I split this idea off the Afro and Latin Music thread, because I feel that this kind of insightful content can get lost in the shuffle, in a thread that is more often than not, just songs being liked and shared back and forth. You can’t really follow the OK K.O.! theme song (a fine disco song) with a video about the scathing critique of hip hop being commercialised at the expense of its own roots and culture, like other black genres historically. I feel this is a topic where I can recommend video essays and documentaries which touch upon how the Black and Latin genres I like are being shaped and informed, with Black and Latin culture around them.
this documentary is great. elvis mitchell is one of my favorite film critics and it always bummed me out how he stopped writing after 2011, so it was a pleasure to hear him read his own prose for two and a half hours here
This is not an attack on Mandarin or Cantonese. There is not a lot of hip hop in them, but there is a lot of fun out there if you dig into hip hop, r&b, jazz, soul, and funk influenced Sino music. I only post this because I feel that languages not built for easy flow, bars, puns, word play, or rhyming are good challenges to what you can rap.
