fav bands?

[Wisemon]

I dislike the mainstream hip hop crap as much as you do. However, I believe that hip hop isn't *necessarily* bad per se, it just so happens that most of it is. I have heard some stuff (mostly from local artists -- yes, white guys -- that aren't well-known outside of my town) that was 100% free of all that Gangsta-fakeness that is practiced by the majority of chart-topping hip hop "artists" these days. It's not my music, but some of it still appeals to me in a way. These guys are "keeping it real", and I don't see how listening to that would be fake, if one honestly does like it.

The thing is, I dislike what has become a blurring of hip-hop and pop. Violent hip-hop was fine by me; I'm a violent person. It seems that hip-hop has been influenced by pop just as much as the other way around, and now it's all grind songs, not much different from the boy band crap. In other words, the worst of ethnic music influenced white music, but then it was refried into R&B/hip-hop, making it even more horrible and all consuming. At least when the Backstreet Boys were doing the crap, most people knew that they were full of shit. Suddenly, when black guys start doing it, it's legit.