Why "Spoken Word" Makes me Nervous

all right I got a confession to make guys I don't like poetry I don't know what it is there's just something about it that like I don't get all right I don't know it's just not for me especially when you get these like live spoken word poetry performances something about it just feels weird to me and tell me if I'm wrong but I feel like in the last few years I've seen a spike in these spoken word performances like poetry slams and beat poetry whatever you want to call it I feel like they've been shown up out of nowhere but here's the thing it's a big world not everybody has to like the same thing if you like poetry then great I hope it brings you the feelings or whatever it's supposed to do and I really mean it I hope you enjoy it but beyond my own personal bias about poetry and spoken word there's something that makes me really nervous about this whole performance poetry craze the only problem is is that it's kind of complicated to explain and by that I mean it's really complicated to try and explain why I have this hesitation with performance poetry beyond my own personal issues with it and there's no great way to go about it so let's just dive in here's a question I want you to keep in mind what's the difference between spoken word and rap spoken word is like a live performance of a poem I'd consider it music but that's a debate for another time now rap well I honestly can't define rap like what it is what it isn't how it sounds I can't because I'm not a part of the culture I'm not a part of the community but what I can say is that rap is a vocal technique that is frequently performed in hip-hop which means that rap music would be music that predominately features rapping the same way a song predominantly features someone singing and trying to work out the origins of these types of performances can get kind of weird like yeah you have these big competitive poetry slams now but then you had rap and hip-hop in the 80s but back in the 50s and 60s you had beat poetry but in the 20s you had Langston Hughes and jazz poetry but then you can find evidence of Vikings and anglo-saxons flitting in the 16th century which was basically a Thor themed rap battle and then you can also look at the grilles of West Africa and their poetry based system of cultural documentation so trying to figure out which one came first is kind of difficult to do but if rap is a vocal technique that is analogous to singing then that means that you could technically perform rap in an acapella setting like with no accompaniment right like this I got a small circle I'm not with different crews we walk the same path but got on different shoes so let me specify my question our spoken word and acapella rap the same thing such a big I'm gonna turn so yeah no poetry but it really is poet poetry is the tree then the the different genres on the branch is on one branch you have spoken word another branch you have rap okay so it does look like they're different Rudy Rudy she's here actually is a really great way of explaining how these two genres are different setup punchline set up line even if it's not a puss on but just set up rhyme setup rhyme you don't that's that's the bit that's a basic form that's a basic format of rapping so at least from what I'm hearing it looks like the difference between these two genres is that rap tends to have these specific rhyming and rhythmic patterns or a spoken word might not which okay but what happens when spoken word does have those similar rhyming and rhythmic patterns path Philly trim cuticles Justin something suitable and never rude or crude at all unimprovable right on time as usual not on cue then a snooker ball by like to play it super cool I feel like you could easily put a beat to that and the rhyming pattern sounds an awful lot like what I've heard in rap so here's my question assuming that we're looking at a situation where a spoken word performance has the same rhyming and rhythmic patterns as a piece of acapella rap then what is it that spoken word does differently that would necessitate it being called something other than acapella rap what is the difference between this but got on different shows live in the same building but we got different views and this was dressing something suits a boo and never rude or crude at unimprovable right on time as usual my on cue then a snooker boob I like to play it super corner that would necessitate a difference in genre in this situation what do we gain from calling it spoken word instead of something like acapella rap well I don't know how much things have changed since I was in college but I never saw coffeehouse advertising rap night I always saw slam poetry posters are on my college campus now it's not like people are going out of their way to completely override a genre of music on purpose because they don't like what it's associated with speaking of which have any of you guys ever heard of Ford you know Ford the car guy way back in the 20s like invented the assembly line or something like that well turns out that in the right perspective he's kind of the grandfather of country music you know country [Music] well way back when in the 1920s he was the guy who made these cars change the course of American history yada yada but in Richard Peterson's book creating country music he outlines how Ford played this role in the genesis of country music as we know it today see Ford hated the things that came out of the city which his cars an industry kind of like created but more specifically he hated the tobacco use alcohol and sex and he associated all three of those with the jazz dance environment so as a means of counteracting the evils of the jazz dance halls Ford financed for a bunch of fiddling competitions and old times Square and round dancing he went on this like crusade trying to replace jazz dancing with what we now associate to be country dancing and these fiddling competitions now the problem with all that is that Ford believe that the jazz dance halls weren't an accident he blamed african-americans recent