I still can't stand rap music. After 20 years, you'd think I'd learn to live with it or dance to it, but it just doesn't do thing-one for me. I can't bring myself to like the sound--the atonality and faux-south-bronx accents drive me up a wall. I can't even do aerobics to it. I don't think the lyrics are all that meaningful, and they certainly aren't romantic even when they're bringing up the topic of sex. What can you say about a musical form that has its roots in disco? Actually, the very first rap song was French, and we all know how good they are at music. "Je t'aime/Moi non plus" was a seducto-hit around '68. Similar stuff seeped into our brain pans thanks to Barry White and some other really pathetic aural-erotica records that were sold only through mail order in the early 70's. Actually, James Brown probably is probably the father of rap, and he had a minor hit with the only truly hilarious rap song, "Ain't Gonna Bump No More (with no big fat women)." And Gil Scott Heron's "The Revolution Will Not be Televised Tonight" is probably the best of political satire in music this side of Randy Newman. All goodies aside, there's not much in mainstream rap (the stuff that made real money from 85 till now) to commend it. Rap had a temporary fusion with punk rock. Blondie's "Man from Mars" (or whatever it was really called..."the man from mars is eating cars/ and going to bars/ where the people meet/ wall to wall and cheek to cheek") was a truly awful attempt by quaaluded white trash to popularize the form. Naturally, it made tons of money. The biggest single rap song of all time (I hope) has got to be "Can't Touch This." Now, M.C.Hammer lives just up the hill from me--so I consider him a close personal friend--but facts are facts: the music was a loop he stole from Rick James, who was himself a remarkably no-talent musician. Rick James was such a pig he made Prince look like the Moral Majority. But I digress--back to M.C. Hammer: in order to pay for the furniture in his big old house on the hill, MC Hammer is now the main attraction at Moscow communist party political rallies (really!)--so you can see he's totally bound to his Oakland roots, you can be sure. The second biggest rap song was probably "I feel for you", appropriately performed by Stevie Wonder, among others, and sung by Chaka Khan--the one rapper I would sincerely like to sleep with. OK, I'll admit it: that's something to commend rap for. Actually it isn't. Would you sleep with any of the members of Scoop Dogee Dog? Or want to be seen with a guy named Chunky T or Heavy J? Rap singers don't have drug problems as much as they have issues with fat-intake and really bad barbers. This musical form, as the people in it, is basically derelict and ne'erdowell. I cannot wait for its replacement, and can't believe it still survives as entertainment.