Last week, I decided to roll my windows down for what felt like months. The breeze was cool, but it was a welcome feeling as compared to the dreary winter chill that I had grown accustomed to. It was the first time in a long time where I was able to take a mental snapshot of a moment where I was truly enjoying the world around me.
The funny thing though, was that all this came while I, a white middle-class college student, was blasting the #BlackLivesMatter anthem “Alright” off of Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly.” While I sympathize with the movement and urge anyone I can to be involved, I found it amusing how in a song so personally enjoyable, Lamar addresses an audience that deals with struggles so foreign to people with my way of life. I resonate with it, even though lines like “Alls my life I has to fight,” or, “We hate Popo wanna kill us dead in the street for sure” wouldn’t appeal to my kind of lifestyle.
My mind went immediately to a scene in the 1999 movie “Office Space,” where Michael Bolton is rapping along to Scarface’s “No Tears,” and the point that joke made actually rings true for a lot of music.
Everything is tailored for a certain audience, and it’s funny to see gangsta rap embraced by a white, scrawny office worker. It’s the same thing that happened to a friend of mine when he told me that he liked Justin Bieber’s new music. Even if I found it to be well-produced; it’s the stigma attached to an artist and their expected listeners that boggle me. I’m hardly convinced that Bieber made his songs for 20-year-old frat boys any more than Scarface did for Bolton.
However, my point is that music, or any kind of art for that matter, is not supposed to be only consumed to by the group of people that it was made for. We, as listeners, need to learn to be comfortable appreciating art in more than one context.
“Make something for nobody and everybody will like it, make something for everybody and nobody will like it,” comments Eddie Murphy, on how a piece of art made for the lowest common denominator loses its charm. By allowing art to be made for a certain audience; it creates an avenue of expectations for the work, and by having rules it allows the artist to break them.
Take a band, give them a singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer and you have a rock band. Have the band focus on technicality and abnormal chord progressions and you have progressive rock. Have the band focus on power chords and energy over performance and you have punk rock. In the act of allowing themselves to fill a niche, whether it is Pink Floyd or the Ramones, they let the audience expect certain things from them. More than often, I find that the music the groups make then proceeds to break these expectations.
I’m writing this because as Yeezy Season 3 winds down, Kanye West has being thrusting himself into the spotlight. As he makes headlines, his music is inevitably thrown into the discussion, and I noticed a trend among my friends to have opinions on “The Life of Pablo” before they actually listen to it, saying they didn’t like it because “they don’t like rap.”
While it’s okay to not like certain music, the complete dismissal stuck with me, as there are thousands of hours of hip-hop that people just throw away because they have a preconceived notion of how the genre is supposed to sound. But the exact guidelines that they expect from rap are the rules that are being broken by artists today. The music experience is sullied by either the artist or listener believing that they have to follow an arbitrary checklist of personality traits that let them enjoy whatever music they have in front of them.
Even though my life is completely different from the artists that I love, there’s nothing stopping me from listening to them. No matter the message, at the end of the day, they still make really good music.
Eric Ryan is a second-year student majoring in English. ER821804@wcupa.edu