On Culture: Rap Music (Hip Hop) in My Life.
22 October 2016 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
hey what's up you know meeting people on
the internet is a strange thing very often the first thing you learn about someone would be something personal that you might not know about them if you'd met them face to face in a coffee shop you might not learn about them for many years even if they were a friend that you made in primary school they were a friend you made in high school if they were friend you made in university or if they were friend you met for the first time in the workplace as a grown adult you might know someone for years without knowing what poster is hanging on their bedroom wall you may never know that about some of your closest friends in the same way I mean with the Internet sometimes the first thing you learn about somebody is what type of music they listen to and what they think about that music their personal tastes and so on and you may not know that about your university professors your work colleagues or getting friend's you've had for years possibly friends you met in university in high school or what have you so it is a bit of a funny thing in my life but it's not entirely surprising to me that so many people have wanted me for a long time now to make a video talking about rap music and the roles had my life why it is that hip-hop or how it was that hip-hop and rap music really became the one genre of music I listen to that it came to dominate you know my musical interests in my adult life so in this video I'm going to skip over sort of the cultural context I grew up in could be a much longer video talking about the way hip-hop culture and rap music ascended in toronto canada during my lifetime while I was growing up how it ascended from something marginal hated and feared by the mainstream to being something so powerful that it really redefined the mainstream and Senta just was accepted as a normal and not too threatening part of mainstream cultures that was a transformation that had before my eyes uh but in terms of my how the role of that culture in my life um the first thing I'd say is that you know one of the lessons I had already learned before i started publicly identifying myself as a fan of rap music is really a question about what it means to have a culture at all a lot of people in Toronto Toronto is a little bit influenced by Scottish culture a lot of people try to snub you and ridicule you just to see how you react they take a poke at you I don't mind that much but the Scottish are huge on that that's a really kind of a legacy of Scottish culture again in some ways I remember a guy at my university guy who knew me a little bit it was my friend at the time but he knew me a bit um he saw me that time had physical CDs in my backpack of rap music those are the days you own pieces of plastic and so this guy said completely contemptuously he said oh I suppose if you met these people you think you would have something in common with them yeah we start these people of he was alluding to like ghostface he was looking like members of wu-tang or you know represented by the color illustrations leave peacefully and without me missing a beat without a moment's hesitation I looked him in the eye and I said that's not the problem the problem is that you think if you sat down had a conversation with jsbach that you'd have anything coming you think that you could sit down with vogner or Shakespeare and that you represent the same culture just because you're both white it was a great moment and you know conversation even though you didn't freak out and then we talked about a bit he really thought about it and he knew enough actually about the composer's i mentioned to realize that most of them were kind of religious maniacs and he actually did reflect on the extent to which he did assume that he had something in common culturally with someone like vogner or Johann Sebastian Bach even though intellectually on some level he knew he didn't he was aware me Johann Sebastian Bach was a complete religious maniac by the way really to call him eccentric as flattering um and obsessed with numerology and the stuff he that was the first moment when he stopped and reflected that he would be totally incapable of sitting down and having conversation with you on Sebastian Bach or vogner or Shakespeare and now I have no claim that I could sit down and have a great conversation with Ghostface or Method Man or any of the founding members of Wutang but that's not important to me that's not what culture is in my life and I've actually dealt with that in parallel I've dealt with that many many times when white people try to insult me and reproach me because I studied Cambodia like oh you think you're Cambodian know I'm not a part of Cambodian culture Cambodian culture is a part of my life when I studied Korean a jib way I don't think I'm First Nations I don't think I'm Native American I don't think I'm part of it I don't think I'm part of that culture studying that culture is part of my life I care about the politics in that culture whether you're talking about curry or Cambodia and whatever i don't i don't think a part of it of course the funny thing is with any of those fields once you get it deep enough those people start to claim you which is also really interesting i remember one situation something like this happened about twice only but i remember once I was speaking Lao the lotion language say lotion but they'll just like Lao so in the language in Laos now speaking pretty at a pretty good clip at that particular moment and then I walked into a hotel I was speaking out in the street I walked into a hotel and the guy inside the hotel started trying to explain something to me in English and a little old lady who had just seen me talking the street she talked to me a little bit but she wasn't she actually ran into the hotel and she said to the the guy working the hotel lobby she don't know don't worry about it he's a white loud like he's a white lotion and you know still to this day I have no idea what that man everyone in the room was like oh okay and then they started speaking about co the extreme example I've been speaking Lao for about two years at that point I guess when speaking speaking