It's rather hilarious to see complaints that rock music won't be featured and "you'll only get hip-hop now" when for decades all we got was old, past their prime rock bands that nobody in my age cohort was remotely interested in.
I hope it's Kendrick for the next 5 years straight.
meh, I'm over the genre and I
do think "mumble rapper" is an appropriate description of Lamar. He's boring, and I don't need the purveyors of hip hop to act as if they brought sophisticated poetry to music when I was listening to the likes of Leonard Cohen decades ago in the folk genre. If anything, the increasing corporate / widespread media saturation of hip hop has made American pop culture more third-world-trashy in a tangible way, and reduced the overall intelligence of music. It's not a race thing per se, because I consider jazz one of the greatest American music / art forms, but ghetto lyrics really just
are ghetto and gross for humans to participate in, and there really is no redeeming artistry here.
I agree, however, that the rock bands at past Super Bowls were terrible. But to be clear, that was only a small passing phase--we had maybe a decade or 15 years of that. If you look back at the shows in the 70s/80s/ even into most of the 90s, you saw a lot of "__ marching band does a tribute to __". In retrospect, that was much better than the popstar nonsense we've been letting drag the game down for so long now.
Rap is way, way overexposed, it's boring now.
More than that... it's
corporate now, which is an embarrassing position to be in. Don't pretend to be street artists or authentic souls when you're the face of Apple Music and Coke ads, and nodding to Lamar is basically a shibboleth to prove you're not one of the bad racists. It's so tired and standardized, and a giant funnel from the dumbest white kids whose listening provides all the cash to keep it going, straight into the hands of corporate handlers and then into the talentless mumbler hacks... who just play their part in this corporate machinery without the slightest awareness of irony. There's nothing bold or challenging to be found in any of it, it's a ruse and a boring one now.
tl:dr for the threadbump post above mine:
1) You can’t please everyone.
2) Rap/hip hop is too popular.
3) Popular Rap/hip hop music isn’t for him.
Even on the central point ("Rap/hip hop is too popular") this is a complete misread. If anything, I'm supportive of music being popular / for the masses in the general sense. After all, I brought up the era when marching bands would play halftime with suites of crowd-pleasing medleys like "tribute to the seventies." My criticism is of a
corporate and synthetic popularity, which is a different thing entirely. But again, if one thinks Lamar is a genius, these kinds of subtleties of language are sure to pass over your head.
