Posted on 01/03/2008 8:58:33 AM PST by Milhous
As a way of profiling three artists who made three solid hip-hop albums this year--Turf Talk, Prodigy, and Project Pat--the New York Times' Kelefa Sanneh has written another entry in the "hip-hop: possibly dead, definitely changing" trend piece parade. The reasons, in case you've been otherwise occupied: sales are in the crapper, hip-hop sales are really in the crapper, one-hit ringtones rule, albums by former backpack outliers are (shockingly, right?) selling better than albums by the one-hit ringtoners, and the genre's mainstream is taking the reality of the new model harder than most thanks to its longstanding "if you're not getting money, you ain't sh_t" philosophy. The difference being, Sanneh argues, that the rappers themselves are (sometimes) finally realizing the need to scale back their ambitions and "keep grinding" on the indie circuit. But what if hip-hop's multitudes can't be contained by the indie circuit alone? What if the genre needs the money men to foster creativity? What the underground needs the promise of the giant gold tank to keep that grind rolling?
Under-the-radar releases, weird tour schedules, modest sales figures: none of this is new. The success of Southern hip-hop in the last decade was built on a foundation of independent and independent-minded rappers, many of whom worked with the scrappy regional distributor Southwest Wholesale, which is now closed, like many of the little shops it used to serve. In an earlier era these regional scenes were farm teams for the industry, grooming the top players and then sending them up to the big leagues. But what if there are no big leagues anymore? What if there's no major label willing or able to help Turf Talk get his platinum plaque? Would his next album sound as brash? Will his musical descendants be as motivated? The mainstream hip-hop industry relies on a thriving underground, but isn't the reverse also true?Eventually, a (new?) group of executives will find a business model that doesn't depend on shiny plastic discs, or digital tracks bundled together to approximate them. But for now the major league is starting to look a lot like the minor one. And in ways good and bad and utterly unpredictable, rappers may have to reconsider their place in the universe, and their audience. Some will redouble their commitment to nonsense, like Project Pat. Some will wallow in their misery, like Prodigy. Some will merely revel in their own loudmouthiness, like Turf Talk, hoping someone will pay attention. But if sales keep falling, more and more rappers will have to face the fact that they aren't addressing a crowd, just a sliver of one.
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Ah, I can only hope crip-crap will die.
The Casa Lormand is a Rap/Hip Hop Free Zone, and always will be.
That's what I thought in the late '80s. Just hang back a few years and it will go the way of disco.
Technology being what it is today, any up-and-coming producer can make beats with $2,000 worth of equipment, and any MC can afford to press up a few hundred "mixtape" CDs.
That's how Little Brother got started in the first place.
Jazz was considered a fad in the 1920s.
Disco died too and lives on longer as retro-nostalgia.
Jazz is not commercially viable these days. It is ignored by the MSM.
Brilliant Insight #3,384 from Greg F.
Musical styles that rhyme with hop or bop are fads, shown by the meaningless catchy nature of their name, and die quickly. Witness Hip Hop, Bebop, and doo-wop.
Hip hop music is a style of popular music typically consisting of a rhythmic style of speaking called rap over backing beats performed on a turntable by a DJ. Rapping and DJing are considered two of the four elements of Hip hop, a cultural movement which began in New York City in the 1970s, predominantly among African Americans and Latinos (the other two elements are breakdancing and graffiti art). [1] The term rap is sometimes used synonymously with hip hop music, though it originally referred only to rapping itself.
Wikipedia . . .
Whatever you want to call it, it’s still gutter garbage.
...or the know-nothing 12 year olds who write for Wikipedia.
Hip-hop is both. It was actually a genre of music first, which lent it’s name to the subculture. Kind of like the rock and roll lifestyle in the 70s.
Although the exact origination of the term "hip hop" is and will always be unclear, it existed as a term before it was a music.
It's pretty well established that DJs at street parties in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan invented the practice of using two turntables and two copies of the same song, to play the drum/bass break that was usually present in extended dance remixes of funk or disco records.
There were dancers, or b-boys (break boys) who were known for doing athletic dance moves to these very rhythm-heavy portions of the songs.
The DJs would alternate from one turntable to the other, playing and replaying the drum breaks of the records over and over again so the b-boys could dance continuously to their favorite portion of the song.
Their dance moves were called "break dancing" or "top rocking" or "up rocking" or "hip hopping." There were various dance crews, each of whom came up with their own names for the style of dancing they were doing, so there were a lot of different names for the kind of dancing done to breaks.
