Not sure what you mean about MCs and producers "trying to catch up with some imaginary in-thing". If it's imaginary, that means it's something only in their heads, right? So if they're trying to catch-up with something they imagine in their head... isn't that creativity? I'm not really sure what you're getting at here, though, so maybe you should elaborate.
You are right, it was very badly phrased. By imaginary I meant image-oriented rather than creative/imaginative. Superficial, formulaic, alienated, fashionable. Something like that. If you have any taste whatsoever you must admit that at least some artists fall into this category. We disagree about some of them.
Now it seems that way to you, sure. The urge to see the art of the present as corrupted and post-fall, and hark back to some prelapsarian golden age, has been with humanity for as long as art has, and reoccurs in different interations across all media and genres. But a good way to spot it, and to realise its fallacy, is to watch for it to reoccur within the same genre. So, for example, in 1996 DJ Shadow put out an album containing a track called 'Why Hip Hop Sucks In '96', in which he claimed that "the money" had ruined everything. At the time there were many who agreed with him, and closed their ears to the quality of much of the music released that year. Now that almost ten years have passed, however, a new generation of people who have fallen into the trap of nostalgia see the mid-90s as itself part of a superior golden age of hip hop, in contrast to what they perceive to be the shallow pickings of 2005. What you have to realise is that this has always been the case: 'Rapper's Delight' was seen as a sell-out record, too commercial, too pop!
Your argument seems like you are projecting your ideas onto me. You cant merge my dislike for certain styles with the nostalgic trip or with DJ Shadow's personal opinions for example. They are different.
The golden age is objectively historical. The decline in hip-hop is due mainly to the following reasons:
1. Its depoliticalization following the LA Riots (Paris dropped from his Label, Ice-T controversy, the media & PE (before the riots), Dre and Cube’s change in lyric content, etc)
2. Stricter sampling laws, which lead to less dense production (good examples of older dense production are Ice-T's New Jack Hustler, NWA's 100 miles & runnin, most Public Enemy, Pete Rock & CL Smooth's Mecca and the Soul Brother album, the first Cypress Hill album), and the reliance on either a single loop or factory sounds.
(the lesson: The foundation of hip-hop was and is the breakbeat. Music recording and playing equipment is a time machine, machine is extension of mind onto matter. Dub and the breakbeat represent the time machine as a creative instrument. The record is an inscription of a point-event’s characteristics onto spiral vinyl matter. The playing of a breakbeat is the manifestation of circular time. At the same time the breakbeat creates a temporal link with older currents of music, in the context of the Bomb Squad etc it is linked strongly to ancestors and the black musical tradition. For others (e.g. Paul’s Boutique) it is more multicultural. Dead musicians play with each other, the drummer still sweats. “Rap brings back old R&B, and if we did not, people would have forgot”. The ‘golden age’ was the point when this alchemy of sound reached its greatest potential.)
3. Circa 95 (and windows 95) when producers began using computers as opposed to samplers; the interface of the computer lends itself to a completely different perception of rhythm and anchors sounds to their graphical representation, the screen and mouse and keyboard etc. Production has become more standardized. Left Left Left Right Left File Edit View Tools Effects Help.
4. The increase in collector-fetishists and speculators in the crate digging world, the ridiculous prices of rare records and so on made it much harder for inner city kids to become producers in the sense that Diamond D or the Bomb Squad were, it is much more affordable to become a Swizz Beats or Timbaland type producer. The generation of hip-hop producers whose reference point was the radio rather than their infinite musical heritage. The decline of imagination in sample sources.
5. The rise of so-called R&B (from here on called SFP (Sex For Profit) out of respect for rhythm and blues singers) and its fusion with mainstream hip-hop. The production values of the 90s and their fetishization of digital clearness (similar to the fetish for chemical hygiene). Recycling of pop songs in hip-hop versions.
