Live Rap?

[Photo: Getty Images]

So 50 Cent (aka “Fitty”) held a concert at Cipriani Wallstreet the other night, and it didn’t really register too much of a blip on the radar for us, until we started to think about live Rap, and its acoustic quality in live venues.  As most of you may know rap music sales have been plumeting (the majority of people who buy it, white girls, are losing interest), and there really hasn’t been a dominant album since 50’s last one (don’t know the name) with “In Da Club”.  I was certain that the urbanification (i think that’s an appropriate adjective) of America and the ever growing hip-hop rage would never see its day.  Well it is about to, and the day is fast approaching.

What are some of the root causes?  Well for starters, musical trends and genre’s tend to be in fashion for about a decade (think 80s Hair Metal, 90s Grunge).  But more importantly these genre’s change because of changing attitudes, rather than a specific genre shaping attitudes, so I’ve concluded.  I think at the end of the 80s after Van Halen and a couple of other true musical geniouses had been played out, people got tired of the sea of left-over untalented guys hiding behind walls of distortion and long hair (enter Grunge).  I think the 2000s people wanted to sell-out a bit more, get intoxicated on a Las Vegas lifestyle and detach from reality (enter Hip-Hop).  Its seems now people are ready to go in another direction, where exactly I don’t know.

But I digress.  The point of this post was to point out how much Hip-Hop and Rap suck live.  Why do people even bother paying money to see these artists put on a record, and inaudibly rap into a microphone, creating pure cacophony?  Its moronic.  If you like overproduced music fine, but realize that it’s exactly that, overproduced and could only be the product of serious sound engineering.  Buy the CD, download the file on a p2p network, or be a good soul and buy from iTunes.  But don’t go to a show, you will be thoroughly dissapointed.

 I can only imagine the mess of sound at Cipriani Wallstreet, the reverberation, the richochets off of the Hellenistic columns…but I don’t think people cared too much because they got to eat ravioli and drink mimosas with 50.