share with us your favorite passage:

[mikeycorn]

It could be literature, it could be prose, it could be verse, it could be something from a comic book, but there are for most of us a few lines and paragraphs that will forever resonate in our hearts and minds.

I think it would be quite refreshing if we all took a step back from our own personal pontifications and simply shared with the community something someone wrote that struck you profoudly . . .

[mikeycorn]

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.

Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more dispair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse . . . .

To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

[dimava]

by reading the lyrics I would say that some of them are rap and some are country, correct me if i'm wrong

ALL COUNTRY........ RAP SUCKS!
it sucks it sucks!!!!
all it is is pointless, thoughtless rhyming about how your gonna do your bitches!

country has thought to it!

[dimava]

1. Rap does not suck
2. I dont want to spend years arguing becuase its all opinon
3. what state do you live in?

1) Rap sucks, its not an opinion, its a fact j/k
2) I know its an opinion, I was joking... but I hate it
3) Virginia
4) you can't realy know how the song sounds 'till you listen to it..... it sounds much better in MP3 form.

[dimava]

you dont like eminem?

hell no!

although i am part of Gen-Y(yeah we are called Gen-Y) I hate what it does,
the way they resent their parents purely because of age,
the way they dress, the music they like,
their hobbies,

I hate skateboarding,
I hate rap,
I hate baggy droopy ripped up clothes,
I hate teenagers....
well 2 exceptions, but they are abnormal like me

you are a normal teenager, but in my eyes, that makes you look like an idiot.

[HarryW]

Why would anything sound better in a compressed format?

it sounds better then when you are reading my text,
because when its in MP3 and/or CDA format, it has all the music, and guitars and stuff backing it up, also the rythm,
I didn't mean it sounded better than radio or something.

[dimava]

so you ware tight pants? nothing "baggy" or wide? and a comptessed format would not make it sound better, actually it decreases the quilt by a little but not noticble by the human ear, but if you have an image of the MP3 and the original CD file, there would be a small diffrence in them

I wear "Loose" pants,
not baggy pants, or too tight.

its just another day in paradise

one of my favorites, its new so I don't know the artist, or the name.....

[mikeycorn]

Hey Dennis,

You know, I actually find that there are a lot of similarities between rap and country! Rap and country are the only two kinds of popular music where the lyric and the message of the song come first. A good lyric on a country song or a rap with a clever hook in the rap itself can make a song a hit almost all by themselves. Take any other kind of music and the lyrical message is secondary to a catchy riff. Rock music or what's erroneously called alternative (alternative to what? alternative is the mainstream now) both those styles have the vocals much more buried behind a wall of guitar and the singers are often incomprehensible anyways.

So next time you knock rap music, just realize that its really just the African-American version of country.

mikeycorn

Yeah,
but country music is actually 'bout real stuff,


Like I said,
all rap is, is singing about how your gonna do your *****, and what your gonna do to her if she doesn't listen to you.....

rap wouldn't be so bad, but the lyrics are horrible...

[mikeycorn]

Nah man,

You really probably haven't heard much more than what the media likes to shock people with. There are so many rap lyrics that are stories about things other than bitches and ho's and boasting about who's the real mac daddy. Honestly, many times I check out something by Tu Pac or even Dr. Dre or Snoop Doggy Dogg and I trip out on how much it's really a storytelling session somewhat along the lines of that cool VH1 CD of Johnny Cash and Willie. Maybe the perspective is a little different, having grown up in the hood, but the stories are still there.

It's like someone saying how all country music songs are about how you lost your dog, your job, your wife and so you went out and got drunk. It's just the popular conception of a casual observer and although there is a lot of that, it's not as if that's all there really is to it.

I'll try to track down some raps that go against the popular stereotype.

my favourite lyrics (if I may)

"Face down, arms out,
Nailed to the cross of doubt.
Blood runs like rain,
Drowning for this world in vain,
Crown of black thorns,
Human skin ripped and torn,
.....Where is your saviour now?"

Pisschrist - Fear Factory

it sounds better when they do it though...

[S@NSIS]

Def Leppard - Lets get rocked
I'm just an average ordinary everyday kid
Happy to do nothing
In fact that's what I did

And quite right too.