Operap

So says the new rap: Aldo Ranks and Danger Man, “singing opera.” “Singing”? I doubt it. With some benevolence we might grant “shouting,” and they can keep the change. But opera? Never. That is not opera: it is a failed graft of melodies from well-known arias onto rap time.

They were not content with calling their cheap rap reggae (reggae is something else). Now they want to call the same blight by the name of its antonym: opera. Opera requires sublime singing, a plot, a set and a full orchestra.

To me it sounds like heresy. They have taken excerpts from Handel’s Messiah (a symbol of Christian exaltation) and from La donna è mobile from Verdi’s Rigoletto (a roguish song about womanhood) and have ground and pounded them until they got a cheap refrain in which no trace of the beautiful original remains, so as to sing—over these remains—stupidities about thugs and violence. It is a long way from Pavarotti to Aldo Ranks, not to mention that Kiri Te Kanawa is infinitely more sublime than Danger Man.

Now then, if we consider that there are a great many people (young people?) for whom the word opera means nothing, we will appreciate the kinder side of the heresy: the followers of rapping will at least become familiar with the term.