The short answer:
Yes.
The long answer:
Sometimes I hear from a parent of a student something to the extent of, "Well, it's good that (kid's name) is studying classical music, because I want her to get accustomed to hearing music instead of that rap nonsense that all the other kids listen to."
I hear that I am wonderful for bringing something other than rap or dance music into people's lives fairly frequently. My response in these situations is usually to say, "Yes, exposure to many types of music is good for people," and leave it at that, because I realize the foolishness of biting the hand that gives me a check each month.
1. There is no real music happening.
2. The singers aren't really singing, they're just shouting.
3. All of the songs sound the same.
Charges levied against rap or hip-hop, yes? Yes, but the very same charges were used to argue against rock and roll music fifty years ago by people who thought that real music was produced by the crooners. And the same arguments apply.
Let's compare Sinatra singing Dindi with Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love.
Dindi:
Arrangement: a lush orchestration for horns of all shapes and sizes.
Vocal stylings: An intriguing melody that ranges over about an octave and features some interesting chromatic passing tones.
Harmonic construction: at least eleven different chords (depending on exactly what extensions you use when you play them), some with names like "A flat minor major seven" and "E flat seven flat nine."
Whole Lotta Love:
Arrangement: bass, extra loud guitar and extra extra loud drums.
Vocal stylings: A simple blues melody with a center section featuring hedonistic grunting and screeching.
Harmonic construction: two chords, neither of which features the word "seven."
That's the argument. If you make it against hip-hop, I can make it against classic rock. If you propose Charlie Parker as the purveyor of everything good and true about music, I can argue against you by using Rachmaninoff and saying that Parker's rhythm section is harmonically repetitive.
Of course, Whole Lotta Love is a great rock tune and Parker was a musical genius. Comparing one style of music to another is completely unproductive, because it is like comparing apples and ostriches.
So what is music? We all have to answer that in our own way. My favorite composer of the last fifty years, Gyorgy Ligeti, has a piece entitled Poeme Symphonique which utilizes 100 metronomes. By the end, when there is one metronome left ticking, it sounds astoundingly mournful. He has another piece that was used as the basis for the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut that uses two notes for much of the piece, with a third added briefly as a musical climax. Is something written for metronomes music? Is a piece with only three notes music? You may answer in your own way, but my answers are yes and yes. In the late 1940's John Cage wrote a piece entitled 4'33" which consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to illustrate the fact that music is simply an arrangement of sound.
Folk music has a tough time of it. It always has. And yes, hip-hop is folk music. Folk music is music by and for folks. It is art that is written by those who understand the fears, plights, dreams, desires and realities of their audience. A person likes to feel understood, and when someone is singing about how hard it is to walk through the snow with holes in their shoes, and you can feel the splinters on the floor through your shoes at the exact same time, that singer will get your attention. A modern-day composer who writes a palindromic twelve-tone etude might be more theoretically schooled than the average folk singer, but if the folk singer is singing about how cold it is since his wife died, if my wife died and I’m cold, that’s going to resonate more with me than a clever musical plot twist.
Conflict is the seed from which folk art grows. Bill Monroe, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan penned tunes about conflict. Sometimes that conflict was within the songwriter himself, sometimes the conflict was with the government and sometimes the conflict was with a woman who didn’t understand that returning the balladeer’s love was the only obvious choice. The goal of this music was to connect the songwriter to his audience through shared experiences, hopes and disappointments.
And that’s how hip-hop started. It was the only means through which a bunch of kids who wanted to say something but couldn’t afford drum kits and guitars and grand pianos could say it. All they had was dad’s stereo, so that became their instrument.
Indeed, there has been a bastardization of hip-hop music by people who discovered that it was a viable means of attaining wealth as well as a way of communicating the notions of the disenfranchised, and today’s airwaves are filled with this type of music that serves only to enrich the performer, but every other form of music has been hijacked in the same fashion. There is a lot of bad hip-hop out there, but there is just as much bad jazz (visit any local elevator to hear the practical application of this assertion).
It's all music. It may not be proverbial music to your ears, but for every arrangement of sound there is at least one pair of ears with which it resonates.