Lonesome EJ and Mooh,

I don't care for rap music much. I agree that it concentrates on violence. But there are plenty of spoken (not sung) rhythmic examples of folk music from Africa and other places.
The Talking Blues is a home-grown version. (No melody).

As to the violence...check out the Scot's Edward Ballad, American's Duncan and Brady or even T for Texas, Pretty Polly....they don't exactly advocate peace.

Alan Lomax had a theory that the American bloody ballads had an element of titilation for the singers which smoothed it over with a prosaic moral preachment at the end.

As to the tunes in folk music, some of them are dull. Some are beautiful in their simplicity. Some pretty tunes get turned into easilly sung monotous ones.

The big problem with the idea of a Folk Process has more to do with the "Image" of the performer than the material itself. What seems to be "dead" now is caracature of the folk musician. The music will live on. Not all songs can be "concert" art songs, jazz tunes or arias. Some have to be re-written, re-sung and re-introduced away from the stultifying sameness of the performances of artists on the media. Not that these performances are bad, it's that they offer no alternatives. Folk musicians do.

In time, there will probably be "variants" of many songs that are sung today in its original form. Some variants will be improvements and some not. Rap as part of popular culture has to be a part of this.

Frank Hamilton