GET OVER IT! Kathryn Beaton Anyone who has tried to enter into a conversation about music will have unfortunately come across prejudice. We are all guilty of judgement to varying degrees, and yet everyone has felt annoyed when someone has judged their music taste. Sometimes, we judge ourselves — there are guilty pleasure themed club nights, with DJs playing music that socially you shouldn’t admit to enjoying. This judgement is facilitated through superiority contests over a variety of premises, from who is the bigger fan to what constitutes ‘proper’ music. Our capacity for judgement is so extensive that liking an artist can be a defining factor of your personality. Taylor Swift fans are branded online as ‘girls who used to be into horses’, which translates to privileged, probably white, and awkward. Issues of judgement span is a phenomenon not just among fans, but among artists as well. Yet, we are all aware that music taste is subjective, and everyone makes their personal aesthetic judgements. So why is this issue so widespread when we know it to be false? In many ways judgement is natural, and plays a necessarily central role in all discussions around forms of artistic expression, not just music. Competitiveness is inherent to human nature, and enhanced by capitalism. Our individual sense of identity, shaped heavily by our likes and dislikes, is often threatened by the needs of the collective. An easy method to protect your individuality is to frame it as superior to someone else’s. This is a theme that runs through the history of rap, Tupac claimed De La Soul, “... got a problem with this hard shit… I’ma keep it real, show you how it feels to ride”. Ice T claimed Soulja Boy “single handedly killed hip hop” with the release of ‘Crank ‘Dat’. Large shifts in popular rap music, the rise of mumble rap, the use of autotune and trap beats to name a few, have caused many earlier rappers to criticise these new trends as they feel their own identity becoming threatened.
“I’m gonna defend my older heads and tell you you’re not equal… problem is y’all want us to accept music that don’t move nothing but the young.” - Pete Rock Those rappers’ personal perspective on how rap should sound is central to their identity as an artist, and when their opinion falls out of fashion, artists feel compelled to express their musical superiority through comparative criticism. The comparative and public nature of the criticism demonstrates that these disagreements do not come from pedantic preference; rather, the evolution of a genre is taken as a personal insult.
©Illustrations by Iris Deng 30
