Rap is like having someone shit in your ear to a beat

I'm not much of a music guy, I only listen to about 4 or 5 bands, but I do recognize how shitty rap and modern pop is. I played classical and jazz piano for several years before switching over to singing, so I've developed an appreciation for the skill required to make good music. I've also realized how little skill it takes to rap. First of all, the music itself. Most of the time the "music" is just a beat to 4/4 time throughout the entirety of the song. No chord progression, no key change, every measure looks exactly the same, except for the chorus in some cases. The most complex chord structure might be a major seventh chord, but that's pushing it. The vocal part is completely monotone, and just shitty poetry about sex, drugs, money or violence. Hardly any of the content is thought-provoking or interesting in the least.

I heard someone say recently that the only thing worse than being poor is being rich and being like Kanye West.

Let's compare rap to music that I listen too. Like I said, I only listen to 4 or 5 bands. Those bands are Tool, Rage Against the Machine, A Perfect Circle, Foo Fighters and other tidbits of metal, rock, or progressive metal here and there. I can appreciate and enjoy the complexities of almost any genre of music with the exception of rap and modern pop. The song Schism by Tool uses advanced vocabulary, polyrhythmic time signatures, crescendos and decrescendos, metaphors, allegory and actual instruments, as well as actual chord progression. There's no slang and the song describes humanity's disconnection with spiritualism, and is pretty thought provoking. The song No Church in the Wild by Kanye West uses a simple time signature, the same measure of sound over and over again with some computer generated sounds here and there. He uses a mostly monotone voice, and describes riots, and to someone like me isn't too thought provoking at all. The most advanced vocabulary in that song is "monogamy". For comparison, Schism has the words "Mildewed", "juxtaposed", "dissonance" and "atrophy".

If you think Kanye West is smarter or more talented than any member of Tool, you're a moron.