immigrants and something Ford called the International Jew and even went as far as to create a publication outlining his conspiracy theory that these jazz dance halls were like part of some master plan or something I don't know I didn't really make any sense to me but either way Ford's efforts kind of worked because by the mid 20s radio stations started to appear that would play a bunch of what was known at the time as old-time music one such radio station created during this time and under these circumstances was WS Sam in Nashville Tennessee and seat by a guy called George hay and on that station he had a weekly show called the National barn dance and on November 28th 1925 the National barn dance was renamed the Grand Ole Opry now like I know what you might be thinking like just because Ford was a racist and was trying to manipulate the market doesn't mean that our college campuses are doing the same thing besides let's just say that we ignore that extraordinary racism for a minute and in the end of the day maybe Ford just wanted to have more fiddling competitions right sure if you want to go for that okay fine but for wasn't really a one-off there are plenty of instances of people doing things like this in the music industry I've mentioned him before my channel but it's just a great example of what the music industry does in the 1950s Sam Phillips was the owner of Sun Records in Sun Studios and was on the hunt for talent at some point while trying to make his fortune Phillips told his secretary his plan now I got a sense of this because YouTube doesn't like the language and I'm not super comfortable reading it out loud myself so you're gonna have to read it but too frequent viewers of the channel you'll know that Sam Phillips was the guy who discovered Elvis Phillips his entire goal was to sell black people music - white people using someone with a white people face and you can see it in the music the two most cited instances are Little Richard in Big Mama Thornton [Music] bamboo anything that now to this day when we think of rock and roll we tend not to think of the black musicians who started the genre well but today if I pick up a guitar start making what music black people would tell me I'm trying to be white it's incredible the level to which they've managed to market me says something has nothing to do with black people so to point that black people would tell me if I make more it's incredible but like those two situations were in the past right blackface was a thing when Ford was around and he was racist but fine that was way back when and all this stuff with Elvis happened ten years before MLK and I have a dream we're aware of this kind of practice now we know what's going on and we're taking measures to stop these kinds of things Pepsi just got hammered remember that there's no way we're gonna let this happen today there's just no way something like this could get by again there's no possible the Backstreet Boys were founded by a guy called Lou Pearlman Pearlman died in 2016 after being sentenced for 25 years after pleading guilty to conspiracy money-laundering and making false statements during a bankruptcy proceeding I was raised not to speak ill of the dead so unfortunately that's all you're gonna get about Pearlman but the story behind the Backstreet Boys is terrifying and outline in John Seabrooks book the song machine inside the Hit Factory so the story goes that Pearlman was in Orlando because of a failed blimp business venture I'm not kidding but Orlando is apparently this mecca for child actors and other young talent weird I know evidently the parks attract all the most desperate parents and believe it or not this is where Disney picked up their Mouseketeers including the ones that went on to have pop careers like Britney Spears Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake anyway Pearlman specifically wanted to find five white kids to sing for an urban crowd he picks these kids up gets him in rehearsals and then starts getting them gigs at like shopping malls and SeaWorld or whatever but the problem is that the boys thought of themselves as R&B singers a white version of boys to men not as pop artists now this is a problem because one as an adult I'm not sure you should be having children listening to music that has lyrics like this but hey what do I know and two RMB is one of those things that doesn't mean what it actually means page 53 Seabrook writes in the late 1940s the record industry began to promote these groups under the label rhythm and blues a term invented to replace the derogatory trade name race music RMB was a marketing term that became a badge of black musical identity by definition a black group would always be labeled R&B even if they sang pop now I know what you're thinking and don't worry yes it gets worse the Backstreet Boys real break came when BMG couldn't get the arm be seen to break in Germany their solution these five white kids for three years between 95 and 98 the Backstreet Boys dominated the charts in Europe with our R&B sounds and their break in the States didn't come until they released I want it that way in 98 that took the whole world by storm so we have a racist looking to change what he's hearing on the radio for well racist reasons we have a guy willing to take music from one group of people and sell it to another and then we have a guy who's specifically trying to make as much money as possible with no consideration for what he was doing like the really sick part about the Backstreet Boys story was that Pearlman knew that one day people would get tired of the Backstreet Boys so while he was putting the band together he went behind their back without them knowing and found a second boy band that would replace the Backstreet Boys once their time was up that band was called NSYNC [Music] now the world of music has a bunch of stories like this and more appear everyday but the big question here is like what if you just like the music what if you aren't a racist and you aren't doing anything for racist reasons but you just happen to like