{"id":7652,"date":"2012-10-29T15:06:13","date_gmt":"2012-10-29T22:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=7652"},"modified":"2012-10-29T15:16:43","modified_gmt":"2012-10-29T22:16:43","slug":"something-from-nothing-the-art-of-rap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2012\/10\/something-from-nothing-the-art-of-rap\/","title":{"rendered":"Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1><strong><em><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-7653\" title=\"Something-from-Nothing-The-Art-of-Rap-M-Review-SeptOct-2012\" src=\"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/Something-from-Nothing-The-Art-of-Rap-M-Review-SeptOct-2012.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"250\" srcset=\"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/Something-from-Nothing-The-Art-of-Rap-M-Review-SeptOct-2012.jpg 400w, https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/Something-from-Nothing-The-Art-of-Rap-M-Review-SeptOct-2012-300x187.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/>Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/h1>\n<p>[Indomina]<\/p>\n<div><strong>DVD REVIEW\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In rap, you are whatever you say you are. Until someone contradicts you with faster, flashier rhymes, your words carry a kind of truth. It\u2019s music of self-definition, and as such, it\u2019s the perfect genre to tell its own story\u2014and spin its own mythologies. With \u00a0<em>The Art of Rap<\/em>, director Ice-T chats up old- and new-school MCs from the Bronx\u2014the birthplace of hip-hop\u2014to Compton, asking them to explain their craft. Thanks to his status as pioneering gangsta rapper, Ice-T gets access to some prime players (Chuck D, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre), and he elicits some illuminating responses. Early on, underground hero Lord Jamar recalls starting out with the instrumental \u201cDo It Yourself\u201d B-side of Kurtis Blow\u2019s 1980 classic \u201cThe Breaks.\u201d He\u2019d always thought rapping would\u00a0be easy, but facing his first beat, Jamar drew a blank. Ditto for Eminem, who got booed his first time onstage and says here that \u201cwords are like puzzles,\u201d\u00a0even after all these years.\u00a0For Eminem, hip-hop was a means of finding and asserting himself, and similarly, many of Ice-T\u2019s subjects compare rapping to fighting. \u201cYou\u2019re being set up,\u201d Lord Finesse tells potential challengers, likening rhymes to boxing combos. Others are less adept at explaining their processes, but rock songwriters rarely fare much better. If the goal was to portray rap as more than \u201cpeople talking over records\u201d\u2014an antiquated criticism in 2012\u2014Ice-T easily succeeds. Beyond that, he presents a mix of profundity and self-aggrandizing jibber-jabber. Given the subject, that seems about right. \u2013Kenneth Patridge<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap\u00a0 [Indomina] DVD REVIEW\u00a0 In rap, you are whatever you say you are. Until someone contradicts you with faster, flashier rhymes, your words carry a kind of truth. It\u2019s music of self-definition, and as such, it\u2019s the perfect genre to tell its own story\u2014and spin its own mythologies. With [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[196,1114,5093,5077,5092],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7652"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7652"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7655,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7652\/revisions\/7655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}