to dominate the commercial rap market, and while production techniques have evolved to become the most sophisticated in pop music, rapping itself – the essence of hip hop culture – has not developed in at least a decade. […] In an essay last year in the Hudson Review, the poet (and head of America’s National Endowment for the Arts) Dana Gioia deconstructed rap’s prosody, holding up its rhythmic vitality as a contrast to the weakness of free verse. Gioia argued that rap represents a reconnection with fundamental principles of rhythm that literary poets – in their effete self-consciousness – have long since abandoned: ‘Rap characteristically uses the four-stress, accentual line that has been the most common meter for spoken popular poetry in English from Anglo-Saxon verse… to Rudyard Kipling.'” Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture | Dana Gioia http://www.hudsonreview.com/gioiaSp03.html “The end of print culture raises many troubling questions about the position of poetry amid these immense cultural and technological changes. What will be the poet’s place in a society that has increasingly little use for books, little time for serious culture, little knowledge of the past, little consensus on literary value, and—even among intellectuals—little faith in poetry itself? […] No driver can negotiate a sudden turn in the road by looking backward, and neither can a critic accurately see what is most innovative in contemporary poetry through the now-antiquarian assumptions of Modernism and the avant-garde. Those powerful ideas once produced great art, but now nearly a century old, they reflect a culture without radio, talking-films, television, videocassettes, computers, cellphones, satellite dishes, and the Internet.[…]Roland Barthes, a creature of print culture, saw the world as a text and announced ‘the death of the author.’ Anyone attentive to the new popular poetry sees the antithesis—the death of the text. American culture conditioned by electronic media and a celebrity culture based on personalities has given birth to a new kind of author, the amplified bard ” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Monday 22 March 2004 @ 1:54 PM