practicing the language so there are times even when you don't claim a culture when other people turn around and clan acclaim you to some extent like oh you're a foreigner but you've put in the hard work to learn our language study our history and our politics so to some extent we're claiming you will did that's interesting but no I mean back then the point at which i started publicly identifying as a person who listens to rabaa as a fan there's no big deal is a consumer of this culture was the point at which i was really comfortable dealing with bullies who try to denigrate you and insult you um because they assume that I want to pretend that I'm a part of that culture and I'm not that culture is a part of my life now how many people listen to western music and they're not Cowboys so what are you going to say only if you actually ride a horse work on a ranch if only actual Cowboys can listen to western music as a cultural phenomenon that means i think has been at a fashionable western music music about cowboys millions of people listen to it who never rode a horse whom it probably who never owned a gun but never lived through any of those situations he never roped cattle yeah the word cowboy changes meaning obviously i am not a gangster I'm not a rapper I'm not part of the culture I'm not part of the subculture associated with the creation of that but the whole point is there's a much larger culture that consumes it that listens to it that's the audience for it and I have absolutely no sense of shame no sense of hesitation i know you know i have to me you're not insulting me but finding those things out about drawing my attention of those contradictions I'm totally comfortable with those contradictions the questions are you comfortable with the contradiction that you claim Shakespeare like if you're a white Canadian who thinks you're part of the same culture is Shakespeare you're not you may be part of the culture of the British Empire that's guilty of genocide in Canada you may be home of all kinds of cultural legacies in reality but no you and Shakespeare there's an ocean separating you from Shakespeare and actually the gap between you and a guy like Ghostface it's not that it's not that why actually you could sit down and have dinner with Ghostface or any of the members of wu-tang and I don't know I know what you talk about talk about the latest elections talk about what's in the newspaper you know actually it wouldn't be that hard for you guys drill each other it's not that alien um but I think that is something fundamental you know when I was researching Buddhism I wasn't pretending to be a Buddhist monk I wasn't part of that culture but that culture and that religion was part of my life now again some of those people claimed me you know i mean they wanted to treat me like i was a Buddhist monk ER like I was preaching that religion when I was studying it and that's understandable there are gray areas there when you get into religion it's kind of a different thing but music and hip-hop culture you know is not a religion doesn't have those elements so you know long story short what importance to the above have my life when I was in Toronto during that period of time was very much an ascendant culture it went from being sling marginal hated and feared totally reading redefining the mainstream saw that happen music that when it first came out was considered shocking and threatening and rebellious 20 years later is being played as background music at the mall when people are shopping for bargain clothes it's an amazing transformation to me but I think a lot of people who grew up in the 1960s saw the same thing music that in the 1960s was considered shocking and rebellious and politically prerogative 20 years later in the 1980s was being played as background music at the mall so it's not a completely unique cultural historical experience but that's my generation I saw that happen with hip-hop so there's nothing particularly surprising that the hip-hop happens music I listen to but while i was still in toronto well it was still in canada it was less important to me than it was after i moved to asia i had years like when i was in Laos I had long periods of time where I never really spoke to anyone in English like you know if you went to the pharmacy the guy who works at the pharmacy would speak to you in broken English but where I was speaking allow all day every day and where I very rarely heard the English language spoken well soon if I was communicate with you know maybe you buy an airplane ticket and the guy working at the counter speaks to you in English it good enough English to buy the airplane ticket obviously but the importance rap music had in my life really escalated really ramped up when I was no longer hearing idiomatic fluent persuasive passionate English being spoken by the people around me so it was at that point probably living in Vienna I already listen to hip-hop four years before that but it didn't feel that important in my life and that time also i was still listening to classical music and when i was living in laos studying pally studying lao studying the history and politics that part of Southeast Asia that was when I really plunged into heavily listening to hip-hop all the time and nothing else everything else dropped out of my listening schedule I stopped listening the last couple of like white artists disappeared from my hard drive just to be blunt there were only a few then and that's when I stopped listening to you on Sebastian Bach and the more metrical classical music and when it really became more rewarding for me to hear the language used in that way and so you know long story short that's never left now another really interesting turning point in my life you know around the time my daughter was born I thought you know raising my daughter I thought okay now for like ten years hip hop is going to disappear from my life because I wasn't going to listen to gangster rap in front of my daughter as a toddler so there was actually a point when I deleted all the wrap up my hard drive because I was a hundred and ten percent committed to raising my daughter those you watch this channel before and though I'm divorced so after I got divorced I ended up looking on my hard drive again but that was