the music that you're listening to I actually have a video explaining why that might be happening in my Coco video I argue that you might like the music that you like because you listen to it as a young teenager and there are some neurobiological processes that could be encoding this music in your brain and having it stick there for basically the rest of your life and you can kind of see evidence for this in certain musicians biographies like when Mozart was a very young child he toured all over Europe playing for basically everyone by the time he was an adult he was able to merge the Italian German and French styles into music that all of Europe would enjoy by listening to all the diverse pieces in Europe as a young child he was able to synthesize him into a unifying style as an adult and interestingly there are a handful of musicians who have been called cultural appropriators who have stories that can kind of fit into this hypothesis Benny Goodman for example was known as the King of Swing back in the 30s when big-band jazz was all the rage he even had this concert at Carnegie Hall called a famous 1938 Carnegie Hall jazz concert creative I know but the thing is is that when you track his biography you can see how and why he grew attached to this music Goodman was one of 12 two poor immigrant parents in Chicago and they paid for clarinet lessons to keep him out of trouble by the time he was 14 Goodman was good enough to perform with Bix Beiderbecke a jazz cornetist when he went to high school he was playing clarinet and dance halls and by the time he was 16 he joined the Ben [ __ ] Orchestra one of Chicago's top bands and we could see something similar with Elvis like where do we even start with him he was the king of rock and roll but at the same time he's been accused of cultural appropriation and you can actually see that directly in the music that he performed yeah Elvis appropriated an african-american musical style and combined it with more of a white country but Elvis was raised in a poor two-bedroom house in Tupelo Mississippi in a large black community it was there when he first picked up a guitar in 48 when he was 13 he and his family moved to Memphis Tennessee and by the time he was in high school he was spending all his time on Beale Street which was basically where the Blues lived in Memphis and finally you can look at someone like mm I don't really think I need to explain a situation but Eminem was born in 1972 in Missouri while he was young he moved between Michigan and Missouri with mother but by the time he was 14 Eminem was rapping with his high school friends during lunch breaks it was at this time he developed the stage name mmm and he started freestyle rapping so assuming that my Coco video is right you can see how and why these musicians dedicated themselves to the genres that they did but there's still a problem with all of this it's tough to ignore that these guys were all white playing music that was associated with black communities and that these musicians specifically became enormous ly successful especially when you look at what kind of people pull the strings in the music industry they prefer their black music and their black culture from a non black now regardless of whether or not it is conscious or purposeful this is something that's been going on for a long time but why is that well if my cocoa video is right and you see teenagers pursuing this type of music because that music releases dopamine in their systems and they're teenagers so they're all looking for new and exciting experiences and they listen to it so much that codes itself into their brain I'm not gonna go into any more detail here that's literally a different video but assuming all of that is true then you might be seeing rebellious teenagers pursuing music that their parents generation might perceive as oh I don't know the devil's music degenerate music or music with no moral or ethics substance to it or in no room in this city for the vulgar performances of Elvis president it's shocking I watched him gyrate his legs and swivel his hips and our parent-teachers group feels he should not be on television so those rebellious teenagers go out of their way to pursue that music and it virt n't ly encode it into their head and by the time they've reached adulthood and want to pursue that music or even just enjoy music then they're gonna go look for someone or something that has had a similar experience to themselves you could even argue that these musicians are the victims of an unfair system if we live in a systemic erase of society then these people are not cultural appropriators in a malicious or dishonest way instead they are the victims of a system that will disproportionately favor them instead of a true meritocracy that would value their innate contributions to the world of music they prefer their black music and their black culture from a non black that's a culture issue that is an issue with people out there the listeners think about it is it really their fault that they would be disproportionately advantaged in our society they just loved music and they wanted to more music to the world and if they really wanted to make a difference then it would fall to them to try and offset whatever system gave them that advantage in the first place he's trying to curate a Super Bowl show full that would not be invited to Super Bowl normally and when you find these musicians who have that childhood connection to the music you can see them giving back every single time like you really got to remember that jazz started as a black art form but back in the 1930s blackface was still a thing I heard a story once for my jazz history professor that they once put a black band in blackface because they were worried that their complexion would come off as too pale for the camera and upset the audience I haven't been able to find that story for myself but it kind of gives you an idea as to what band directors were dealing with back in the 30s Goodman knew about all this and was watching it happened but nevertheless he pushed