During these repeated breaks the party organizers (MCs) would often make comments about the dancers and their skills, make announcements, etc. That was the beginning of rapping.
In the earliest rap songs there are plenty of references to dancing, breaking and hip hop, thus the nonsense patter on songs like "Rapper's Delight": "the hip, the hop, the hip hip hop you don't stop rocking bang bang the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat." This sounds like what it probably originated as - an MC at a party encouraging the dancers.
The first tracks used for rapping were called "break records" or "break beats."
So to me it seems that hip hop begins as a style of funk/disco dancing that created its own subgenre of music performance - i.e. playing break beats on two turntables.
The lack of melody inherent in playing break beats over and over lent itself to spoken, not sung, vocals.
So hip hop dancing lead to hip hop music (DJing) which led to hip hop vocals (MCing).
That's my view.
Smack My B*tch Up !
From the Rapper Krugerand......
Kill the Rapper,Kill him dead
Shoot the scoundrel in the head
Crush his throat with his gold chain
Watch the video of his pain.
Hate the bastard, the illigit
Mouthing nonsensense, verbal shit
The story here that we must tell
Let the sob rot in hell
“Whatever you want to call it, it’s still gutter garbage.”
So is heavy metal, which I find to be an reprehensible pile of crap.
There is some validity to that argument ;)
That makes too much sense.
Metal underwent a substantive degredation of its own in the late 19080’s, as the more melodic, guitar heavy style of bands like Dio, Queensryche, and Iron Maiden was brushed aside by a wave of what became known as “death metal” (or “deth” if you’re an anti-spelling reb). The soaring vocals were replaced with gutteral grunting, on-the-torture-rack shouting, and untintelligible maniacal ravings, set against an undercurrent of unrelenting dual-bass-drum quads.
The same effect can be achieved by shouting over the din of an idling top-fuel dragster.
Additionally, the lyrics (to use the term loosely) darkened substantially, involving more recurrent themes of bodily violence, murder, rape, bloody gore, suicide, necrophilia, damnation, intertwined with overtly Satanic cultic references, all proffered in an attitude of raging frustration. Though some of that can be found in 70’s and ‘80’s metal, the metal scene after the mid-80’s became completely obsessed with it, and has never looked back.
A stark comparison would set Black Sabbath’s “Heaven and Hell” alongside, say, Exodous’ “Bonded by Blood”.
I can’t delve more deeply into it than that, ‘cuz I didn’t follow the metal scene down that dark and bloody road. When they kicked harmony to the curb, I stayed with her.
I will be satisfied if it is relegatied to jazz or disco status. Right now it is still way too popular.
Rap destroyed what was left of ‘soul’ music.
That said, can ya hook a brotha up?!
As a fan of hip hop, I don't think it's too popular - too popular would mean that it would be difficult for me to get tickets to shows I wanted to attend.
And I can get in.
Actually, soul music was already dead when hip hop took over. It had been replaced by disco - every soul artist of note had either gone disco or fell off the charts.
The "neo-soul" music renaissance that has revitalized soul music - with artists like D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Anthony Hamilton, Angie Stone, Gnarls Barkley - has begun as an outgrowth of hip hop and these artists are generally produced by hip hop beatmakers.
These singers favor funky, pre-disco grooves of the kind used by singers like Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye in the early 70s - precisely the same kind of grooves most favored by East Coast hardcore hip hop producers.
That’s my point, since people are still holding concerts, it is way too popular. Mostly it’s not the music I can’t stand; it’s the disgusting behavior of many of the performers, and the whole disgusting treatment of women. I could go on and on.
Wideawake - fan of hip hop?????
I believe that it is autistically viable.
Is there a translation available for this article? It appears to be written in an alternate form of English.
Two words:
Cannibal Corpse.. rock on!
I like gangster rap too btw. The louder the better. I guess I am still a young man. ;-)
I grew up in Harlem, Bushwick and Glendale NYC in the 80s.
I had a front row seat in Old School.
I’ve always preffered Ragtime to Jazz. The latter de-emphasized the role of the composer almost to the bottom of the rung. Even the arranger is more important than the composer in Jazz. The most important figure in the history of Jazz, Louis Armstrong, has a pitiful record as a composer. Scott Joplin on the other hand...
You actually need both hands to play Joplin. LOL. Or Barrelhouse Welch. ;) Or the high sheriff from hell, Lord have mercy.
Great composers redfine the Art and listeners can choose to go along or not. It’s been a century since Schoenberg’s atonal stuff and it still doesn’t really have a mass audience.
