For Doz That Slept...Or are still sleeping

I need to vent. I'm angry. I don't think anyone else will really care, but fuck it, I feel the need to say this shit and this IS sorta something like a music blog isn't it?

A couple of weeks ago I heard some shit on the radio that made me realize how much of a member of the "old folk" that I've become. It's pretty sad. I was listening to the Steve Harvey morning show, and some young (early 20s), dumb chick wrote in to him asking him why did he play the music he did in the morning (predominantly a lot of older R&B and some older hip hop), and why didn't him and his morning show learn to "walk it out" and "superman dat ho" instead of "2 steppin' it", and play some better music in the morning like SOULJAH BOY. She says, "OUR music is so much better than YOUR music." I damn near lost my mind when I heard that, because this girl thought that SOULJAH BOY was REAL music. Going back to this young chick, she further showed her stupidity by saying that she thought the "Moulin Rogue" song was originally done by Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim etc. She further went on to say that she thought that Earth, Wind, and Fire stole the song "September" from Kirk Franklin. I really wanted to choke her the fuck out now, before she potentially gets impregnated by some shithead, and has babies as dumb as she is. For that matter, her parents are retarded too by not dropping some knowledge on her ign'nint ass.

Anyway, Steve Harvey had thunk on the whole topic and his response was that older music was more focused on love and making love, and telling women how much they loved them or missed them, and then newer music seems to be more focused on degrading women. He felt that it was the fault of black men of his generation were so caught up in climbing the corporate ladder and focusing on their careers, instead of teaching the black men in the generation after them to respect women. He further elaborated that people shouldn't consider it "OUR music" and "YOUR music" because that further divides us, when music should be considered EVERYONE'S music. He was also trying to raise some consciousness of the lyrical content of today's music as opposed to more "old school" type shit, which I applaud him for...especially since I've been saying for a while that people are dumbasses and can't focus on shit these days so all they can listen to is "YOUUUUUUUUU!" (In semi-unrelated news, apparently that god forsaken dance was featured on the Ellen show, and my MOTHER learned it and did it in front of me a week ago. I wanted to die on the spot.)

From what I've read, I know dumpin is predominantly a music blog based around hip hop, and based around rap in particular. (But let's not forget what the great KRS-ONE said..."rap is what you do, hip hop is what you live" and anyway, the way people live is particular to the individual, so I guess what hip hop is, is different for everyone, but whatever) However, I'd just like to say that as distasteful as many hip hop fans might find R&B music, a lot of hip hop is based in older R&B. So much sampling of older R&B groups and music has gone on in the last 10 years with music producers, with Diddy and Kanye being the most prominent and coming to mind first. But of course this has been going on FOREVER. Where would hip hop be today without Stevie Wonder (he and Roger and Zapp were doing synthesizers LONG before T-Pain), Rick James, James Brown, Earth Wind and Fire, and pretty much all of Motown?

Now, for me personally my parents always listened to old jazz (Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday) but weren't necessarily into R&B, but I suppose for me liking older R&B was a inevitable move from older jazz. Then liking older R&B sort of evolved into newer R&B and rap music when I was a teenager and really angry. And yeah, I'm an Asian chick, one of the "model minority" but I was still (and still am) a disenfranchised minority nonetheless. I've got TWO things to be mad about. But that's neither here nor there in regards to this post. I just don't understand...where did things go wrong? Are we as Americans getting stupider? Or is this just the record label execs for the past decade pushing some bullshit out there and really pumping it up? Or is this some crazy ass record label Illuminati type shit trying to just dumb us down so we don't think about what's going on around us?

I don't know what the fuck it is, but I'm not even on my period and I have been getting crazier and more angry and feeling like the world is fucked because I can't even surround myself with music and ignore everything else like I used to. I need a Spaceship like Kanye so I can get the fuck off the planet and go live with some aliens. I bet they're not listening to Souljah Boy. At least I hope not.