8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

  • 8sided About
  • memora8ilia

Rhymes With ‘Naughty’?

January 4, 2016 · Leave a Comment

The Daily Beast:

While music might be intended to inform or incite, it is also designed to entertain. And as a glance at bestsellers lists can attest, conspiracy sells. The search for hidden meaning and coded symbols adds another level on which a product can be enjoyed. Which might explain why Jay Z keeps putting occult references in his songs and videos, even while he explicitly denies being part of the Illuminati. “Great rap should have all kinds of unresolved layers that you don’t necessarily figure out the first time you listen to it. Instead it plants dissonance in your head,” Jay wrote in his 2010 book Decoded. And what better way to plant dissonance than canny use of subversive imagery. Hip-hop was predicated on sampling and remixing older ideas into something new and relevant, and Illuminati myths and symbols can be sampled the same way a drumbeat can.



Then again, there might be a more pragmatic reason why hip-hop latched on to the idea of the Illuminati. As Rakaa Iriscience of the trio Dilated Peoples pointed out in a 2014 interview with Hiphopdx.com, “There were a lot of organizations that existed. That one [the Illuminati] just happened to rhyme with body, party, naughty and a lot of other things. It sounds cooler than some of the other ones do.”

------------------

Related posts:

  1. Embrace the Genre
  2. An Enthusiastic Hug
  3. Sampling Non-Stop

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Esoterica, Hip Hop, Music History

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

8sided.blog

 
 
 
 
 
 
8sided.blog is a digital zine about sound, culture, and what Andrew Weatherall once referred to as 'the punk rock dream'.

It's also the online home of Michael Donaldson, a slightly jaded but surprisingly optimistic fellow who's haunted the music industry for longer than he cares to admit. A former Q-Burns Abstract Message.

"More than machinery, we need humanity."
 
  Learn More →

Mastodon

Mastodon logo

Exploring

Roll The Dice

For a random blog post

Click here

or for something cool to listen to
(refresh this page for another selection)

Linking

Blogroll

A Closer Listen
Austin Kleon
Atlas Minor
blissblog
Craig Mod
Disquiet
feuilleton
Headpone Commute
Hissy Tapes
Jay Springett
Kottke
Metafilter
One Foot Tsunami
1000 Cuts
Parenthetical Recluse
Poke In The Ear
Robin Sloan
Seth Godin
The Creative Independent
The Red Hand Files
Things Magazine
Warren Ellis LTD

 

TRANSLATE with x
English
Arabic Hebrew Polish
Bulgarian Hindi Portuguese
Catalan Hmong Daw Romanian
Chinese Simplified Hungarian Russian
Chinese Traditional Indonesian Slovak
Czech Italian Slovenian
Danish Japanese Spanish
Dutch Klingon Swedish
English Korean Thai
Estonian Latvian Turkish
Finnish Lithuanian Ukrainian
French Malay Urdu
German Maltese Vietnamese
Greek Norwegian Welsh
Haitian Creole Persian

TRANSLATE with
COPY THE URL BELOW
Back

EMBED THE SNIPPET BELOW IN YOUR SITE
Enable collaborative features and customize widget: Bing Webmaster Portal
Back

Newsroll

Dada Drummer
Dense Discovery
Dirt
Erratic Aesthetic
First Floor
Garbage Day
Kneeling Bus
Lorem Ipsum
Midrange
MusicREDEF
Orbital Operations
Sasha Frere-Jones
The Browser
The Honest Broker
The Maven Game
Today In Tabs
Tone Glow
Why Is This Interesting?

 

TRANSLATE with x
English
Arabic Hebrew Polish
Bulgarian Hindi Portuguese
Catalan Hmong Daw Romanian
Chinese Simplified Hungarian Russian
Chinese Traditional Indonesian Slovak
Czech Italian Slovenian
Danish Japanese Spanish
Dutch Klingon Swedish
English Korean Thai
Estonian Latvian Turkish
Finnish Lithuanian Ukrainian
French Malay Urdu
German Maltese Vietnamese
Greek Norwegian Welsh
Haitian Creole Persian

TRANSLATE with
COPY THE URL BELOW
Back

EMBED THE SNIPPET BELOW IN YOUR SITE
Enable collaborative features and customize widget: Bing Webmaster Portal
Back

ACT

Climate Action Resources
+
Carbon Dots
+
LGBTQ+ Education Resources
+
Roe v. Wade: What You Can Do
+
Union of Musicians and Allied Workers

Copyright © 2023 · 8D Industries, LLC · Log in