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- Jun 28, 2004
I am actually not that old but because most of use start to establish our tastes in music (or at least start to get our own CD's and discmans in our early teens) I have been into music and primary among that music has been hip hop. I am sure that others in this forum, if they do the math will realize that music has been a big part of our lives for well over half of it. I am 26 and I started to listen to develope my own taste in music, buy CD's, listen to my disk-man and talk about it with my friends at school since I was 10 and while I truly d like "all kinds of music," Hip Hop/Rap make up a plurality on my iTunes Library.
We need to be honest, the state of hip hop is not good and there is almost no rap music on the radio and that there is very little new rap music. Luckily we have a huge stock of classics, absolutely massive, Just the songs made between 1988 and 1998 in either LA, NYC constitute enough great music for one lifetime but we need to be greedy, I want to get back to the days of regularly feeling the exhilaration of buying a brand new album and almost every if not every singe song is amazing and you can just put on the album and listen to from start to finish. That never happens anymore but it can and should, the following is an essay about what happened to our beloved genre and how it can be revived and in the process, be officially recognized as the form of art that we have already and always known it to be.
The fact that rap has become so mainstream means that we are going to have more and more of these barely lyrical, superficial garbage dumps of a song where the props in the video are worth more than the performers' actual net worth.
I also ascribe a theory that was formed by some of my friends, who happen to like both hip hop (from all subgenres and all eras) as well as house, electronic, dance, trance and techno and they also happen to take MDMA regularly. They believe that more and more black people, more specifically black teens, are getting into this drug and the most commercialized pats of the hip hop community are changing there current acts and new acts are being created to cater to the MDMA popping, glow stick waving, dancing (not just leaning back or doing a to step but going all out on the floor) and clubbing at least two time per week.
That would make sense in theory and empirically because Dre and Snoop Dogg make music that goes well with Marijuana, or so I have been told and/or could deduce based on the giant cannabis leaf on the front and the cameo by Cheech Marin at the ending. Chopped and screwed music is for fat people in Houston and you listen to it when it is 99 degrees with 99% humidity and there is nothing to but to hangout and sip your sizzurp because just moving around by day or even by night will leave you swimming in your own sweat, the hip hop from the 80's was for black people who did little or no drugs (remember that crack is whack, Marijuana was very weak back then and black people back then were typically much more sober than white [people in that decade and in that decade most fans of rap music were black) and may or may not have had a few beers during a night out with their friends. Crunk from the Early 2000's was for adults who would do cocaine or crack or maybe just ridiculous amount of caffeine or ephedra and also drink heavily or for the longer fans, drink a can or two or five of Sparks or Joose (It was 4loko before there was a 4loko). Eminem was different not because he was the first white guy to really be a nationally famous figure in hip hop, who was not a total disaster, but his whiteness was not the biggest thing about him that would change things up for the genre, it was his mix of all sorts of truly mind altering drugs, including radical hallucinogenic drugs that caused some of his works from 1996 to 2004 to be psychotic and interesting in a macabre fashion. Bling rap was enjoyed by people who were blowing their paychecks on bottle services and maybe also took a few lines of cocaine so that they could have some tiger blood and they wanted music that would serve as soundtrack to delusions of grandeur The style of music fits the vice and more specifically the substance that goes with
The commercial hi hop that has been created in the last two years has had nothing that is gangster let alone gritty, it is mostly positive and full of bubbly levity, hip hop versions of love ballads and hip hop that should be called house hop or plur hop or techno hop because it is never been lighter on the lyrics and when it does it talks about love or clubbing in these extremely light hearted ways. The only references to anything illegal are now oblique references to being weight dealers but they do not dwell on how the drug money is made, they mostly talk about how that money is consumed and while talking about a grand lifestyle, real or imagined is not new to hip hop, the aspirations of these Justin Beiber-Tony Montana hybrids is to spend all your millions money on drinks at the club, bottle service for your buddies, champagne for all and to lavish gifts on the girl for whom you have that powerful I-will-love-until-the-end-of-time-or-the-end-of-the-school-year adolescent, irrational puppy love. I think that it is demographic because back in 2000 60% of mainstream "urban" radio listeners where female and the median age was about 25. I have not checked the stats lately but I would guess it is not 75% female and more importantly, the median age has to be under 20 and probably 16 (meaning that half of the listeners, or half the of most frequent listeners are under the age of 16.