to have his band perform at Carnegie Hall the biggest baddest concert hall in America and when he did even though he had his face on the record he had black performers onstage with him and he performed music written by black composers and when you look at Elvis yeah there are criticisms about him taking songs from people like Little Richard and Big Mama Thornton but just five minutes of searching and you start finding stories about him trying to offset the system that disadvantaged performers that came from the musical background he was trying to represent Elvis was told by his people that when you can leave the black girl's home so Elvis wasn't gonna do the Astrodome unless his girls could be with him and he personally welcomed me into the family and for a guy who you know didn't really knew know where he stood this was very important and then Eminem again where do you even start I think a lot of people consider him to be a genuine contribution to the world of hip-hop I'm not a hundred percent sure again I can't speak for hip-hop but one thing is for sure and I've seen other people point this out and I'm not saying why I shouldn't participate in a movie they should but they should say what Eminem said you know to do black music so selfishly and use it to get myself wealthy but it really looks like in many ways Eminem might be his own biggest critic [Music] but here's the big question with all this who cares who cares that the music is similar who cares whose face is on the record if the music's good why can't we just listen to the music especially if there is actually some kind of neurobiological component here if someone makes a good burger you can't complain about some other fast-food chain coming along and also making burgers if one person does something better than someone else then they win right well it's tough to hear that argument and then hear those exact same people turn around and start complaining about how homogeneous pop music is see when everyone starts doing the same thing you become the victim and you lose because when you start seeing the same thing over and over again you're the one who has to deal with things like the four chords and all the excuses for him like all music has been written before and there's nothing new Under the Sun this is how and why so many things on the radio sound so similar let me put it to you this way think about all the different let's players you've seen play the exact same game and have the exact same reaction think about all the different youtubers you've seen have the exact same reaction to the exact same movie trailer at the exact same time in the exact same way it makes the world really bland like does anyone remember the irate gamer that's kind of my case in point you can very clearly see the similarities between him and the angry video game nerd but the thing is that you can find a whole bunch of people that followed the legacy of the angry video game nerd I would be completely out of my mind to sit here and tell you that every blurred or irritated gamer or film reviewer sitting in front of a camera screaming and exaggerating minor details is somehow ripping off this series because this series is basically the equivalent to the invention of lined paper but something that all these other people did was that they took the style and made it their own and they contributed their own voice and opinions to the complete discourse of video games but with someone like the irate gamer well given that his content was so extremely unoriginal this made him very unpopular in the reviewer scene and this is something I really try to keep in mind when I make my videos I try to tell myself that if someone else has already talked about it and I don't really have anything to add then there's no point in me talking about it so I know I'm not the first person to talk about your training on the Internet but I found out was on a podcast that I might have learned ear training a little differently from other people so I thought it might be worth it if I put my perspective on ear training out there I know that there are other videos talking about set theory but I hadn't seen anyone talking about clock diagrams probably because my theory professor was the guy who invented them and he had just retired no I want make this really clear I'm in no way shape or form saying that I'm perfect hell I can't even say I'm half decent I can 100% guarantee that you're gonna find pieces of my videos all over the internet and other YouTube videos blog posts articles wherever as far as I'm concerned that's me screwing up and I know I've done that before because in the end of the day the whole point of me citing my sources and doing everything I can to research a topic isn't just that I can tell myself that people are getting the credit that they deserve it's so I can tell myself that what I'm contributing is actually valuable because maybe not that many other people out there have thought about this in this way before like even this sentiment isn't entirely my own so you're gonna hear someone else talk about it now in days of old entertainers and writers would measure success by how well-regarded their work was or in how much the wider discussion was furthered by their contribution but aren't you thinking this has nothing to do with people like Elvis because Elvis is rock and roll Eminem has contributed so much to hip hop that to call him an outsider wouldn't just be wrong it would be disrespectful and in many ways these kinds of musicians might be the first or most significant exposure to that genre of music that you've now grown to love besides like I said these musicians came from the same world that created the music that they now have grown to define in some way so even if there were any contributions to these genres of music it's coming from the same place in the same background so it really isn't a problem right well think about this imagine that one day you discover that there's an Islamic version of jingle bells and they've started singing it in Egypt that's gonna raise a lot of