I know nothing about contemporary music, so I decided to read a profile of Megan Thee Stallion in the Guardian. It filled me in:
Her punchline-rich lyrics are wittily self-confident, humiliating men for their sexual failings and dismissing female rivals as “bitches thinkin’ they the shit when they really toilet water.”
Damn. That's poetry, folks.
I wonder whether she knows that "toilet water" is a term meaning light perfume. If so, then... that's a compliment, I guess? I'm obviously not the target audience.
no.
Is it mean to ask if Megan Thee Stallion realizes that stallions are male?
do you?
Why is Meafan gendering herself?
& why is RobMac contesting the gendering?
If I were the performer, rather than Meagan Thee Stallion, I would be Meagan Them.
but that's because you're mainly an idiot.
As a MAD Magazine subscriber, I will take that as a compliment.
I was wondering what her birth name was, so found my way to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Thee_Stallion where I came across:
She adopted the stage name "Megan Thee Stallion" because she was called a "stallion" in adolescence due to her height (5′10″)[10] and "thick" body frame:[13] voluptuous and statuesque women in the South are colloquially called stallions.[2]
[2] Ogunnaike, Lola (April 6, 2020). "Megan Thee Stallion Is Just Warming Up". Marie Claire. ISSN 0025-3049. Archived from the original on June 29, 2020. Retrieved June 27, 2020.
Finding those links in [2] left as an exercise to the reader given this comment system's allergic reaction to "too many" links in a comment.
So, if Method Man is the Ticalian Stallion, is he Trans?
get off my lawn!!!
This just points out the absurdity of trying to assign objective criticism to popular music. You can evaluate a musician's playing ability, the complexity of music, and, eventually, the historical influence of music, but in cases like this, none of that seems to be relevant. At the end of the day, almost everyone listens to music they identify with culturally.
People have different tastes in music.
Good tldr
ABSURD
If you think that's silly, check out modern country. Or rock. Or pop. Top-40 music is horrid these days.
Driving the other day we put on some local station that was playing a rerun of America's Top 40 from 1979. 40 songs and almost all of them (spanning several genres) were classics. The Stones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Donna Summer. Those were the days!
More into Can and Brian Eno at that point in my life. But I get where you're coming from.
I remember a bit that Steve Allen did back in the 70s where he did a dramatic reading of the lyrics to Hot Stuff and finished it by saying "I rest my case." I guess it was moderately funny but kind of misses the point of a song like Hot Stuff, which is a great song BTW.
So let's put the hashtag #grumpygrandpa on KDs post and on my previous comment.
I remembered that too. 1980 actually.
https://youtu.be/Wfj1zvx05h4?t=2207
He started that schtick in the 1950's with Be-Bop-A-Lula
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAyxatBvKfg
I knew Steve Allen was doing that bit for a long time, and it goes to show you how high poetry marks were never a requirement.
I came to comment on that exact Steve Allen bit re: "Hot Stuff", and that I had found him doing the same bit earlier. I am inordinately proud of myself from even remembering it was "Be-Bop-A-Lu-La".
I credit Steve Allen with turning me on to swing, and thence jazz, because when I was in HS I watched "The Benny Goodman Story" because he was in it. I then went to the library and listened to a Benny Goodman LP (remember those?) and was hooked.
Yes! Donna Summer's work with Giorgio Moroder stand the test of time, like Meagan Thee Stallion it's about female empowerment.
Personally, I’m looking forward to the Tina Turner documentary on HBO next week.
"When love congeals, it soon reveals, the faint aroma of performing seals..."
Those were the days.
"Damn. That's poetry, folks."
You were expecting Maya Angelou or Billie Holiday?
I don't know Kevin, you're playing the "kids these days" thing pretty hard.
If you want to gain an appreciation of rap, see if you can go back and find some of the blog posts Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about rap and what it meant to him, and how it connected to him. He has some videos linked. Listen to them. Read what he says about them, and what the commenters said.
That's probably going to work better than choosing some random new person. Now, if you're willing to dig into it, and listen to a lot of random new stuff while suspending judegement, that approach might work.
The thing is, putting you off is a feature of this music, not a bug. If you want to engage with it, you have to accept that. Beyonce's stuff, for instance, is not addressed to me on multiple levels. Nor should it be. Of course I'm not going to relate to it immediately.
Similarly, read/watch Michael Eric Dyson's material re: rap.
I don't get rap, but that's ok - it's not for me. I know enough not to take uneducated potshots at it though.
"Old white guy complains about hip hop, news at 11."
Seriously. I was just complaining to myself about getting older just aches and pains. And then I see this, and feel a bit better.