This would explain why the genre has become progressively shallower and shallower over the years, at least on the radio and record executive use that as a proxy for consumer tastes in music. Even just ten years ago the songs were somewhat gritty and at least in the bling rap they were telling a more plausible, albeit cookie cutter biography of a drug king pin and our characters did not just think that the whole world consisted of night clubs, night clubs and school dances. In it chronological adolescence the music of hip hop, rap music, was vulgar in it heavy and perhaps excessive use of Anglo-Saxon words but it lyrics and subject matter were mature and were largely created for and from the point of view of a struggling gang member from the slums of Los Angeles of New York, now that hip hop is chronologically a mature adult it has never been so appealing to adolescent fantasy with the late mid to late 2000's the fantasy of the adolescent boy was celebrated in crunk rap (aside from playing in professional league of your favorite sports or being the best COD:BO or Halo Reach or WOW3 or SC2 player on the planet, the private fantasies of adolescent boys are disgusting and because NT is 99% male and with almost 60% of NT in or having graduated from Middle School, I need not elaborate on what 13 to 17 year old boys dream of doing most of the time).
Now it seems like those who write the lyrics and promote the new "artists" do a focus group of 13 year girls in order to write the lyrics and choose the child actor to play "Young lil' Kay Whizzy" and then maybe throw in some auto tuner because that will be so original and will smooth out the boy's cracking voice when he sings about how he has never loved a girl like this one before and how she is the love of his life and the best he has ever had "he is not lying, it is hard to have had better girl friend when your balls dropped this spring and she is your first therefore, by default, your biggest love or rather your biggest crush/JO fantasy. Once again, the majority of us have been 13 before and the majority of the music forum's most frequent users will know what it is like to be 13 sometime around the release date of COD:MW4.
While it is popular and easy to pick apart "commercial" hip hop, there are very few rappers that make albums and have a national or regional following who do so without any compensation and therefore, all professional hip hop is "commercial." Of course, some acts are more commercial than other acts. If you are getting played twice per hour every single hour for three months straight and then the after looking at last quarters' numbers and focus group feedback you bang out another song to be played in the next quarter that year (I seriously think that it so commercialized for some acts on the radio that they do operate like a bank and they do seem to have a set of 15 songs which abruptly change on the first day of January, April, July and October. The degree to which the playlist has any incremental change is due to the fact that some firms have their quarters on other days of the month than the first and/or they may have their fiscal year not start on the first of January). I picture Frank Lucas being Justin Bieber's agent/producer and the next studio to come up with some boy with a higerh pitch voice, who has more hair on top of his eyebrows then he has on his chin and loins combined, will come over to the night club owned by the other producer and in private yell at him about copy right infringement. I do not fault artists and those who promote them for wanting to make money, lots of money, but have some love for the music and recognize that you are part of a tradition and have some respect and not make total garbage please and the way to avoid total garbage is by letting your artists be artistic and have a few tracks on his album so that
Because of the fact that the commercial aspect of popular contemporary music is changing, it used to be about Radio Stations and albums and it did not matter when vinyl was replaced by the 8-track and by cassette tapes and even by CD's. This market place of digital music may, in the long run, shut down or drastically alter the business model of music radio in the short to medium term, radio is probably disproportionate at producing the appearance of demand for hip hop. singing that is appealing to my aforementioned, female, teenage, MDMA consuming consumer of music. On the other hand, this digital age has allowed those of us who are older to disenfranchise our selves economically when it comes to music. You vote with your dollars and not your bit torrent downloads, if you do hear a song by an adult that is actually rap music, buy the album and burn it to your iTunes and/or support the artist by sending a dollar or two at the iTunes store to buy a song that you really like. Listening to Big Boi's "General Patton" or Dre's "Kush" has proven to me that I do like hip hop a great deal and any song where Timberlan is making the track, I will am going to enjoy that beat even if the lyrics ae not that good. There is a big market or rather a big demand for older hip hop fans who love the classics but also want contemporary music to channel that same spirit while being original and adding to this glorious genre of music.