questions questions like why but say that it happens and they completely changed the words and even change a couple of the notes and they add their own embellishments but you can still tell that it's jingle bells and at the same time let's say that there's a version of jingle bells out there performed by Kelly Clarkson which version do you think the Mormons are going to go out and buy now you can kind of see the comparison between this situation and Elvis Elvis sing music that belonged to black people but he's white so he's evil and we shall start the heat brigade on Elvis right no obviously not this is an extreme comparison with a lot of unfair differences and Elvis was someone who was raised around this kind of music he clearly had a passion for it and he tried to give back whenever he could all right so let's change it up let's say that instead of an Islamic version of jingle bells it was still an Egyptian version but it was sung by Egyptian Christians for Christmas apparently Egypt has one of the highest populations of Christians in the Middle East so let's say that even though the words might be different that the overall structure is basically the same what might that version of jingle bells sound like imagine if you took this recording and started playing it in all the shopping malls in Salt Lake City and then they stopped selling Kelly Clarkson's albums it's the same song right sung by the same people who still care about the original message it's basically the exact same thing right well no you can clearly see that there's an influence that is in some way altering the identity of the piece but then again Elvis was raised around the kind of people who created rock and roll so that's a really unfair comparison because there is nothing else differentiating him from his fellow rock and roll musicians that would then influence the music that he created right combined it with more of a of a white so white musical style which is a country and ended up with something that white people generally saw as innovative but african-american people saw as derivative and I was very disgusted but by him saying it he really made it bigger and made me and so with that let me ask you again assuming that we're looking at a situation where a spoken word performance has the same rhyming and rhythmic pattern as a piece of acapella rap then what is it that spoken-word does differently that would necessitate it being called something other than acapella rap and the reason this whole situation makes me so nervous is because of Eminem Eminem hit the scene in the early to mid 2000s anyone who was a preteen at that time would have been in college by the early 2010's now it's no secret that Eminem kind of opened up the game for a lot of other artists I hate to say it but looking from the sidelines rap looks to be a little more diverse than it was back in the 80s and 90s I mean this is the BYU cheerleading squad for Christ's sake and that might be attributed to the Elvis effect that Eminem so clearly pointed out in his own work Eminem offered a face that an unforgiving community would perceive as less threatening if the choice is between NWA harshly criticizing the police or this white guy with bleached hair dress like Robin which do you think the Mormon mom is going to let their teenager listen to nevertheless in the last decade hip-hop has effectively become one of if not the biggest musical genre period meaning that those teenagers and preteens who were raised in a world where hip-hop and rap was more accessible like in the late 2000s and early 2010's are just now starting to get into college meaning that if my math is right all these people are going back to their dorm rooms and listening to hip-hop but then instead of going on stage and performing hip-hop or even acapella rap they end up performing spoken word at a poetry slam and when rappers in y'all know who y'all are you know I'm saying this many times when people come up to me whatever never liked you you know I'm saying I'm gonna do my join acapella like spoken word you know just cuz you take a rat and do what a cappella does not make it spoken word all of a sudden he couldn't quite get to grips of what they said so he let his light be eclipsed by what they said he fell into a lone star state like Texas and finally even punched in his solar plexus I'd lay awake at night just staring at the ceiling I've spent my whole life trying to run from that feeling that feeling of being lonely that feel to be lost that feeling of being sick when the lights turn off now I get it I might be little paranoid maybe I'm going way too far with this maybe I need to lay off the midnight Wikipedia adventures but if I'm right then we might be watching this whole cycle repeat and soon there will be no one to stop it thanks for watching I like to thank my patrons for making these videos possible the very special thank you to Hayden hell's at Donovan Hodges Andrew Luke - Matt Ethan Rooney Karen Rosen ow claritin and Billy bass plays if you like I just saw here be sure to check out my other videos for more follow me on Twitter and twitch type music questions answered live and if you really like what I'm doing consider supporting the channel on patreon but that's all I got for now thanks for watching you

Channel: Sideways

Views: 500,014

Keywords: Why, Spoken Word, Makes, me, Nervous, Cultiral, Appropriation, Elvis, Eminem, Benny, Goodman, Backstreet, Backstreet Boys, Ford, Poetry, Slam, Spoken, Word, Drake, Rap, Hip-Hop

Id: kBD1AYOMqmE

Length: 24min 53sec (1493 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 02 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/odious_odes]

I don't understand the final Jingle Bells section. Help?

The rest of the video, I found to be very interesting, well-written, and in-depth. I've had similar odd feelings about the spread of spoken word even as I enjoy some spoken word stuff (in particular, as voice for minorities including but not limited to people of colour) and it's an excellent point that you don't see coffee shops advertising rap nights.