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Maybe I apologize because maybe I was a little excessive and took your words wrong misunderstading you.

Yes, the matter is what you say. If this rhythme and rhyme we hear and beat can be art. I agree I take a qualitative look at it because it seems to me that when you hear the rhythme and the rhyme together with a music with beat, it seems to me that musicians who occupy with other music make a stonger effort to create that music and that if it's only some beat music and rhymes, it's not so diffucult to make it. Because someone who doesn't know music or an instrument, can easily make a hip-hop song and then say that he is a singer or artist but is he really?Of course, I know that this needs its own art, it's an art of course (I mean with general meaning) to make all this thymes together and put the suitable music and start saying it and I don't have the imagination of the people who make those rhymes, but I'm wondering if this is real art, music.

Sometimes we say about the beat songs, who are just one two different notes and it seems to me like that. And we don't say that this is music but we call it music when we want to dance and so on.

But indeed, sometimes I think that when I was younger, as also I am now, my parents and uncles were saying is rock music?, it's not the harmonic voices they heard on pieces of their own age, the sound is no physical (it's electric guitar you know) and these pieces are violent and so on, and they didn't consider it as music. The same thing I think I do with hip-hop music. Maybe this music has a music that I can't hear. And some kids are growing up in this world now and they think that hip-hop is music in this world. So, I think that sometimes time overpasses us and determines us. And maybe you in the futute you will hear the music of new kinds and you will think that this is no music or art. So, I think that things maybe are more relative in the end!

Whatever, I think that maybe it takes a long time for me to see that hip-hop is art but until then, maybe I will just be hearing these songs!

What else can be it classified as?

ANY work that represents abstraction of reality, feeling or thought by humans is art. This is why defining art is subjective. A painting made by a 4 year old child is just as much art in the root sense as a Picasso or Michelangelo's painting at the Sistine Chapel.

Rap may not be high-class entertainment, but so what? It still is music, and thus is art by definition.

I would say also that rap emerged (and to a large extent still exists as such) to portray the grim life of the ghetto/inner-city black American areas. this may be more heavily specified in gangster rap, but it is evident in most other sub-genres also.

I am trying to think of any human thought that is not an abstraction of reality. Reality is out there but we can't reach it directly, we can only appreciate it through the limitations of our senses, which means all that we know is abstraction in and of our minds. We have proof that solid matter is not solid. Our brain will correct the perception of a curved line if it knows that the line should be straight. I think it's all abstract.

Abstraction as in thought or emotional process.

All phenomenon currently deemed art, whether the performing arts (acting, singing, etc.), music, painting, sculpture, architecture, etc. all have in common abstractions of feeling, thought and experience. Rap surely falls under this definition.

If I got two saucepans and hit them together to form a coherent rhythm, this is art by definition.

I think in this thread, people are conflating art in its root form with art in an aesthetic context. This also lends to the subjectivity of art, as art is not exclusively high-class entertainment.

Not sure how abstraction became a necessary definition, because to abstract something is to take it out of its context or concrete reality. While I agree that any form of thought has abstract qualities, something real would be the sensory experience itself. Perhaps, then it is computerized into abstraction or somehow formulated as such, but if something sensory happens, it does not follow I think that it becomes a thought or process of thinking. I may fall and hit my head on a chair. Once this has happened, the real event, then perhaps I abstract it as "Hey idiot, you fell and hit your head." When verbalizing much of our thoughts, then I think we are abstracting.

Same with art. Whether good or bad, I think it's in our attempt to explain its meaning or what it's about, that we start becoming the Theorists of Art. Otherwise, some art you feel and leave it as is, imo.

A question, is art dead, when its creators are a live; and alive when its creators are dead?

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Hip Hop is verbal art, it uses words to paint a pictures as such, the most technical and complex lyrics in the music industry are from the hop hop genre.

I hope you're kidding. Rap is definitely a form of art no matter how obnoxious some people find it. There is good rap out there. If this is not art, I don't know what is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqcTVVUFnKQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orlbo9WkZ2E

I think the real question is "how is rap not art?". Intellectualism is not a precursor to art. Even the most abrasive styles of music like punk or heavy metal are considered art how is rap any different? It's a method of expression therefore by very definition it is art. Not to mention the social commentary some of these rappers provide are deeply insightful and poetic. I see the rapper as a different side of the street poet. There are a lot of bad apples in the bunch. In fact I would say for every 100 rappers only 1 is actually worth the price you pay for the album. I really enjoy Nas, Kendrick Lamar, and Lupe Fiasco and I'm not a aficionado but I would recommend any record by those rappers for a person that was curious on this subject.

Could we say that Salvador Dahli isn't an artist simply because we don't understand why a melting clock is in the desert? Could we say Van Gogh is not an artist because we don't understand why he cut off his ear? Why do some feel compelled to say rap isn't an art because one don't understand what it is to pop a collar. Does your lack of understanding lead you to discredit rap as art. Can you accurately paint the Sistine chapel? Can you rhythmically rhyme 16 musical bars to a beat while remaining on one subject? Oxford dictionary defines art as the expression or application of human creative skill producing works to be appreciated. Is that not rap? If you disagree check out raps history and fruition within the last 20 yrs. Can you really still deny in observance? Why would you think rap is not art. Is vulgarity the void of art or is it deeper?

-- Updated June 6th, 2013, 11:17 pm to add the following --

whitetrshsoldier wrote:You can't spell CRAP without RAP!!!

Seriously, though, rap is just a poem sung to the tempo button on a casio keyboard.

I respect the lyrics from time-to-time, but the music is generally untalented and embarrasing. I normally wouldn't even consider it music.

The only rap I respect is the rap that actually includes musical instruments, like strings, etc., along WITH great lyrics.

You simplify rap like you can easily do it with a casio. Can you rap better than rappers in general? Your in the wrong forum this is for philosophers not ignorant people who make uneducated statements about things they obviously have no experience with.

jstarr wrote:Which philosophers would be most likely to embrace rap as art and which would be least likely?

Yessss! no question; who disagrees?

jstarr wrote:Which philosophers would be most likely to embrace rap as art and which would be least likely?

The question is imponderable if the term remains undefined. So, lets try to narrow the field, anything human biology creates outside its own biology is said to be biological extension, art would certainly qualify on this count. Generally speaking that which humans decide to create outside their own bodies is for a particular function generally to better serve itself either in an direct or indirect way, and again I believe what most people call art falls into this category.


So far what we have is art is biological extension intended in its function to serve humanity. I think, but I could stand corrected, that art is considered communication particular to members of the common species homo sapiens, and their are many many mediums of commutative expression, and then we must decide what is it which is communicated. The medium my well be the massage. but what's the secondary message, isn't art a meaningful expression of the intellectual and the emotional life.


Now ultimately what is it a product of, if not the product of human biology about being in general, and being in the world itself. Art is the beauty and nature of all being, and just what with this meaning can be awoken/evoked in/from the human heart. It is a wonderful dance on the stage of the human imagination of subject and object, choreographed by the artist.


ART-----WHAT DO YOU THINK---

jstarr wrote:Which philosophers would be most likely to embrace rap as art and which would be least likely?

Surely the key word in the opening post was 'embrace'.

So the question isn't whether rap falls under a dictionary definition of 'art', but whether it is a form of art that thoughtful types would admire.

Dirty Universe wrote:It's a piece of crap.

Lol, please elaborate on why you purpose rap is not a form of preforming art.