Rapper's Delight is of course a pop record and the Sugarhill Gang were not part of the block party scene at the time; they were a corporate creation to a large extent. On the Wu Tang Manual thread I wrote a bit about what an MC is. The Sugarhill Gang type of MC is the opposite of that – it is the ghetto black male as a propagandist for Capitalism; the slave elevated to spokesperson and marketter for ruling class ideology; the poet as prostitute. The militant rapper was replaced by the gangsta: more often than not simply the most honest of capitalists.
As for my own favourites... well, let's keep things easy and stick to albums from the past five years. Five off the top of my head: The Black Album by Jay-Z, Speakerboxxx / The Love Below by Outkast, Deliverance by Bubba Sparxxx, Birth Of A Prince by The RZA, and Fantastic Damage by El-P. This year I've been very distracted by UK grime, but I enjoyed the posthumous Ol' Dirty release Osirus a great deal (there are existing threads on a lot of these, by the way), and I'm excited about Missy Elliott's forthcoming The Cookbook on the basis of awesome first single 'Lose Control'. A couple of random great tunes I've enjoyed so far this year: 'Vibrate' by Petey Pablo and 'Mic Check' by Juelz Santana. Will that do for now?
El-P's has a couple of good tracks but the production sounds a bit too forced, his flow is boring too. On Pretty Toney by the way that Run song is ok. Wu almost always have at least one or two good tracks per album, most of their output is watered down. I havent heard Bubba Sparx. Neptunes have very few I like. Grime beats can be quite strong sometimes but i prefer hiphop mcs. Missy Elliot is not bad but nothing special. I do not like Jay-Z. His beats are very weak (the exception 99 problems is good, it is his first good beat since friend or foe that wasn’t jacked off classic hip-hop tracks). So weak that I don’t see why they are considered hip-hop, they are SFP beats. He cant flow.He sounds like he is trying too hard to sound like he isn’t trying hard. He has the occasional smart lyric. He is the equivalent of vanilla ice except he has street credibility. Which says a lot about the state of the streets. I can’t download any more albums for now. Little of the things you mentioned inspired me, it seems lacking in the spirit which defines the essence of hip-hop, the undefinable essence of hip-hop, the moment of silence between flow and breakbeat.
Incidentally, it would be helpful if you could nail down the period when everyone was trying hard to create a new style and fashion didn't play a part (let's leave aside the "why is fashion bad?" argument for now). Rough ballpark of five to ten years will do.
Thought about it and what I had said is not true. Say 90-95 when you have the craziest rawest shit coming out, there is still Hammer and Kriss Kross and Rump shaker and all of this commercial SFP crap at the same time. It was always there. And of course hip-hop has always been interacting with capitalism, rakim was paid in full, etc. Hip-hop is still evolving.
But the multitude of styles in flow in 90-95… das efx, lords of the underground, del casual and the hieroglyphics camp, Brand Nubian, epmd, soul assassins camp, freestyle fellowship, leaders of the new school, ultramagnetic, black moon, gangstarr, nas, biggy, ditc camp, BDP & KRS’s solo work, onyx, artefacts, beasties, blacksheep, twista, jeru… of course wu and pe, the stuff I mentioned above… shit was moving on different levels. There was more soul and less machine.
This is true, but it's also true of all popular culture, and the question is: why should someone need to "form an understanding of the historical legacy" of a given genre? I think that's an incredibly tall order for any form of music, and while for some people it may be very rewarding and enrich their listening experience, I don't think it's necessary to appreciate that music and I don't think it's realistic or fair to expect every listener to do so. Additionally, it doesn't take much reading around to realise that different people who have studied the history of hip hop - not to mention people who were there at the time - don't necessarily come to the same "understanding". Particularly on issues such as commercialism, lyrical content, older styles of production v. new, crossover with pop and r&b, etc...
Music taste requires a reference point. Kenny G might sound very good to someone who has just heard a brass instrument for the first time, but he is very bad if you have heard Coltrane. I am opinionated. Musical relativism annoys me. It is too accepting and uncritical. When it comes to hip-hop I shift to single mindedness.
-bruno |
