Features Podcasts Family Video Comics Music Tech Science Books Film & TV Games ✚

Jill

Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, The Infamous 20/20 Segment on Rap Music

Ed Piskor at 12:00 pm Tue, Dec 4, 2012

PREV • INDEX • NEXT

Tweet
Kindle

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!

Hip Hop Family Tree is now available for pre-order on Amazon for 38% off cover.

MORE:  brainrot • Hip Hop Family Tree

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

  • http://www.wizzywigcomics.com Ed Piskor

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onRKOcsf1J0

    • http://www.wizzywigcomics.com Ed Piskor

       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdPpfBw8U4A

    • http://devojane.blogspot.com devophill

       Hugh Downs looks like Joshua Pearson of Emergency Broadcast Network. (he shows up in this video at about 2:42)

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGSrag79KMY

  • Frank Diekman

    Ah. Back in the day when TV journalists actually did research for their stories.

  • https://twitter.com/misterjayem MrJM

    “Hip hop ain’t real music — not like when I was a boy.”

    http://www.history.com/videos/hollywood-stars-entertain-troops#hollywood-stars-entertain-troops (1m10s)

    • http://instantaneousinstances.com/ Spieguh

      Awesome. The Thin Man Tours a Flattop

  • Halloween_Jack

    “Anyone can rap.” Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha… Oh, Hugh. If only you’d stepped up to the mike yourself in an attempt to prove that.

  • dolo54

    Anyone can rap? Worst mistake I ever made at a karaoke bar is try to do Eminem. Even with the words in front of my face, and even though I knew the song by heart, no way could I keep up.

    • noah django

       the biggest problem with karaoke is that they only show two or four lines at a time.  with melodic lyrics, this is often an entire verse, probably 45 seconds to a minute’s worth of material and you can skim it at a glance to refresh your memory.  with rap, 4 lines is like ten seconds, there’s no skimming ahead.  instead of showing a screen at a time of a few lines, it should be a continuous scroll with the next two lines always visible.  then we wouldn’t look like dumb-asses singing songs we legitimately know  /rant

  • http://profiles.google.com/joshuabardwell Joshua Bardwell

    IMO, the comic mis-interprets or mis-represents the last line, “Not everyone can sing, but anyone can rap.” Setting aside for a moment the fact that it’s actually not true… The way I heard the line when I watched the story was not that it was a put-down of rap for being “easier” than singing, but that it was explicitly speaking to rap’s accessibility.

    • wizardru

      Given that the name of this segment is referred to as INFAMOUS, I suspect that whatever the intention may or may not have been, the Hip Hop community received it the way the comic implies.