For the longest time, I hoped and hoped that hip hop was a fad. But it clearly isn’t one anymore.
Several factors:
People need something to dance to. Not much going on in other genres that are dancable. Some of the biggest boosts to new art forms in popular music have been due to dancing. Going back centuries if not all the way back to the first musical forms.
It’s part of the “dumbing down” of culture. You don’t need to sing, don’t need to play an instrument well, don’t even need to think of real lyrics, just rip off the stuff from the 80s. People take the easy way. Hip hop is the next easiest thing to children’s rhymes.
Hip hop is a lot like how “Titanic” made so much money despite being a crappy movie. Nothing came along to knock it off the top spot for a long time. The urban scene, a traditional source of new musical forms, has stopped producing original music. I mean flat out gave up on anything remotely new or interesting.
Eventually something new will finally break out and hip hop will fade.
The true test of “not a fad” will be: Are people going to listen to nostalgia hip hop stations decades later? I can’t believe that’s going to happen, but I also can’t believe that anyone listens to the “morning zoo crew” type radio stations.
Have you ever tried turntables before? That’s an instrument and it’s not as easy as it looks…and there already is nostalgia Hip Hop played on radio these days.
I don’t like most of the mainstream rap on the radio (although a few mainstream artists can get me to stop flipping through the stations when I hear them), but underground hip-hop is really where it’s at. Underground hip-hop truly gets me going. I love it.
I’m also a fan of some trance/electronic music, particularly when I’m high. But that’s a story for another day…
As for rap, I can see people listening to stuff like Missy Elliot and Outkast decades or centuries down the line, but I hope the annoying repetitive crap like 50 Cent fades in popularity quickly. I don’t really know enough about the underground stuff to comment on that, so I won’t.
And you, as evidenced by your uninformed opinion, don’t listen to much rap, do you?
It’s not all about bitches and cash-money, just as all rock isn’t about… um, bitches and cash-money. (The themes of bad music seem to have no consideration for genres, do they?)
Try Outkast, Jurassic 5, Black Eyed Peas, Mos Def and The Roots if you want to hear some GREAT hip-hop. And, actually, I think 50 Cent’s alright… his music has some pretty dark themes to it. Even moreso for Eminem, who lays his Id on the line more bluntly than any mainstream artist of the past few years.
Rock ‘n’ roll turns 50 this year… rap has been around for a full half of that time. It’s time that it be given its due by everyone as a musical genre. Doesn’t mean you don’t have to like it – I hate nearly all recent country music – but you do have to acknowledge it’s more than a fad.
Excellent points. Like a lot of people here, I’m not much of a rap or hiphop fan, but once in a while I do hear a hiphop song that really is good. Heck, I do consider myself a rock fan, yet can’t listen to most of that either–not if it’s just rehashed material, or most of the 1970’s rock that your local classic rock station plays, that I’ve heard a million times.
Even I can see that rap is not “as simple as children’s rhymes”, as some have said. It takes talent and skill to be able to rap extemporaneously like the best artists can do, just as it does to play an instrument well. As a musician myself, I gravitate more towards instrumentally oriented music myself, but there’s no denying that the best rappers deserve the same respect as the best musicians.
OK. I’m not a hip-hop fanatic by any stretch of the imagination. I grew up playing and listening to classical music. These days, I mostly listen to rock and underground music. For anyone to say hip-hop/rap requires little to no talent and comparing it to children’s rhymes is woefully ignorant of the genre. To rap convincingly is extremely difficult and, no doubt in my mind, requires great music talent. It ain’t singing, and it’s not fair to judge a rapper by the standards of traditional rock or pop music.
The melody is not what drives the song. It’s the rhythms. Rhythm is to rap as melody is most other forms of Western music. A good rapper has an amazing command of rhythm, phrasing, vocal timbre, and dynamics. The rhythmic interplay of a rap vocal over the beat that grounds the music is spectacularly complex. If you must analyze from a classical perspective, just try to transcribe the rhythms. Go ahead. It’s crazy and interesting stuff, certainly NOT as easy as children’s rhymes.
But many people are so rigid in their conception of what defines music that the mere lack of melody or traditional instrumentation compels them to dismiss an entire genre – easily the most innovative and original development in music over the last twenty odd years – as noise. They said the same about rock n roll in the 50s. Some things never change.
