You're the man Boofo but I disagree completely on this one.

The Alice Cooper comparison - absolutely. However Manson's band is better, his songs are better, his lyrics are better and as a whole he's a much better musician than Cooper is. As far as live shows go, I've seen both and while I give cooper a slight edge, Manson's live performances are nothing short of spectacular.

It's worth mentioning that Alice is to this day the best concert I have ever seen, and I saw him ~8 years ago when I was 22 and the majority of his "best" years were well behind him. Basically it wasn't even my generation's music and he absolutely blew me away. Not to take anything away from MM who is also fantastic, but Cooper is just flawless live.

That said, Manson is certainly taking a lot of inspiration from him, but he's hardly a "pathetic copycat". He's picking up where Cooper left off, if anything. If you aren't into Metal I can understand why you wouldn't care for MM, but don't dismiss his entire catalog if you have only heard the handful of radio hits he's released. He's a BRILLIANT songwriter, and his band is excellent.

The Ozzy comparison is way off base though, apples and oranges. Ozzy was a metal singer writing rock songs. Manson writes heavy metal, conceptual art. He's closer to a dark/heavy David Bowie than he is to Ozzy.

I agree to a point. The majority of Rap that I've been exposed to (which is quite a bit), while a "performance art" no doubt, simply isn't music. I am a musician. My instrument is the guitar. If you're a singer, your voice is your instrument, a violinist, a pianist, etc. If you're relying on computer generated samples and programmed drum tracks for your backline, and the best you can do is talk over them - that's not music, that's Dr. Seuss.

Every band is capable of putting out a lousy song. However those bands you mentioned are comprised of musicans writing original material, whereas the majority of rappers are reciting lyrics over a looped sample, and half the time those samples were recorded, written, arranged and basically birthed by an actual artist.

I play guitar. I'm classically trained, but I'm a metal guitarist, and I'm a shredder. I can play In The Hall Of The Mountain King, and I put my own style on it and turn it into a shred/metal piece. That doesn't mean that I wrote it, but at the same time it takes a decent degree of skill to pull it off. (And by decent, I mean quite a bit). I've been playing for almost 20 years, and I practice my ASS off.

If you buy a guitar, you are a guitarist. When you work at it, then you become a musician. If I wanted to put out a rap album, I can buy some software, loop some samples and read this post over it in a verse/cadence, and voila, I have crafted a rap song.

Some of rap's origins may be the blues, but I'm sorry, Jay-Z has as much in common with roots Blues as I do with an astronaut.

Most rappers aren't musicians, they're performers and entertainers. Granted there are exceptions to every rule, and you can certainly be both at the same time. Please point me to a brilliantly written, composed rap piece PLAYED BY MUSICIANS that isn't the work of a team of producers, that doesn't require samples and isn't borrowing melodies from any other artist.

Not to nitpick, but the time signature has absolutely nothing to do with it. You can speak in odd meter over a pattern in odd meter. At the same time, not all rock is 4/4, it's just the easiest and most basic time signature to play in, as well as the most naturally listenable.

If you want to try some fun counting, listen to the new Tool single, Vicarious, and listen to the first 15 seconds or so. Those are polyrythms, and if a rapper were talented enough to double vocal lines like that, I'm sure it would certainly sound interesting. Lots of classical/opera pieces have them in there - it's a LOT of counting and extremely hard to write but the end result is fantastic from a technical standpoint.

Such will be the bane of musicians for all time. Try being a metal guitarist. I'm a progressive-ambient-metal-shred-rock-guitarist. But oh no, I have an acoustic piece with classical overtones, and I do play some polyrythms, and throw in some bluesy bits, so my album is a progressive-ambient-metal-shred-rock-blues-classical-acoustic record!

Which category is that on Amazon.com, again?

Best post in this thread.

Anyway, my final points:

- I now have the longest post in this thread.
- As the token music guy (see my site in my sig), that's my job.
- Whatever you enjoy is up to you, and hell, if you want to fart into a microphone and that's what you want to hear and you enjoy it, more power to you.

I'll never like rap. I won't deny that some of it has merit, but in a nutshell for the most part, not as a whole I do not consider rappers to be musicians in any sense of the word. They are artists and entertainers.

Being a musician is something very special that takes an enormous commitment, and I am in a small way offended when these talentless hacks are being given (by the media) a denomination that has taken me almost 20 years of my life to obtain.

I AM a musician because I have worked at it, I have lived for it, and after countless hours, days, years, I have earned it. It's not something you can buy, and not something the media can give you. That's something that I think only other musicians will ever understand.