To describe the various shades of hip hop over the decades I decided to use a viticultural, a wine based set of metaphors. Some people want music that is very distinctive and has real character like a Twany Port (80's rap). Some want something that is strong and dry like a Chianti or Cabernet-Sauvignon (90's rap), or maybe you want something that gives you a full bouquet of flavor and the characteristic of having been grown up in the hot sun like a black Zinfandel (Outcast and Ludacris and the first generation of southern rappers) or you may want an organic, soft on the palette big still very classy and complex Petit Syrah (like the, according to Bill O'Reilly gangster-rapper, cop-killer who goes by the alias of "Common"). Even something more contemporary that is something luxurious but still with a little bit of a burn and character to it like a decent Sparking white wine (bling hip hop) or a Dessert wine (a rapper-R&B collabo from the late 90's and the 2000's) or something that is not the most elegant, something that packs a wallop that is guilty pleasure even though it is still made for grownups like Sangria (Crunk from the mid 2000's) is very nice, especially when compared to our current mainstream alternatives. We want anything aside from instead of this current Sippy Cup, overflowing with sparkling grape juice spiked with Absolut Raspberry, Jolly Ranchers and Molly and, as if that was not enough the date rape drug (which is to say this 2010's style of singing that they play on "urban" stations").
I suggest that if you do not like how the mainstream urban music scene is, actually buy the albums or at least the singles that you like from the rappers that are still left and who are still making new songs. Request the few contemporary rap songs on your radio station and let them know that it is not just children who are listening and send them an e-mail saying that you want a little more variety and remembered back when power 106 or whatever is the main urban music station in your area, it was only 11 years ago that the Chronic 2001 was getting played a lot but it had multiple singles so it deserted the airtime. Every song on that album was amazing but there were like five or six true classics that also had mass appeal at the same time, people who do not listen to much hip hop had this album because they loved at least a couple of the tracks. Back in 1999 and 2000, rap was not as mainstream but my friend who never liked rap and was totally into rock music only, looked the Chronic and we worked on playing some of the tracks from 2001 on the drums and the guitars, for a crappy garage band we sounded great because we had great source material.
I do find it truly ironic that here in Los Angeles at least, you are just as likely to here Urban music as on Kiss 102.7 (LA’s biggest pop station) as you are on power 106. KDAY (LA’s much smaller and newer station) is much more urban than power 106 but it has to play a lot of old school at all hours because so little new hip hop, let alone rap is being created by record labels. The biggest irony is that it is on 96.3 Latino, that you are more likely to here a Tupac song than on what was once the “black: station in LA, power 106. I personally, as some who is Latino, enjoy the mix of having A Corrido from Sinaloa followed up by “California Love
We need to be honest, the state of hip hop is not good and there is almost no rap music on the radio and that there is very little new rap music. Luckily we have a huge stock of classics, absolutely massive, Just the songs made between 1988 and 1998 in either LA, NYC constitute enough great music for one lifetime but we need to be greedy, I want to get back to the days of regularly feeling the exhilaration of buying a brand new album and almost every if not every singe song is amazing and you can just put on the album and listen to from start to finish. That never happens anymore but it can and should, the following is an essay about what happened to our beloved genre and how it can be revived and in the process, be officially recognized as the form of art that we have already and always known it to be.
The fact that rap has become so mainstream means that we are going to have more and more of these barely lyrical, superficial garbage dumps of a song where the props in the video are worth more than the performers' actual net worth.
I also ascribe a theory that was formed by some of my friends, who happen to like both hip hop (from all subgenres and all eras) as well as house, electronic, dance, trance and techno and they also happen to take MDMA regularly. They believe that more and more black people, more specifically black teens, are getting into this drug and the most commercialized pats of the hip hop community are changing there current acts and new acts are being created to cater to the MDMA popping, glow stick waving, dancing (not just leaning back or doing a to step but going all out on the floor) and clubbing at least two time per week.
