Foshizzle my nizzle

My niece is in a hip hop group at Venice High. Practices allllllthetime. Hoping to see her at Christmas vacation, if her dad will bring her up to see me....

In case this thread seems to start out a bit weird ... it's a collection of posts from another thread (called Hello ...) thats split apart into a new thread of its own!

For example, the quote below from Sofia was in a post that had some other stuff as well, and which hasnt been moved to this thread. But it was the one that started this whole discussion on hip-hop, that we now made into a new thread, off.



Eminem has some genius lyrics. Look up "cleaning out my closet", for example (tho you have to hear him spit it all out). He revolutionised hip hop like PE and NWA did a generation earlier, with his lyrics.

In the 80s, it was all (=mostly) lyrical fun. Then PE came with the hard-hitting politics. Then NWA came with the hard-hitting street reality. But by the late 90s, all the hip hoppers were just endlessly trying to outdo each other in who was the baddest gangsta, who had the biggest gun and used it on the most people ...

In comes Eminem, and he's as tough as any of them, but he raps about his mother. And that he was hurt. He made rap personal, without ever losing his street cred.

I used to dislike Eminem. I heard his shocker lyrics about his ex and his violence, and I thought, yawn. White guy reinventing the wheel ten years after Straight Outta Compton. And I didnt like the sound of his voice half as much. But that was before I got to really listen to it.

I was forced to - Anastasia was playing it all summer. And she meant business - this was no background music, it got her hurt in there, too. So I started listening. And I was impressed. This kid was earnest - look through all the posturing, and you see he's earnest, about his emotions (when did hip-hoppers have emotions before, apart from mourning drive-by victim homies?) - about his daughter, about his ambition to make it, his struggle with getting away from his roots without betraying them, about how ******* hard it is.

You should see 8 Mile Road. Again, I was sceptic - MTV star goes big screen. But its a straightforward movie: he's telling his story. A loner with a big mouth and a heart of gold, who just does what he gotta do. I dont know how it relates to real-life superstar-Eminem now - I dont watch TV. But its in line with the stories he tells in his lyrics. And those stories are stories any number of people can tell you. The track 8 Mile Road became Anastasia's anthem. There's a thread about him somewhere here, btw. Lemme look it up, the link will be <<Eminem>>.

Download these songs and listen to the Lyrics. Rap isnt bad it just depends on the artist.

Common - The Light , Common - Come Close, Common - Ghetto Heaven

I like Common!

I like his style, the feel of his music, and I like his brains.

I was just fading out as rap was fading in... got some MC Lyte and a tiny bit of Public Enemy, that's it.

I like reading the lyrics, though.

I was one of those white kids who got turned on to hip hop by PE. "Bring the Noise" - I remember hearing that for the first time! Damn ...

Until then I'd been mostly into ... err ... <blushes> ... like, the Cure and Simpleminds and Siouxie and ... <whispers> the Smiths ... <ahem> ...
well, and some punk, which I still play (the Clash, Sex Pistols, Exploited).

I'd noticed hip hop but it hadnt really gotten me until PE. Loved it. NWA was the second eye-opening shocker. I Saw Ice-T live in the Trojan Horse (small club in The Hague) - awesome. Didnt know many pple who liked it, too - theyre all into guitar music. There was this kid in high school a few classes down, we exchanged tapes. I got a Lakim Shabazz one from him. I was pretty much into the radical politics of it, too. Got the single with the Malcolm X excerpts, Movement Ex's "Freedom got a shotgun", that kinda thing - yeh. <giggles>

I lost track completely for a few years after 93, 94 or so, tho, and i never really got up to date anymore, tho i use kazaa as well as i can. fave of the moment (tho its not new): Roots Manuva. I like his voice.

Yes he is awesome
i try to get my friends to listen to his lyrics but they say he isnt gangster enuff

Dammit.

What is a fizzle, a shizzle, a pizzle and a whizzle?

Why even use derivations of English? Why not just burp, fart and emit other noises with a heavy bass?

i wonder, do you look at, say, cockney english with the same degree of contempt?

I never hear it (cockney English). Unless this vernacular was the maddening form of communication in Snatch. Twas muy dificil to understand.

If cockney was on the radio all the time, and it is a bunch of made up words to side-step the inability to find rhyming words, I don't imagine I'd like it any more than the nutty rap volcabulary.

Tyrius, when you have a chance--if you will--
pizzle, whizzle, fizzle?

nimh-- Contempt is a little strong to describe my feelings about nonsensical rhymes. Moderate irritation is more appropriate. :wink: Not seeking to ban it, or anything.

I thought it was reasonable, actually.

I don't know for sure, Sofia, but I think that all of the "-izzles" are to make R-rated words G-rated. Then more for rhyme/ fun.

What I'm curious about is whether the "izzzle" stuff started as a way to make songs less objectionable, and then took off in and of itself. Like, what version would be used in a club?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fo'+shizzle+my+nizzle

This is funny...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/06/06/nrap06.xml

The last one is the most pertinent.

(H)Eh. Well, I got more than moderately annoyed by Kris Kross ("Jump! Jump!") as well, so I get what you're saying about nonsensical rhymes. But thats not the same as not understanding another group's colloquialisms. Coz they're not nonsensical to those who understand them.

Lots and lots of hip hop lyrics out there that are very meaningful, even if the lingo sounds nonsensical to you cause you dont understand it. Well, I already did my fiery, personal defence of Eminem (lyrics), for 'xample, up here ^.

