MOG

The other day I got into a little musical contretemps with this older head in a cafe who was talkin' spank about hip hop's not really being an "according to Hoyle" art form which made me put a Bushmills-tempered headbutt up in his piece by pointing out a few facts...the little dust up reminded me of a piece I'd written a while back that I'd thought I'd link...It begins like this: "Whenever you hear one of those cats like Keith Richards or Rod Stewart smartin' off with shite about hip-hop artists "stealing musicians' music in samples" always bear in mind that "groundbreaking" British groups in the '60's & '70's like the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, to name a few, and 'guitar-wank' soloists like Eric Clapton and Paul Butterfield were biting moves and sounds from Black American bluesmen like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters, Lightin' Hopkins, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, B.B. King and (even) Ike Turner which is, in layman's terms, a form of sampling. So -- as Flavor Flav once groused on Public Enemy's seminal LP It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back: "don't believe the hype" because every musician is a thief (to quote U2's "Fly on the Wall" aka Bono)...As of this writing, hip-hop has come a long way since Sugar Hill's "Rapper's Delight," yet it still remains ensnared in the musicolgy melee titled: Is Hip Hop A Lasting Music or Not?...the piece ends like this