I have to admit that a lot of what I think about war is from Gwynne Dyer's War: The Lethal Custom, which pretty much holds that resource scarcity + nearby borders = no one likes war and everybody does war. I should probably get my act together sometime soon and a) reread that enormously depressing book b) find and read some rebuttals, such as they exist.
And HAH, I was thinking the same thing about rap! And am glad someone else was, because I immediately got very nervous about "oh shit is this cultural appropriation??? but it makes sense???"
I hear you but also figure everything in the dystopian future is appropriated from everything in the present, and also, like, cultural survival is cultural survival and there's a reasonably strong Australian hiphop culture? And also who knows who the warboys are descended from. But also, I am kind of familiar with guys in the military rapping, and the warboys seem so much like enlisted kids to me.
But yeah, seriously! a populist oral tradition that people can participate in without equipment or good singing voices. In the warboy barracks, late at night with a tiny little heat fire going, some kid laying down a beat and some guy spitting the story of how his friend died while everyone lays in their bunks listening, and then when he's winding down the next guy gets up and goes over and crouches by the fire and takes up the lyric line from him.
no subject
And HAH, I was thinking the same thing about rap! And am glad someone else was, because I immediately got very nervous about "oh shit is this cultural appropriation??? but it makes sense???"
I hear you but also figure everything in the dystopian future is appropriated from everything in the present, and also, like, cultural survival is cultural survival and there's a reasonably strong Australian hiphop culture? And also who knows who the warboys are descended from. But also, I am kind of familiar with guys in the military rapping, and the warboys seem so much like enlisted kids to me.
But yeah, seriously! a populist oral tradition that people can participate in without equipment or good singing voices. In the warboy barracks, late at night with a tiny little heat fire going, some kid laying down a beat and some guy spitting the story of how his friend died while everyone lays in their bunks listening, and then when he's winding down the next guy gets up and goes over and crouches by the fire and takes up the lyric line from him.