'F sure there's lots and lots of truly nonsensical hip hop lyrics out there as well, of course . But then, not much fewer nonsensical pop lyrics, even if those are not in lingo. (Come to think of it, the fact that they're not just makes 'em more annoying, cause you can so clearly hear that they're nonsensical ;-).)

HUH? have you ever Heard "Dear Mama"? "Brenda's Got a Baby"?

Your history of rap is a bit fuzzy from the 90's onwards. Introspective lyrics arrived in the 90's. Sure there was a lot of gangsta bluster but that didn't go away with eminem's arrival at all. Has nothing to do with him.

It went away because rappers like Dr. Dre et al realized it should and when they started dying.

At the height of "gangsta' rap' Dr. Dre proclaimed that "gangsta rap is dead". This infuriated Tupac et all and Tupac reamed him in some lyrics.

But what sealed the death of Gangsta rap was not Eminem at all. It was the death of the two greatest rappers. 2Pac and B.I.G.

After that rappers realized that playing gangster wasn't cool if you ended up dead. It has nothing to do with Eminem's introspection.

2Pac put Eminem to shame as far as introspection goes. If Eminem brought anything to the rap scene it was humor. Rarely has popular rap been funny.

Tupac....hardest working dead man in show bizness...

<sighs>

Yeh, I did. I remember "Brenda's got a baby", I liked it, a lot. It touched me. That musta been, 91, 92, when I was listening to that? Yeh.

OK, now I gotta look up what I wrote up there for you. Cause I think you misunderstood - or well, let's just put it that way.

Yeh - here goes - I wrote: "when did hip-hoppers have emotions before, apart from mourning drive-by victim homies?". 'K, if I'd been making a seriously argued thematical case, rather than just chattin' about the kinda music I've liked, I would probably have expounded on that, and you wouldnta jumped to conclusions.

Listen, when I saw Boyz N The Hood, I was blown away. Damn. I dont know how it would now rate in film history or anything, but to me it was one compacted ball of anger, tragedy and hardcore life. I was touched & impressed. Thats all kinds of emotions, note. Lots of hip hop back then conveyed the same intense emotions, and struck me in the same way. Thats why I liked it so much. NWA, MC Ren, Above the Law, Ice Cube, Ice-T, Cypress Hill. But it was all, say, in the gangster life tragedy bracket, which is what I was referring to with the "mourning drive-by victim homies" quip. Emotions, yes; outside the bracket of what you would expect a gangsta to show his mourning over, no. Thats why I got bored with it.

In that sense, Eminem was totally different. He went beyond telling the effective, but by that time pretty hackneyed-sounding "ghetto grief" narratives. 2Pac, who you say "put Eminem to shame as far as introspection goes", was the king of expressing ghetto grief. But when Eminem is sad or angry, its not just about the weaknesses and sadnesses of the (ghetto) world he lives in, like with 2Pac - its about his own weaknesses and sadnesses, too - unromanticized, un-machoified. See the difference?

Eminem doesnt darkly romanticize the victim-mother of "Brenda's got a baby"; he turns against his own mother, telling her how he's struggling with not wanting to hurt her, but just being so very angry at what she'd done, to him, at what she'd not done, at how she'd fucked up, and how he just needed to tell her - "cleaning out his closet". Its not like his hip hop career centres around his mother or something <grins> - its just the most striking example I could think of. 2Pac plays on your emotions - Eminem betrays his.

(Actually, this is where I have to fess up that I actually borrowed the whole "In comes Eminem, and he's as tough as any of them, but he raps about his mother - he made rap personal" line, which you fell all over, wholesale. It was funny - cause its the line Anastasia had persuaded me with, when I was still thinking Eminem was some kinda white Eazy-E on repeat a decade late - it was the line I then delivered on the Eminem thread here - and then I heard it repeated almost verbatim in the passionate delivery, last week, of our office's own ex-gangsta, a Cape Verdian guy who's the only guy his age he knows who's got a job, to the un-believers who said hip hop wasnt 'real' music. Shouldnt make a **** of a difference to you, I hope, but made me know we werent the only ones thinking what we did).

Yeh, and then the remaining 2/3rds of your post goes on to prove that Eminem didnt kill off gangsta rap, that it had nothing to do with him and his, etc ... well, thaz fine - good thing, then, that I never said he did, huh. 'Ctually, if you see how 50 Cent's doing, I'd say gangsta was still alive - and he's Eminem's own protege.



<snort>

Well, I'ma mighty sorree, Sir Lector Craven of Hip-Hop Expertise. Isnt it a lucky thing, then - again - that I never pretended to write "the history of rap"? I coulda, one day, probly, back when, but yeh, no more! What I did was in a literal four (!!) lines, roughly point out four trends - 80s lyrical play, turn of 90s politics, post-90 gangsta, Eminem. Thats about the extent my "analysis" went - shouldna be too controversial, now, should it, in its generalising kinda way?

And, eh ... I'm sure any others here who read my first post also read my second one, you know - where I wrote, literally, "I lost track completely for a few years after 93, 94 or so, tho, and i never really got up to date anymore"? So, yeh, I'd say you were pretty much on-target with the second half of your sentence . Really shoulda put my broadbrush 4-line "history" of rap in perspective enough without your self-righteous lecturing, shouldnt it, if you think about it?

Anyhow. Sure must admit I'm glad to see I'm not the only one in a foul mood.