Lots of backpacker shit at that link?
I hope not, but I fear it be so.
Choosing backpacker as a hip-hop head is like being a rock guy & choosing the Decemberists.
Most pop music is meant to be heard while driving in a car and doesn't really work far outside that context.
And the audio setup most people have reflect that fact. Size -- and physics -- counts.
No YOU get off my lawn!
Actually, about a year or two ago, I was with my teenage daughter in some store and this female hip-hop artist was playing over the pa and the song was rather silly and I asked the kid if she knew who this was and she said, "Megan Thee Stallion".
Me: "Wut?"
Kid: "Megan Thee Stallion"
Me: "Stallion? It's a woman, right?"
Kid: "It doesn't matter, dad."
Sad to say, grownups (as a group) do have better taste in music than the kidz. Same thing with books, of course. No one thinks 'The Magic Tree House' series is high art, nor do they argue that adult ignorance of lack of appreciation thereof constitutes prima facie evidence that they're out of touch.
No one thinks that is true.
Since my ex is a child librarian who reports regularly on the Kidz These Days beat, well, you've just destroyed whatever credibility you may have thought you had.
The year Chuck Berry released 'Maybelline' (1955) the top songs on the Billboard 100 were
1 "Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White" Perez Prado
2 "Rock Around the Clock" Bill Haley & His Comets
3 "The Yellow Rose of Texas" Mitch Miller
4 "Autumn Leaves" Roger Williams
5 "Unchained Melody" Les Baxter
6 "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" Bill Hayes
Great adult taste.
7 "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" The Four Aces
8 "Sincerely" The McGuire Sisters
9 "Ain't That a Shame" Pat Boone
10 "The Wallflower (Dance with Me, Henry)" Georgia Gibbs
Not a Baby Shark to be found.
I prefer today.
Honestly, I’m impressed. I don’t think I’ve ever come up with anything even half that savage in my life.
No, you're a tremendous savage.
If you mean to say the part of melody isn't as prominent as it used to be, then you're right.
I blame those teeny tiny speakers the kids are buying these days.
Rap isn't music - at least not what I think of as music. The closest I ever came to enjoying rap was when Sam Malone was doing the sports on TV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg9ruee3Vos
Rap's been around for 30+ years and Kevin's just now trying to figure it out by listening to a flavor-of-the-month Grammy winner. Sheesh.
Rap is older than me.
In fact, it's so old, the now 75 year old Debbie Harry was "rapping" 40 years ago.
S/o to Fab 5 Freddy.
The first "rap" song I ever heard, on WMSE, back in around 1981.
Bought King of Rock as a college senior and have loved Run-DMC ever since.
I remember the day I found out WMSE had limits: was listening to the mid-AM show in Spring 2007 or '08 & the dj accidentally played the unedited version of "If I Only Had a Brain" ny MC 900 Foot Jesus. She cut the song straightaway, & apologized.
I thought college radio was pure.
Then again, in my own college radio days in the late 90s, I got called to the carpet for complying with FCC rules on PSA by playing the Spanish, Russian, & Vietnamese language carts.
Halfwit psychotic vulgarity isn't wit however loud you make it.
'Wow, it sounds just like idiots I know!' isn't actually a good thing.
Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
~ Oscar Wilde
I'm an unreconstructed rocker. That's the kind of music I've been writing, playing and singing since the 60s, and I'm still at it. I view the ascendance of hip hop and rap warily, but I know some things about popular music, so I'm not particularly offended or alarmed.
When I was a kid my parents (and their whole generation) listened to the music they had fallen in love with (and to) in their youth. It was outdated, but it was their music, and they didn't like the rock'n'roll their kids listened to. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, our music was specifically designed to piss off the older generation, as I'm sure theirs was. So it is with rap, but here's the thing: the big band music of my parents is still around, still viable, and still has its practitioners and fans, as does be-bop, old-time rock'n'roll, disco, new wave, and all the other hit genres you can think of. None of those styles dominate the charts or the award shows any more, but none of them have gone away, either, nor are they likely to, at least for a good long time.
The musical form that I think of as "mine" is on the sidelines now, as much a relic as Benny Goodman, but it still has its adherents, and I don't feel sad that Little Richard or Mick Jagger don't have big hit recordings these days. I don't "get" today's most popular music, but I know it's because I'm not supposed to, and it's OK.
So Kevin, enjoy what you enjoy. Inevitably, you and I have been passed by, and it's not necessary to make remarks suggesting that what "the kids" are listening to is no good. The best of it will endure, and as long as you have Spotify, YouTube or Pandora you'll always be able to dig any music you choose.