another interesting turning point where was like okay you realize this music that has such a high level of slang and profanity and you know such a big role for reflections and violence and what have you um you know that was going to disappear from my life and disappear from a computer for a while so you know uh that was another moment when that stuff was was meaningful welp anyone especially meaningful moment for me um now you know some of you might ask nobody ever has asked but some of you might ask given that I'm a vegan given that I believe in minimizing violence towards animals and people ever possible why would I listen to a genre of music that has set your relentless focus amounts look you know i'ma come out of a hard brass tacks political science background all the books I read I mean you know whether it's ancient Greek philosophy or modern political science the fact that peace exists in the shadow of war that civility and manners and you know human civilization exists in the shadow of the constant threat of violence that it's like new to me then I sign strange and that ain't something particular to rap music again you can compare rap music to cowboy music there are many other genres of meat of music and literature you can compare it to Shakespeare how many people get stabbed in the average Shakespeare play I mean as a lot of violence and Shakespeare to UM from Titus Andronicus on down man um so you know the role of violence in hip-hop it is significant and I do think it's actually meaningful to have an art form that is so much engaged in meditation on the role of violence in our lives the shadow it casts over our lives I don't think that's meaningless at all and you know I think that does connect to my philosophy of veganism in just one simple sense in this video there I think it's true that all of us choose if we're going to live lives of escapism or if we're going to live lives of confrontation you know you can look at the reality of a cow having its throat cut in a slaughterhouse whether that's in a video or a photograph or a newspaper article you can look at the reality of what mass production of meat is what that industry is and you can choose to evade it you can choose to lie to yourself use to make up excuses you can choose to live a life of self-deception and of comforting half-truths or you can choose to confront it and you know what both in their way are actually kind of emotionally devastating this channel I mostly talk about how the vegan path is emotionally exhausting and so on but all the time I talked to meat eaters who are extremely emotionally [ __ ] up of a where their food comes true they've taken that other path but it leads to their own you know its own problems and you know I am someone who wanted to face up to the reality of violence both real direct violence in the simplest sense and more symbolic and abstract violence like the fact that when I grew up the threat of nuclear war totally defined the society and politics around me etc so yes in that one sense at least both veganism and my engagement with hip-hop music with gangster rap with the more hardcore edge of hip-hop music that does reflect something about my character and I don't think it's a bad thing
the internet is a strange thing very often the first thing you learn about someone would be something personal that you might not know about them if you'd met them face to face in a coffee shop you might not learn about them for many years even if they were a friend that you made in primary school they were a friend you made in high school if they were friend you made in university or if they were friend you met for the first time in the workplace as a grown adult you might know someone for years without knowing what poster is hanging on their bedroom wall you may never know that about some of your closest friends in the same way I mean with the Internet sometimes the first thing you learn about somebody is what type of music they listen to and what they think about that music their personal tastes and so on and you may not know that about your university professors your work colleagues or getting friend's you've had for years possibly friends you met in university in high school or what have you so it is a bit of a funny thing in my life but it's not entirely surprising to me that so many people have wanted me for a long time now to make a video talking about rap music and the roles had my life why it is that hip-hop or how it was that hip-hop and rap music really became the one genre of music I listen to that it came to dominate you know my musical interests in my adult life so in this video I'm going to skip over sort of the cultural context I grew up in could be a much longer video talking about the way hip-hop culture and rap music ascended in toronto canada during my lifetime while I was growing up how it ascended from something marginal hated and feared by the mainstream to being something so powerful that it really redefined the mainstream and Senta just was accepted as a normal and not too threatening part of mainstream cultures that was a transformation that had before my eyes uh but in terms of my how the role of that culture in my life um the first thing I'd say is that you know one of the lessons I had already learned before i started publicly identifying myself as a fan of rap music is really a question about what it means to have a culture at all a lot of people in Toronto Toronto is a little bit influenced by Scottish culture a lot of people try to snub you and ridicule you just to see how you react they take a poke at you I don't mind that much but the Scottish are huge on that that's a really kind of a legacy of Scottish culture again in some ways I remember a guy at my university guy who knew me a little bit it was my friend at the time but he knew me a bit um he saw me that time had physical CDs in my backpack of rap music those are the days you own pieces of plastic and so this guy said completely contemptuously he said oh I suppose if you met these people you think you would have something in common with them yeah we start these people of he was alluding to like ghostface he was looking like members of wu-tang or you know represented by the color illustrations leave peacefully and without me missing a beat without