Asklemmy

There's a lot of rap and hip-hop that isn't just running along to a bassy beat. Busta Rhymes doesn't rap to a beat, and he comes up with some clever lines. I've heard that Childish Gambino is one of the most clever writers right now, with some lines in Bonfires and Sweatpants being pretty damn hard.

I really like A Tribe Called Quest as well, because they have a more jazzy sound than most. I REALLY like Digable Planets though because they're like the ultimate fusion of funk, jazz, and hip-hop.

Rock had excellent lyrics in the 60's and 70's, but lyrical poetry kind of fell off a bit after that era. In the 90's a lot of bands were experimenting with mixing rap, rock, rasta, and other genres together. Some of it works really well, and some of it doesn't, but it's all pretty unique music. Eminem did an excellent job of mixing rock and pop with rap, and he has a lot of success to show for it. So, we've seen a lot of experimentation and progress over the decades, but we don't see much of that any more, at least not from major labels. They figured out a decade and a half ago that there's a very algorithmic approach to selling lots of music, and they'd rather continually follow that formula than take a risk on originality. So now most of the music coming from major labels are songs that are written by studio song writers, following a specific formula proven to sell albums, and the artist is secondary. They'll find someone with a good stage presence, that looks good, teach them to dance, and hand them a stack of songs to perform under heavy auto-tune. Most of the popular music I've heard in the last 10 years is devoid of soul.

That's true, I was just hoping to maybe convince you to try out something that maybe you don't know is wonderful yet. I've had that experience with music before, and I think it helped me to understand why people like things

It helps if there's a transcript to read along with it. Zack De La Rocha from Rage Against The Machine has a verse at the end of that song that hits really hard, because he's a great lyricist.

There's a line in El-P's verse where he says "hand on my heart and my mind on my drugs, got a Vonne-gut punch for your Atlas Shrugged," and the whole song is about modern ultra capitalism and our state of society at large.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/KD59LJX2r38

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Billy Joel is the only thing I recognize on your list. I guess we have very different musical tastes. I like pretty much every genre of music, but I gravitate towards rock and metal.