A Lapse In My Infinite Knowledge

HA! Me. Knowledge. Infinite. Hilarious. I mean, realistically speaking there must be one or two things I don’t know right? I suppose so. Either way, I found one recently. Let me share.

Rap music. I don’t understand it.

I mean, beyond the culture of it all, which is just worlds away from what I know and experience on a daily basis, the music is so weird to me. I spent a lot of time in various clubs this past weekend…most likely the reason that it’s taken me until Thursday to develop the mental capacity to pen another entry on this little e-journal of mine. Needless to say, all weekend I was facially assaulted by club-music. Now, some of it is admittedly not rap. It would probably fall under various foreign categories like house, trance, electronic, etc. I can’t even pretend to joke about what it’s classified as because I literally know that little about it.

What I want to understand (someday or somehow) is HOW the music is made. Based on the knowledge and experience I’ve garnered playing/writing/listening to the music that I’ve been listening to since my childhood, I can listen to almost any pop, alternative, punk, rock, metal, or really any genre who’s core instruments are guitars, bass, and drums and figure out, or at least understand how someone could write a riff or song. I’ve fiddled around on guitars long enough to understand that sometimes it takes a flub in a scale to create a riff. Or sometimes drawing chords out of a hat to make a progression will actually stick (done it…). Or sometimes you’ll be driving around Isla Vista delivering pizzas when in a moment of surreal clarity and divine intervention on behalf of the pizza and metal gods, you develop the sickest riff in your head and have to call your drummer to IMMEDIATELY meet you at the practice studio (studi-HOOOOO) to hammer it out and get it down on paper. These things happen. This is how I have written songs. This is how I can understand that by fiddling around with these instruments you can write music.

The disconnect I guess comes with the instruments themselves. I don’t understand how DJs create music. I’ve heard rap songs where the music behind it was a series of bed-spring squeaks spliced in with, like, car horns and accented by, I dunno, some weird digital bloopy-bleep-o sound. What baffles me is how a guy can be sitting at a computer with a seemingly endless bank of singular sounds and be able to formulate a rhythm, melody, and song structure. It’s crazy!

So needless to say, after a long weekend’s worth of rap/club immersion, I ran home and flushed my system with some Iron Maiden. Nothing like “The Trooper” to purge Fiddy Cent. Lather, rinse, repeat.