a moment's hesitation I looked him in the eye and I said that's not the problem the problem is that you think if you sat down had a conversation with jsbach that you'd have anything coming you think that you could sit down with vogner or Shakespeare and that you represent the same culture just because you're both white it was a great moment and you know conversation even though you didn't freak out and then we talked about a bit he really thought about it and he knew enough actually about the composer's i mentioned to realize that most of them were kind of religious maniacs and he actually did reflect on the extent to which he did assume that he had something in common culturally with someone like vogner or Johann Sebastian Bach even though intellectually on some level he knew he didn't he was aware me Johann Sebastian Bach was a complete religious maniac by the way really to call him eccentric as flattering um and obsessed with numerology and the stuff he that was the first moment when he stopped and reflected that he would be totally incapable of sitting down and having conversation with you on Sebastian Bach or vogner or Shakespeare and now I have no claim that I could sit down and have a great conversation with Ghostface or Method Man or any of the founding members of Wutang but that's not important to me that's not what culture is in my life and I've actually dealt with that in parallel I've dealt with that many many times when white people try to insult me and reproach me because I studied Cambodia like oh you think you're Cambodian know I'm not a part of Cambodian culture Cambodian culture is a part of my life when I studied Korean a jib way I don't think I'm First Nations I don't think I'm Native American I don't think I'm part of it I don't think I'm part of that culture studying that culture is part of my life I care about the politics in that culture whether you're talking about curry or Cambodia and whatever i don't i don't think a part of it of course the funny thing is with any of those fields once you get it deep enough those people start to claim you which is also really interesting i remember one situation something like this happened about twice only but i remember once I was speaking Lao the lotion language say lotion but they'll just like Lao so in the language in Laos now speaking pretty at a pretty good clip at that particular moment and then I walked into a hotel I was speaking out in the street I walked into a hotel and the guy inside the hotel started trying to explain something to me in English and a little old lady who had just seen me talking the street she talked to me a little bit but she wasn't she actually ran into the hotel and she said to the the guy working the hotel lobby she don't know don't worry about it he's a white loud like he's a white lotion and you know still to this day I have no idea what that man everyone in the room was like oh okay and then they started speaking about co the extreme example I've been speaking Lao for about two years at that point I guess when speaking speaking practicing the language so there are times even when you don't claim a culture when other people turn around and clan acclaim you to some extent like oh you're a foreigner but you've put in the hard work to learn our language study our history and our politics so to some extent we're claiming you will did that's interesting but no I mean back then the point at which i started publicly identifying as a person who listens to rabaa as a fan there's no big deal is a consumer of this culture was the point at which i was really comfortable dealing with bullies who try to denigrate you and insult you um because they assume that I want to pretend that I'm a part of that culture and I'm not that culture is a part of my life now how many people listen to western music and they're not Cowboys so what are you going to say only if you actually ride a horse work on a ranch if only actual Cowboys can listen to western music as a cultural phenomenon that means i think has been at a fashionable western music music about cowboys millions of people listen to it who never rode a horse whom it probably who never owned a gun but never lived through any of those situations he never roped cattle yeah the word cowboy changes meaning obviously i am not a gangster I'm not a rapper I'm not part of the culture I'm not part of the subculture associated with the creation of that but the whole point is there's a much larger culture that consumes it that listens to it that's the audience for it and I have absolutely no sense of shame no sense of hesitation i know you know i have to me you're not insulting me but finding those things out about drawing my attention of those contradictions I'm totally comfortable with those contradictions the questions are you comfortable with the contradiction that you claim Shakespeare like if you're a white Canadian who thinks you're part of the same culture is Shakespeare you're not you may be part of the culture of the British Empire that's guilty of genocide in Canada you may be home of all kinds of cultural legacies in reality but no you and Shakespeare there's an ocean separating you from Shakespeare and actually the gap between you and a guy like Ghostface it's not that it's not that why actually you could sit down and have dinner with Ghostface or any of the members of wu-tang and I don't know I know what you talk about talk about the latest elections talk about what's in the newspaper you know actually it wouldn't be that hard for you guys drill each other it's not that alien um but I think that is something fundamental you know when I was researching Buddhism I wasn't pretending to be a Buddhist monk I wasn't part of that culture but that culture and that religion was part of my life now again some of those people claimed me you know i mean they wanted to treat me like i was a Buddhist monk ER like I was preaching that religion when I was studying it and that's understandable there are gray areas there when you get into religion it's kind of a different thing but music and hip-hop culture you know is not a religion doesn't have those elements so you know long story short what importance to the above have my life when I was in Toronto during that period of time was very much an