Gaga's connections to the urban scene

[Werk 13,166]

There was this song from  2011 that Gaga recorded a rap verse on with a male singer/rapper but I can't remember the name. The song got shelved but it's on SoundCloud. There was something that I had to do with German in the lyrics I think and fashion.

And don't forget Let Them Hoes Fight 

[StrawberryBlond 14,932]

On 3/18/2019 at 9:39 PM, AJRocketMan said:

In other words, black people? 

Honestly, I’ve noticed that Gaga has a tense and maybe even problematic relationship with the black community (in America, I don’t know about anywhere else). I used to avidly frequent urban music online boards (KanyeToThe, Genius forums) back in the early-mid 2010’s and... a lot of people (of all races, and totally straight) on those websites would make fun of Gaga for her appearance and her music by calling her “ugly” and “wack” and “gay AF”. Black twitter is surprisingly nicer to her actually. I’ve met maybe three black women and four black men in person who liked Gaga, and surely some more on the internet. I’ve always wondered why Gaga has comparatively so few black fans when she has so many white and Latino fans. Is it just too much of a culture clash? Could anybody explain this to me? It’s something I think about a lot.

No, I feared people would make that suggestion, but that's not what I meant. It's a reference to the music, you can be any race and make urban music. I included white people in it as well and said that Gaga herself has made an urban style. Urban is an umbrella term for any type of music that originated in the black communities in the cities (urban is another way of saying city) but that's only a reference to its beginnings, not about the race of its producers.

And I'm talking about the actual makers of urban music, not urban fans themselves. Even if the fans aren't connecting, a lot of the actual singers appreciate her. In answer to your question, yeah, I think it's just a culture clash and a desire to follow those who look like yourself. It's unquestionable that the media shapes who we think we should be listening to according to our race which is why there seems to be so much segregation when it comes to singers audiences. If pop, country and EDM is excessively marketed to whites and seen as something that white people should like, it's not surprising that they choose to follow it and the same is true with excessively marketing rap, RnB and trap to blacks. We grow up with certain expectations of what someone of our specific identities should be listening to and it can influence our preferences. As a white person who loves all forms of music, I wish we could all step outside our cultural boundaries a bit more.

On 3/18/2019 at 10:19 PM, FATCAT said:

You should probably not use it, it has some heavy racist connotations at best. 

There can be a perfectly innocent meaning to things as well as a sinister meaning, if that's how you want to read into it. But I mean the innocent meaning. Its been used as an umbrella term for forms of music within a specific genre because they originated in urban cities. Black people use the word as well and it's an official term used by the likes of Wikipedia and the Grammys (Best Urban Contemporary Album). Using it in a racist way is actually pretty outdated and actual racists don't use words like that anyway, no matter how subtle they want to be. It was almost a more PC word for a while, on the contrary. If you don't think I should use it, what word should I use? I can't say this big mouthful of "RnB/hip hop/rap/trap" (complete with slash sound effects) every time I want to talk about music from this genre.

On 3/18/2019 at 10:51 PM, Werk said:

There was this song from  2011 that Gaga recorded a rap verse on with a male singer/rapper but I can't remember the name. The song got shelved but it's on SoundCloud.

And don't forget Let Them Hoes Fight 

Great memory, there! Added.