That would make sense in theory and empirically because Dre and Snoop Dogg make music that goes well with Marijuana, or so I have been told and/or could deduce based on the giant cannabis leaf on the front and the cameo by Cheech Marin at the ending. Chopped and screwed music is for fat people in Houston and you listen to it when it is 99 degrees with 99% humidity and there is nothing to but to hangout and sip your sizzurp because just moving around by day or even by night will leave you swimming in your own sweat, the hip hop from the 80's was for black people who did little or no drugs (remember that crack is whack, Marijuana was very weak back then and black people back then were typically much more sober than white [people in that decade and in that decade most fans of rap music were black) and may or may not have had a few beers during a night out with their friends. Crunk from the Early 2000's was for adults who would do cocaine or crack or maybe just ridiculous amount of caffeine or ephedra and also drink heavily or for the longer fans, drink a can or two or five of Sparks or Joose (It was 4loko before there was a 4loko). Eminem was different not because he was the first white guy to really be a nationally famous figure in hip hop, who was not a total disaster, but his whiteness was not the biggest thing about him that would change things up for the genre, it was his mix of all sorts of truly mind altering drugs, including radical hallucinogenic drugs that caused some of his works from 1996 to 2004 to be psychotic and interesting in a macabre fashion. Bling rap was enjoyed by people who were blowing their paychecks on bottle services and maybe also took a few lines of cocaine so that they could have some tiger blood and they wanted music that would serve as soundtrack to delusions of grandeur The style of music fits the vice and more specifically the substance that goes with
The commercial hi hop that has been created in the last two years has had nothing that is gangster let alone gritty, it is mostly positive and full of bubbly levity, hip hop versions of love ballads and hip hop that should be called house hop or plur hop or techno hop because it is never been lighter on the lyrics and when it does it talks about love or clubbing in these extremely light hearted ways. The only references to anything illegal are now oblique references to being weight dealers but they do not dwell on how the drug money is made, they mostly talk about how that money is consumed and while talking about a grand lifestyle, real or imagined is not new to hip hop, the aspirations of these Justin Beiber-Tony Montana hybrids is to spend all your millions money on drinks at the club, bottle service for your buddies, champagne for all and to lavish gifts on the girl for whom you have that powerful I-will-love-until-the-end-of-time-or-the-end-of-the-school-year adolescent, irrational puppy love. I think that it is demographic because back in 2000 60% of mainstream "urban" radio listeners where female and the median age was about 25. I have not checked the stats lately but I would guess it is not 75% female and more importantly, the median age has to be under 20 and probably 16 (meaning that half of the listeners, or half the of most frequent listeners are under the age of 16.
This would explain why the genre has become progressively shallower and shallower over the years, at least on the radio and record executive use that as a proxy for consumer tastes in music. Even just ten years ago the songs were somewhat gritty and at least in the bling rap they were telling a more plausible, albeit cookie cutter biography of a drug king pin and our characters did not just think that the whole world consisted of night clubs, night clubs and school dances. In it chronological adolescence the music of hip hop, rap music, was vulgar in it heavy and perhaps excessive use of Anglo-Saxon words but it lyrics and subject matter were mature and were largely created for and from the point of view of a struggling gang member from the slums of Los Angeles of New York, now that hip hop is chronologically a mature adult it has never been so appealing to adolescent fantasy with the late mid to late 2000's the fantasy of the adolescent boy was celebrated in crunk rap (aside from playing in professional league of your favorite sports or being the best COD:BO or Halo Reach or WOW3 or SC2 player on the planet, the private fantasies of adolescent boys are disgusting and because NT is 99% male and with almost 60% of NT in or having graduated from Middle School, I need not elaborate on what 13 to 17 year old boys dream of doing most of the time).
Now it seems like those who write the lyrics and promote the new "artists" do a focus group of 13 year girls in order to write the lyrics and choose the child actor to play "Young lil' Kay Whizzy" and then maybe throw in some auto tuner because that will be so original and will smooth out the boy's cracking voice when he sings about how he has never loved a girl like this one before and how she is the love of his life and the best he has ever had "he is not lying, it is hard to have had better girl friend when your balls dropped this spring and she is your first therefore, by default, your biggest love or rather your biggest crush/JO fantasy. Once again, the majority of us have been 13 before and the majority of the music forum's most frequent users will know what it is like to be 13 sometime around the release date of COD:MW4.
