Rap isn't music. It's a garbage symptomatic of a diseased society. It's a glorification of violence, mayhem and low-life ghetto lifestyle.
I tired of hearing the phrase "personal taste" pandered about to excuse every inferior or amoral thing. Is liking or preferring a Hostess grease-fried, chemical-ridden, fruit-barren individual pie over a home-baked, fresh fruit, quality ingredient made pie a matter of "personal taste?" No, it's the lack of ANY TASTE. So is it with rap music.
I live in a culturally-diverse & supposedly 'good' neighborhood of Chicago where we are terrorized hours of the day and night by low-life who drive around blasting rap music at earsplitting levels with 'bass' that rattles the windows of our house.
I am a professional musician and have an open mind to a lot of music, but I would never call such trash music. Even among that which I would consider 'music', there is music of more intrinsic artistic value, and that of less artistic value. To ascribe equal musical and artistic value to the works of the great composers of the classics to Snoop Dogy Dog, et al. is idiotic and perverse.
I applaud those who answered this thread with a "politically incorrect" response. At least some segment of this society is getting tired of everything being equal and acceptable.
TRU, do you subject your neighbors to listening to your rap music and invading their quiet enjoyment of their units or houses? I see this everywhere, and it is like a cancer. Everybody does whatever they want today, and f--- you if you don't like it. Law enforcement does nothing, and could care less, as could our politicians. As far as middle-class white kids are concerned, yes, they are listening to it. Why, because they are influenced by the low-life who write and push this garbage, and because it is multi-billion dollar cash cow for the self-serving, money-drunk & morally bankrupt recording industry. The fact that we now have audiophiles listening to rap music only shows how culturally bereft our society has become and how children are not introduced to in the education system or by their parents to the large body of great music that has been written.