I do wonder, though, if an elderly married couple in 2060 will be nostalgically listening to Megan Thee Stallion's Savage remix and fondly calling it "our song."
I disagree emphatically. If all you're listening to fifty years later is music that was current in your teens and twenties, well, can you say 'arrested development'?
Never even heard of Jimmy Blythe when I was a teen, for example, and if I had actually heard any of his stuff I would have dismissed it instantly. Now? I think he's da bomb. Listen to this cut of 'Mecca Flat Blues' featuring Priscilla Stewart and I dare you to tell me it's not The Good Stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIRZy4OC_1g
@ScentOfViolets
That would be a good point, if you knew it to be true about me.
But I didn't, so I didn't. There's a reason for the conditional in the English language.
I think our generation was subversively lulled into liking our parents music because it was the music of Looney Tunes and the other cartoons we watched incessantly on our black and white TVs. I recently found myself enjoying Annette Hanshaw singing Would You Like To Take A Walk and realized it was sung in a Porky Pig cartoon.
@iamr4man
👍
That Marlboro Man music put me on to Copeland, I tell you what :-0
But it's hard to explain a liking for, say, 'classical' music or Bebop, as some sort of rebellion. IMHO, of course. TL;DR: There's a reason why most adults idea of their favorite dinner is mac & cheese followed by cake. And it _ain't_ rebellion.
@ScentOfViolets
Your exceptions are fine, but they don't prove the rule, because exceptions don't. And you seem to be saying that everybody's different (...a liking for 'classical' music) and everybody's the same (mac and cheese). Are you just being contrary, or what's your point?
Uh, that most people's tastes normally change as they age? And that it's hard to see how a preference for one thing or another can be so readily categorized as 'rebellion'?
Do try to keep up, there's a good lad.
@ScentOfViolets
I guess it's hard for you to see.
Harry Roy, Original Catblogger begs to differ about 1960s rock n' roll being a break in musical tradition in being made to tick off the parents.
“D amn. That's poetry, folks.”
Yeah sure, I’ll join with others here in saying that we could offer the same type of sarcasm to music, art, theater and poetry going back as far as you want. It’s nice that mr. drum took the time to read about something that is meant for him about as much as the signals from Alpha Centauri. But don’t explore Megan Thee Stallion and expect to find Peggy Lee.
I watch the Grammys mainly to see/hear acts that were nowhere on my radar (like how I watch the Tonys cause I know I’ll never get to see Broadway plays) and I enjoyed the recent Grammys, even if some of those acts are definitely not my cuppa tea.
@bebopman
At the Grammy level it's all about $ales. The tuxedoed and gowned 40-somethings in the audience grinning and groovin' along with DaBaby are just trying to make sure they are still relevant, in case a record exec or producer might be watching.
All true, but I still got hype from Bad Bunny's appearance on SNL.
& to be honest, the best musical hits I have seen on SNL the last three or so years -- since i started watching again (for first time since 2009) -- have been the acts rooted in hip-hop, dance, & ambient grooves. Travis Scott, Halsey, Bad Bunny...
The rock stuff, Greta van Fleet, Strokes*, Phoebe Bridgers** -- crap.
*Legacy act. In a coupla ways.
**I wasn't offended by her guitar smashing failure because she had the gall to be a woman smashing a guitar, or trying to, at least. I was offended by the fact that her heart, as with any contemporary indie-type rocker, man, woman, cis, trans, intersex, queer, whatever have you, wasn't in it. She was aping the old, Townshendian ways of rock destruction to both claim it as her own (unexpectedly) but also mock the futility of it. (Breaking a guitar IS hard.) It was a freshman team level Pavement move. Somehow, Malkmus pulls it off, but one is more likely to be Rock*a*Teens or Royal Trux than Nation of Ulysses.
Yeah, that second artist effect can be a real joy-killer.
Machine Gun Kelly hits harder as a rock performer than Phoebe. & no offense to my ex-coworker, whose son is a huge MGK fan, but Machine Gun is soft as hell.
Tru dat 🙁
The first "rap" song I ever heard, on WMSE, back in around 1981.
Bought King of Rock as a college senior and have loved Run-DMC ever since.
Does Milwaukee have one of the weakest rap legacies for a city with a substantial Black & brown population?
We have, what, Arrested Development (S/o Rufus King H.S.), Juiceboxxx, Klassik, &...? Pretty barren.
Citizen King & Little Blue Crunchy Things were known to get a little funky, but they weren't strictly rap/hip-hop.
Check out some Public Enemy, Digable Planets, Us3, Spearhead, Fugees, or, for something more current, Sault.