While it is popular and easy to pick apart "commercial" hip hop, there are very few rappers that make albums and have a national or regional following who do so without any compensation and therefore, all professional hip hop is "commercial." Of course, some acts are more commercial than other acts. If you are getting played twice per hour every single hour for three months straight and then the after looking at last quarters' numbers and focus group feedback you bang out another song to be played in the next quarter that year (I seriously think that it so commercialized for some acts on the radio that they do operate like a bank and they do seem to have a set of 15 songs which abruptly change on the first day of January, April, July and October. The degree to which the playlist has any incremental change is due to the fact that some firms have their quarters on other days of the month than the first and/or they may have their fiscal year not start on the first of January). I picture Frank Lucas being Justin Bieber's agent/producer and the next studio to come up with some boy with a higerh pitch voice, who has more hair on top of his eyebrows then he has on his chin and loins combined, will come over to the night club owned by the other producer and in private yell at him about copy right infringement. I do not fault artists and those who promote them for wanting to make money, lots of money, but have some love for the music and recognize that you are part of a tradition and have some respect and not make total garbage please and the way to avoid total garbage is by letting your artists be artistic and have a few tracks on his album so that
Because of the fact that the commercial aspect of popular contemporary music is changing, it used to be about Radio Stations and albums and it did not matter when vinyl was replaced by the 8-track and by cassette tapes and even by CD's. This market place of digital music may, in the long run, shut down or drastically alter the business model of music radio in the short to medium term, radio is probably disproportionate at producing the appearance of demand for hip hop. singing that is appealing to my aforementioned, female, teenage, MDMA consuming consumer of music. On the other hand, this digital age has allowed those of us who are older to disenfranchise our selves economically when it comes to music. You vote with your dollars and not your bit torrent downloads, if you do hear a song by an adult that is actually rap music, buy the album and burn it to your iTunes and/or support the artist by sending a dollar or two at the iTunes store to buy a song that you really like. Listening to Big Boi's "General Patton" or Dre's "Kush" has proven to me that I do like hip hop a great deal and any song where Timberlan is making the track, I will am going to enjoy that beat even if the lyrics ae not that good. There is a big market or rather a big demand for older hip hop fans who love the classics but also want contemporary music to channel that same spirit while being original and adding to this glorious genre of music.
To describe the various shades of hip hop over the decades I decided to use a viticultural, a wine based set of metaphors. Some people want music that is very distinctive and has real character like a Twany Port (80's rap). Some want something that is strong and dry like a Chianti or Cabernet-Sauvignon (90's rap), or maybe you want something that gives you a full bouquet of flavor and the characteristic of having been grown up in the hot sun like a black Zinfandel (Outcast and Ludacris and the first generation of southern rappers) or you may want an organic, soft on the palette big still very classy and complex Petit Syrah (like the, according to Bill O'Reilly gangster-rapper, cop-killer who goes by the alias of "Common"). Even something more contemporary that is something luxurious but still with a little bit of a burn and character to it like a decent Sparking white wine (bling hip hop) or a Dessert wine (a rapper-R&B collabo from the late 90's and the 2000's) or something that is not the most elegant, something that packs a wallop that is guilty pleasure even though it is still made for grownups like Sangria (Crunk from the mid 2000's) is very nice, especially when compared to our current mainstream alternatives. We want anything aside from instead of this current Sippy Cup, overflowing with sparkling grape juice spiked with Absolut Raspberry, Jolly Ranchers and Molly and, as if that was not enough the date rape drug (which is to say this 2010's style of singing that they play on "urban" stations").
I suggest that if you do not like how the mainstream urban music scene is, actually buy the albums or at least the singles that you like from the rappers that are still left and who are still making new songs. Request the few contemporary rap songs on your radio station and let them know that it is not just children who are listening and send them an e-mail saying that you want a little more variety and remembered back when power 106 or whatever is the main urban music station in your area, it was only 11 years ago that the Chronic 2001 was getting played a lot but it had multiple singles so it deserted the airtime. Every song on that album was amazing but there were like five or six true classics that also had mass appeal at the same time, people who do not listen to much hip hop had this album because they loved at least a couple of the tracks. Back in 1999 and 2000, rap was not as mainstream but my friend who never liked rap and was totally into rock music only, looked the Chronic and we worked on playing some of the tracks from 2001 on the drums and the guitars, for a crappy garage band we sounded great because we had great source material.
I do find it truly ironic that here in Los Angeles at least, you are just as likely to here Urban music as on Kiss 102.7 (LA’s biggest pop station) as you are on power 106. KDAY (LA’s much smaller and newer station) is much more urban than power 106 but it has to play a lot of old school at all hours because so little new hip hop, let alone rap is being created by record labels. The biggest irony is that it is on 96.3 Latino, that you are more likely to here a Tupac song than on what was once the “black: station in LA, power 106. I personally, as some who is Latino, enjoy the mix of having A Corrido from Sinaloa followed up by “California Love
