What are you listening to

Zack is an edgelord, KRS-One is the real deal.

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oh yeah, how so?

he’s another very bright cat that knows his fate would be Bobby Seale(d)

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Name any other rapper in the past twenty years who brings it to you like this:

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Me? I’m Akhenaten and writing on papyrus

KRS-One is identifying himself with the Pharaoh Akhenaten who reigned during circa 1353–1336 BC. Significant is that Akhenaten introduced worship of Aten, the sun-disk, a monotheistic deity in a breakage from the polytheistic worship of the Egyptian pantheon of gods. Worship of Aten was considered a new version of received truth, and a breakage from old ways. KRS-One advocates just that with respect to Hip Hop. For more on, see Wikpiedia on Aten.

Also notable is that Akhenaten was husband of Nefertiti, referenced frequently by other hip hop artists such as Rakim Visions of Nefertiti, Mecca, Medina.

KRS-One indicates that his verse is written on papyrus, a reed that grows on the banks of the Nile and used by Ancient Egyptians. In this way, KRS-One situates himself within the intellectual tradition of the Egyptians.

pretty cool that this site provides a bit of insight into what KRS-One might’ve meant lol

https://genius.com/Krs-one-never-afraid-lyrics

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You think metal lacks the message of someone like KRS-One?

A few of you do listen to metal

Ignore the covers and instead scroll down a bit to “2019’s Best Metal Songs… So Far”. You’ll find dozens of albums to check out. They recommended specific songs but I just listened to the whole albums. I have made it all the way to the letter T and have about handful left. Very few duds.

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I guess Neal Peart just passed :pray:

Metal is all over the map. Like, there was a whole lot of genuinely subversive shit back in my day. Megadeth was all about the military-industrial complex. Remember when Metallica had a music video with footage from Johnny Got His Gun? Fucking terrifying.

But now all my favorite bands got old and Slayer and Dave Mustane are on some dumbfuck boomer shit. There’s a lot of fascist-adjacent metal that is very bad. I don’t know what the new generation of metal is like because I’m old. I like Mastodon but it’s not subversive in any real way.

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I think the second or third album I ever bought as a kid was cassette of Countdown to Extinction which had a title track warning us about species extinction and how canned hunters like Trump Jr. are cowardly assholes. That shit is still on point thirty years later. Metal had a pretty solid message back in the day. Greta Thunberg could adopt this as her entrance music.

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As a nerd I fundamentally love prog-metal but it’s never been progressive or challenged the status quo in any real way. It’s like, let’s do a concept album about Paradise Lost or Moby Dick or whatever and use crazy unusual time signatures. Okay, cool. I see that you guys are very smart.

Who remembers when MTV would play Metallica’s One music video? Afterward the vee-jay Kurt Loder or Kennedy or whoever would look into the camera and try to awkwardly segue into an Aerosmith video. For real, I would have never read Johnny Got His Gun if it weren’t for this video, that is the kind of thing real culture should try to do and I respect it.

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Tabitha Soren :heart:

You rarely get collectivist politics from metal, the ethos is individualist. Individualism can go either way, like Metallica had anti-war songs on all three of their peak thrash-period albums (For Whom the Bell Tolls/Disposable Heroes/One) but they’re all written from the perspective of one individual in the war, the message is like “you as an individual should not sign up to fight wars, it’s a bad idea”. The individualism can also be right-wing when it takes the form of rejection of solidarity with others, an every man for himself type thing socially. Even when metal criticizes some social or wider political issue, it’s generally just a description of the problem, there’s no call to collective action (Countdown to Extinction is an example of this, other examples are Metallica’s Blackened and And Justice For All). In hip hop you frequently get like “we as a people need to do X”, it’s very rare to see that in metal.

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guess what? you guys enjoy the conversation

I found a rare instance of restraint in my being, and am not gonna participate

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Currently just listening to BBC1 Live Lounge covers on YouToobz, mostly in the same vein (current alternative/pop artists covering each other-think Chvrches, Halsey, Bastille). I decided I want to listen to a [maybe slightly embarrassing] song that I hadn’t heard in a while and guess what there is a sick Live Lounge cover of it by Hozier that had never shown up for me before.

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Tiny Desk Concerts. If you’ve never heard them, you’re welcome. Here are a couple great ones.

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I can’t stand musicals; but it has a glimmer of hope w Bollywood. Pretty sure just about everything about this is fantastic!

Apparently no green screens or anything., just “Let’s throw the whole Bollywood troupe on a train…!”
Health & Safety be damned…

Was researching a walrus and ran into this and god damn its just as perfect and poignant as it was 20 years ago.

And now Ive fallen down a Bad Religion hole and dont really care if I ever come out because their stuff is always so good

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