Rap vs. My Professors (being a white, intellectual hip-hop fan)

so it just got a question from the
audience here on the live stream Curious George asks aisel how is it being an intellectual that likes hip-hop I imagine you probably get a lot of scoffs from your pretentious peers no I don't so it's an interesting question the answer may surprise you so most recently academically I've been involved with Asian Studies and actually I think every single one of the professor's I talked about it with because it did it did come up actually I mean one of the professor's just because he had a deep intellectual respect for me he sat down and he really asked you he asked what kind of music deals do just for that reason it was there was no context don't I mean it wasn't like a situation where I was where music was a natural part of the conversation or something he really wanted to know what terms are getting to know me and so on snow I'm 38 years old some of these professors are as old as say 55 but people who are 55 now they've already grown up with hip-hop being a dominant force in American culture in Western culture and in world culture and I guess the type of people I dealt with in a field like Asian Studies or feel like anthropology I think a lot of them respected my engagement with hip-hop just because they saw it as me making an effort to overcome a cultural barrier probably probably to generalize that's the maybe the most basic or fundamental thing they're like in the same way that they might just respect someone who made the effort to go to Laos and learn to speak loshon just to overcome that barrier to really be involved with what's going on in Laos to care about the history and the politics and and the language just just the fact that it is crossing a cultural line makes them respect it but other than that most of these professors most people around me even if they're fully 55 years old I think most of them they have all of them have left listen to rap music listen to hip-hop to some extent and I guess all of them always wondered how their lives would be different if they made more of an effort to really understand and what was going on in rap because you can listen to it passively or you can try to get more involved try to follow what's going on in hip-hop music and you know even to understand even take the time to Google some of the obscure cultural references in rap lyrics we all do that okay it is not just white people who need to google bizarre cultural historic allusions and rap music we all google rap lyrics all of us a letter where you're from I don't care if you grew up in the grotty s ghetto in Chicago you have used Google to look up something around maybe not the slang maybe you get all the slang terms like phone em but I just got phone em recently uh by the way I mean you know if you listen to what Aang there are historical and political uh you know allusions and all this stuff so no I mean it's it's a great question that has really not been my experience and I guess you know the only contrast that would be what would the attitudes of the Buddhist intellectuals have been you know from a Buddhist perspective Buddhism is a hundred percent anti-drug 100% aunty alcohol and how person eighty violence so the fact that so much rap music revolves around those things I mean again I never had a Buddhist step to me about that or even ask me better want to talk about it but I mean I guess for me from my perspective I don't feel like I'm listening to music that celebrates something I disapprove of you know what I mean that for me isn't a problem with rap music as an art form in the same sense you can be a big fan of Shakespeare but you don't approve of sword fights come on people how many how many stabbings are there in Hamlet we think of Hamlet as this great work of literature but when it really comes down to it a large part of Hamlet is about sword fight it's about knife fights between bored noble men you know I'm Sam so yeah in my life I haven't felt that I haven't felt that that contradiction at all and the to quote the question the the pretentious intellectuals around me maybe it's significant that they all they but look I mean at that at the end of the day the bottom line the last in the Santa says rap music as an art form it's not hard to appreciate why it's meaningful or why it's moving to the people listen to it and by contrast something like abstract painting it may be very very difficult for an outsider to appreciate why it's meaningful or why it's moving to you why this painting that doesn't depict anything that's just a bunch of colors on a camp of canvas even science fiction why is Star Trek so meaningful and so moving to the people who care about it's not to me I'm not a Star Trek fan for an outsider they don't get what are these people connecting to but a lot of rap music even if you can't understand all the lyrics there's a song by RZA or is that a RZA I guess I can give a link there's some of our razor that's called grits GRI TS I'll give a link below this video even if you understand only 25% of the lyrics everything about that song it's obvious why it means so much the people recording it it's obvious why it means so much the people paying to buy the album back in the days and people paid to buy albums it's obvious why there'd be an audience who cares about it listens to it in response to it even if you aren't a part of their arts even if you don't have the response so yeah that's it man that's the surprising answer to that question I've never had problems with the other intellectuals in my life disrespecting me for that and the women in my life most of them they also listen to rap music