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Travis Blake's avatar

“Rap music is country music” is an unexpected take, but it makes sense once you think about it.

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Quiara Vasquez's avatar

Nah: tbh I think "rap and country are the same genre" is a cold take at this point! Certainly plenty of people have made the same claim when dissecting the "I like every genre but rap and country" (read: I like any genre that won't make me look like a poor) meme. Were I sliiightly more in tune with either genre I would suggest another similarity, which is the critically acclaimed artist who is critically acclaimed in large part because their presentation is distinctly middle-class. (I can't name a country artist this is the case for without talking out my ass, but it is absolutely true that - to misquote David Lee Roth - music critics like DJ Shadow because music critics look like DJ Shadow.)

The Defector piece is a bit of a word salad, so I don't know how literally we should take the claims in it. Certainly Daramola's "thesis" (if you could call it that) only makes sense if you're willing to assume that there are such monolithic groups as capital-R Reactionaries and capital-R Rappers, which is obviously dumb. But also, like... would Joe Budden become a podcaster (of any political valence) if his musical career hadn't been dead for a decade? Drake and Kendrick certainly aren't becoming pundits any time soon. I don't want to say that The Breakfast Club et al have *no* cultural relevance, but they're not movers or shakers, really. They're the guys with the seismographs.

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