Reason one, more than anything is that hip hop and r&b seem to go hand in hand. And I hate r&b. Almost as much as I hate country. I’m not sure if its because both are predominately racially black dominated genres or what, but definitely think they should be on different stations. I hate that sometimes I can’t find a station NOT playing r&b. But oh well, I don’t foresee this changing.

Reason two is that it seems like a&r for the hip hop industry is all over the place… to the point where only half of what gets brought up and shoved into the limelight is even worth listening to. I’m not sure if it’s because they are so desperate to find the next mega-franchising artist like 50 Cent, Eminem, Jay-Z or what. But I’m sorry, Shop Boys are not it, for the love of all, T-Pain is not it. Stop playing T-Pain… make him go home, and then lay down in his driveway, and the have his butler back over him. I’ll buy the butler a drank.

But every now and then you get a production gem. I don’t care if stuff is sampled, I just want a good beat… almost all rap lyrics are stupid, so make sure the beat is good, and you’ve got me.

All my life there has almost always been two ways to get through anything. The way the majority of the world does it, and the way I do it. I’m smarter than the average person… it’s a fact. I’m not the smartest person alive, but put me with 100 other random people and test them, chances are I’ll do better than the average. About 7th grade is when I fully realized this, about age 13, as I romped through chess and math tournaments with ease.

Eventually, this resulted in me being able to simply hear or read something once and understand it. I did not need to perform a math function on 20 different problems to master it. I did not need to write down words and then write their definitions to learn what they meant. This work all became busy work to me and I could not justify to myself wasting my time doing it. The problem is that the world is not designed for someone like me. The world is designed for dumber people, and this has been my curse.

We live in an “‘A’ for Effort” society, where if your willing to do something 100 times, even 100 times wrong, you’ll get further than someone who does it 1 time right. High school is exactly like this, college is slightly better but with society allowing every schmuck to go to college now, even professors are starting to have to give in and create busy work for their less than stellar students to make it through college.

As soon as I realized I could learn quickly, I decided not to do the busy work, the homework, or anything of the sort. I showed up for school, found out what we were working on, learned it, and then went to sleep. I woke up to take tests and made A’s on almost all of them without any effort. Spending time on homework seemed pointless. Tests wound up counting for only 30% of the grade you got in each class… it was designed this way, so that people that couldn’t pass the tests were able to breeze through the class by doing their homework which was graded primarily on effort and accounted for 70% of the grade. Between teachers being cool and realizing that I was learning and also furiously doing make up assignments to get my grades up at the end of each semester, I managed to make it through high school with a C average.

Turns out I was actually wasn’t as smart as I thought I was the whole time. The smartest thing would have been to realize how to play the system… which is what I try to do now. Too bad I didn’t know then. Conform to get ahead, and strike out at the system when opportunity allows.

While I’m all for activism for one’s beliefs, I really think this may do more harm then good. As gamers, we feel a need to defend our passion, but we run the risk of ending up looking no better than those seeking to shift blame, while further disrupting the already-mourning. I say that the thing to focus on at this point is simply remembering those lost and cherishing what we still have. Now’s not the time for political vendettas, and gamers need to step down and just humbly accept the fact that blame will always be shifted to the popular youth activities: be it a KISS concert, a video game, or something else.

And honestly, no one has done anything to take these violent games away from adults. As far as I know the only legislation that has been proposed is to actually ban the sale of these games to minors. It’s kind of hard to argue that people under the age of 17 should be playing games that glorify killing other humans, especially authority figures. I’m no psychologist, but I know that kids copy what they see. From jumping off of coffee tables like wrestlers to acting like their favorite video game characters, I think it’s best to keep games like Grand Theft Auto out of the hands of minors. A comic on Penny-Arcade sums up my feelings on this nicely:

Truth be told, I’m willing to bet most gamers aren’t even behind this. The ones organizing it are the ones that have something to gain from being in the spotlight, whatever their true cause may be. The majority of gamers are probably perfectly content to stay home and play Final Fantasy or Halo2 or even Grand Theft Auto without making any sort of scene.