ascendant culture it went from being sling marginal hated and feared totally reading redefining the mainstream saw that happen music that when it first came out was considered shocking and threatening and rebellious 20 years later is being played as background music at the mall when people are shopping for bargain clothes it's an amazing transformation to me but I think a lot of people who grew up in the 1960s saw the same thing music that in the 1960s was considered shocking and rebellious and politically prerogative 20 years later in the 1980s was being played as background music at the mall so it's not a completely unique cultural historical experience but that's my generation I saw that happen with hip-hop so there's nothing particularly surprising that the hip-hop happens music I listen to but while i was still in toronto well it was still in canada it was less important to me than it was after i moved to asia i had years like when i was in Laos I had long periods of time where I never really spoke to anyone in English like you know if you went to the pharmacy the guy who works at the pharmacy would speak to you in broken English but where I was speaking allow all day every day and where I very rarely heard the English language spoken well soon if I was communicate with you know maybe you buy an airplane ticket and the guy working at the counter speaks to you in English it good enough English to buy the airplane ticket obviously but the importance rap music had in my life really escalated really ramped up when I was no longer hearing idiomatic fluent persuasive passionate English being spoken by the people around me so it was at that point probably living in Vienna I already listen to hip-hop four years before that but it didn't feel that important in my life and that time also i was still listening to classical music and when i was living in laos studying pally studying lao studying the history and politics that part of Southeast Asia that was when I really plunged into heavily listening to hip-hop all the time and nothing else everything else dropped out of my listening schedule I stopped listening the last couple of like white artists disappeared from my hard drive just to be blunt there were only a few then and that's when I stopped listening to you on Sebastian Bach and the more metrical classical music and when it really became more rewarding for me to hear the language used in that way and so you know long story short that's never left now another really interesting turning point in my life you know around the time my daughter was born I thought you know raising my daughter I thought okay now for like ten years hip hop is going to disappear from my life because I wasn't going to listen to gangster rap in front of my daughter as a toddler so there was actually a point when I deleted all the wrap up my hard drive because I was a hundred and ten percent committed to raising my daughter those you watch this channel before and though I'm divorced so after I got divorced I ended up looking on my hard drive again but that was another interesting turning point where was like okay you realize this music that has such a high level of slang and profanity and you know such a big role for reflections and violence and what have you um you know that was going to disappear from my life and disappear from a computer for a while so you know uh that was another moment when that stuff was was meaningful welp anyone especially meaningful moment for me um now you know some of you might ask nobody ever has asked but some of you might ask given that I'm a vegan given that I believe in minimizing violence towards animals and people ever possible why would I listen to a genre of music that has set your relentless focus amounts look you know i'ma come out of a hard brass tacks political science background all the books I read I mean you know whether it's ancient Greek philosophy or modern political science the fact that peace exists in the shadow of war that civility and manners and you know human civilization exists in the shadow of the constant threat of violence that it's like new to me then I sign strange and that ain't something particular to rap music again you can compare rap music to cowboy music there are many other genres of meat of music and literature you can compare it to Shakespeare how many people get stabbed in the average Shakespeare play I mean as a lot of violence and Shakespeare to UM from Titus Andronicus on down man um so you know the role of violence in hip-hop it is significant and I do think it's actually meaningful to have an art form that is so much engaged in meditation on the role of violence in our lives the shadow it casts over our lives I don't think that's meaningless at all and you know I think that does connect to my philosophy of veganism in just one simple sense in this video there I think it's true that all of us choose if we're going to live lives of escapism or if we're going to live lives of confrontation you know you can look at the reality of a cow having its throat cut in a slaughterhouse whether that's in a video or a photograph or a newspaper article you can look at the reality of what mass production of meat is what that industry is and you can choose to evade it you can choose to lie to yourself use to make up excuses you can choose to live a life of self-deception and of comforting half-truths or you can choose to confront it and you know what both in their way are actually kind of emotionally devastating this channel I mostly talk about how the vegan path is emotionally exhausting and so on but all the time I talked to meat eaters who are extremely emotionally [ __ ] up of a where their food comes true they've taken that other path but it leads to their own you know its own problems and you know I am someone who wanted to face up to the reality of violence both real direct violence in the simplest sense and more symbolic and abstract violence like the fact that when I grew up the threat of nuclear war totally defined the society and politics around me etc so yes in that one sense at least both veganism and my engagement with hip-hop music with gangster rap with the more hardcore edge of hip-hop music that does reflect something about my character and I don't think it's a bad thing