I challenge you!?

Question:

I challenge you!?

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...

Someone said that "rap=crap" and "anybody can rhyme."

OK, fair enough. So, I have two challenges for people who feel this way:

1) Write 10 to 15 rap songs, find backing music, record the CD, and sell enough to be as successful as, at least, Busta Rhymes (fitting, right?).

2) Write a Shakespearean sonnet, a villanelle, a cinquain, or any other collection of poetry forms, compose enough of those poems to create a book of poetry, get the book published, and sell enough to be as successful as, say, Nikki Giovanni.

Go ahead. I'll still be here when you get back.

Additional Details

3 months ago
Oh, I supposed I'd better ask a question in case someone who gets all worked up reports me: How'd you do?

3 months ago
All right, all right! I was wrong!

3 months ago
Mari: **sigh** If it makes you happy . . . yes, I'm a real threat to run around the two colleges I teach at and start randomly shooting students because they alienated me. As you seem to have me pegged, please commit me before I try to martyr myself.

robert: Challenge taken: Bubba Spark's "Ugly," Cypress Hill's "The Last Assassin," most original rap, the Gorillaz, several Eminem songs including "Without Me" in which he raps: "I'm interesting, the best thing since wrestling; infesting in your kid's ears and nesting. Testing, attention please. Feel the tension, soon as someone mentions me. Here's my ten cents, my two cents is free. A nuisance, who sent? You sent for me?" Not only does it make sense (rhyming words aren't thrown together), he successfully uses assonance. A friend who loathes rap admitted those were brilliant lyrics.

I could keep going, but eh, why?

I enjoy Kanye West to a point, but I know what you mean about him.

3 months ago
Farien3 has several good points. He called me on my false arguments.

However, referring to rap and poetry as "junk" is one of my points. If you don't like it, then don't like it. But there's no need to denigrate it. Simply say, "it's not for me." I'm also guilty of disrespecting certain artists' music because I don't like it, but I find more and more that disrespecting it is unproductive. I'm moving toward stating that it doesn't interest me rather than denigrating it.

Additionally, my overall point was simply: don't disrespect someone's career until you've tried it yourself. I couldn't do what rappers do. I simply don't have the ability. That doesn't necessarily make them more talented than me, but it does mean they are able to do something I can't, and I shouldn't disrespect their abilities by calling them "crap."

Art is not subjective. Art is unable to judge anything objectively or subjectively. The appreciation of art is subjective, and that relates back to my overall point.

3 months ago
Last but never least: Bill

Commercial success is a socially acceptable measure of artistic merit; however, it isn't the only measure of artistic merit, and it is not my personal measuring stick. I know what you're saying. I personally see little artistic merit in Britney Spears' work, but she's making more money than I'll ever make in the music industry. Peter Gabriel's commercial success has come and gone, and I find his work artistically phenomenal.

Obviously, someone out there finds Britney's music worthy of appreciation. What can you do but shrug your shoulders and say to each their own?

I couldn't get up there and do what she does even if all she's doing is lip syncing and writhing on stage. If I did that, people would boo me. So, she must be doing something right (or her managers and producers are, anyway).

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

Supposing for a moment that we all took your 'challenge' and did as you suggested. Would that prove that 'anybody can rhyme'? Or would it only prove that those of us who completed your challenge can rhyme?

Supposing instead that we succeeded in writing all this junk and then failed to get the works published or produced? Would THAT prove that NOT everybody can rhyme? No, it wouldn't. Your challenge is ill-conceived, disengenuous and proves nothing by either success or failure.

You think that because a thing is published or produced it's not still 'crap'? Wrong again. Art is subjective.