The melody is not what drives the song. It’s the rhythms. Rhythm is to rap as melody is most other forms of Western music. A good rapper has an amazing command of rhythm, phrasing, vocal timbre, and dynamics. The rhythmic interplay of a rap vocal over the beat that grounds the music is spectacularly complex. If you must analyze from a classical perspective, just try to transcribe the rhythms.
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Um, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t most rap… cadences, for lack of a better word… simply variations on a 4/4 beat, that almost any good classical drummer, or even some pop (notibly metal, Drums and Base) drummers, should be able to do convincingly?
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In its most basic form, rap’s primary element is the lyrics. The music is simply the vehicle that carries the lyrics. Rap can be, and is often performed without accompaniment. It can be performed with nothing for accompaniment but another person or persons creating rhythmic sounds with his or her mouth and hands. And to tell the truth, a “melody” does not have to be sung or played on an instrument. There is a melody to human speech - our voices change pitch while we speak, and much information is conveyed by those changes in pitch.
Well, by definition, it wouldn’t be “rap” without lyrics. To “rap” means to “speak”.
And children’s poetry? Give me a break. One of the most basic elements of rap is the ability to improvise and think quickly. Ever watched or listened to a rap “battle” in which two rappers trade rhymes back and forth, without rehearsal, attempting to make each other “miss” by speaking a line that the other can’t rhyme? Points (for lack of a better term) are scored for improvising rhyming verse that is both complex, and makes sense. All without missing a beat.
The melody is not what drives the song. It’s the rhythms. Rhythm is to rap as melody is most other forms of Western music. A good rapper has an amazing command of rhythm, phrasing, vocal timbre, and dynamics. The rhythmic interplay of a rap vocal over the beat that grounds the music is spectacularly complex. If you must analyze from a classical perspective, just try to transcribe the rhythms.
Yes and no. 99% of pop and rock and a majority of classical music is 4/4 as well. The vocal cadences of rap can be written out in 4/4 over the 4/4 beat that grounds your standard hip-hop tune, but often delve into polyrythms, pushing three beats over two, subtly “swinging” the beats by stretching and shaving the first and second half of eighth note pairs, respectively.
Can your average classical musician or metal drummer do a convincing rap beat without having a good immersion in the style? Absolutely not.
To make an analogy: any decent musician should be able to learn and improvise relatively well within the blues scale. After all, it’s only six (or five) notes, three chords, hell…child’s play. I’ve heard many technically gifted pianists who were trained in a different style (classical, rock, etc) try to play the blues. Sure, they did something that sounded bluesy, but it wasn’t convincing. There’s a subtle level of nuance which comes only from being immersed in and understanding the music that makes this type of music convincing. I have heard a hell of a lot of whitebread blues which, while technically proficient, sounds utterly crap and uninspired when placed next to music that may be slightly deficient technically, but comes from someone who truly understands the genre.
Music is not only about playing the right note values at the right time. You have to understand the cadences, the phrasing, the accentual patterns, etc, to make it sound convincing. And if you every actually analyzed rap by listening to hear how the vocal rhythms play against the 4/4, you’d realize that there’s a undeniable level of complexity going on there. Like I said, go ahead, transcribe it and see what you come up with.
The lyrical and performance aspect of it are also amazing, especially in the “rap battle” styles of rap, and require a level of ingenuity certainly on par with jazz improvisation. If you’ve ever seen one of these shows in full swing, I cannot comprehend how you could possibly not be convinced of this.
But I’ll just stick with handling the musical and technical points, and let the other posters debate this other important aspect of hip hop.
Now and then I try to patiently listen to an entire rap number to find the literary merit. There’s no music there, so it must be in the brilliant, witty, insightful lyrics, right? I have yet to find any. I came through the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s with a very good ability to hear lyrics, so it’s not that I can’t hear the words over the clumsy electronic drum/artillery track. The vocalist almost always maintains a motonal, drearily angry delivery. The lyrics usually seem to be hastily thrown together, using rhyme software. Hey, let’s see how many words I can use that end in “ary!” If one line has nine beats more than the last, who cares?:rolleyes: If the crouching scowler can’t even follow his own rhythm track, big deal! That’s innovation. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
The only rap performer I’ve ever heard with a shred of humor is Kid Rock. He has that useful ability to not take himself seriously. It’s pains me to say that, because I really can’t stand him. His angry-duck delivery is more grating than other rappers, and most of them are quite annoying.
If you think this is a venomous post, you should have seen it before I toned it down 23%.