All the inventive go your own way "arteests" are schlock, all the self promoting "I just want to be famous" lip synching dancers likewise, the "please identify with me" image posers, etc. There is fine original music being made today, the distinguishing marks are that it actually sounds good and the people making it are doing it because they like how it sounds themselves, and they are masters of their actual craft.
Tastes vary, those principles do no vary. Athletes worried about their salary suck, soldiers worried about PR suck, teachers worried about politics suck, etc. It is ever thus.
That sounds suspiciously like the horrific cacophony that got foisted upon me a few years ago at the Teton Music Festival. It made tears freely flow from patron dowagers in the audience. From its sheer awfulness I imagine. LOL.
Hey, I’d had enough of listening to people fight and argue over who’s music was better by my second semester in High School, so whatever floats yer boat, so long as ya dig it. Oh, and FYI, the Rock ‘n’ Roll scene has ALWAYS BEEN loud; The Who, AC/DC, and Ted Nugent all pumped upwards of 50kW through their amplifier stacks at some of their stadium concerts dating back into the 1970’s.
Mark Steyn made a searing assessment this past November in a column published right after Thanksgiving about how shallow modern music culture has become; the moderns know next to nothing of the roots of their craft, but just 50 years ago another pop artist, Benny Goodman, could pick up his clarinet and play Mozart. Find me a rapper who can do a cover of “Chatanooga Choo Choo”. Find me a death metal band that can knock out a credible rendition of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”. And lyrics? FEH! I’ve taken up listening to a lot of trance/electronica because much of it has no vocals. The modern scene is eight miles wide and a tenth of an inch deep.
That’s not to crash your case for liking a particular form of modern music, it’s just a recognition that almost none of the people making it have a cultural foundation in anything older than themselves.
It’s something to noodle on, anyway.
Here’s the link to Steyn’s column: http://newcriterion.com:81/archives/26/11/twenty-years-ago-today
All I can say is that you are missing out. The music of Clifford Brown and Max Roach is one of life’s unalloyed pleasures.
The "neo-soul" music renaissance that has revitalized soul music - with artists like D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Anthony Hamilton, Angie Stone, Gnarls Barkley - has begun as an outgrowth of hip hop and these artists are generally produced by hip hop beatmakers.
These singers favor funky, pre-disco grooves of the kind used by singers like Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye in the early 70s - precisely the same kind of grooves most favored by East Coast hardcore hip hop producers.
Well...yeah, everyone knows that. (grin) Thanks for the lesson wide.
Interestingly, like ragtime, the composer (or as he is called now, the producer) rules hip hop and reggae.
A common phenomenon in both genres is that of different vocalists rapping, toasting or singing different songs over the same treasured instrumental backing.
Because of the high cost imposed on sampling by recording companies, the traditional hip hop practice of assembling songs from various recognizable or rare soul and jazz samples has gone by the wayside, and the most respected hip hop producers (9th Wonder, Nicolay, Madlib) now use music composed and performed - sometimes composed and performed entirely by themselves - for the track.
The one Japanese hip hop artist I listen to the most these days is DJ Krush.
The rapper Madlib, who also composes, performs and produces on his own and others' records, has put out a Blue Note jazz retrospective collection called Shades Of Blue, has performed and released his own instrumental tribute album to the work of Stevie Wonder entitled Stevie and has his own virtual jazz combo called Yesterday's New Quintet.
The rapper Declaime - also known as Dudley Perkins - has put out a couple of albums of retro-soul music, with a strong stylistic focus on Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway.
On his last album - one of the biggest-selling hip hop albums of 2006 - the rapper Nas (famously criticized by pro-choice blowhard Bill O'Reilly) featured Chrisette Michele on three songs including two singles from the album. Michele is a young vocalist who is a dedicated student of Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday, who is known as "The Ghost Of Billie" and whose backing tracks on Nas' album had some critics wondering if Nas had sampled 1950s jazz vocal tracks for his record.
Nas, by the way, is the son of Olu Dara - a trumpeter who once worked as part of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in the 1960s.
She and her band, The Dap Kings, do a great take on classic mid-60s Memphis soul.
They are not a cover band, but write their own new music in the Stax tradition.
Sharon came to prominence through the work she did for hip hop/house music producer Mark Ronson.
Oh, and I completely forgot to mention Guru - the rapper from acclaimed hip hop crew Gang Starr - has a whole series of records called Jazzmatazz (up to 4 volumes now I think) in which he raps over newly composed bop, cool and fusion jazz tracks with live instrumentation.
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