Sach O, he’s running this rap shit. Break out a post and when it happens: that’s it.
All of this hand wriggling over poor old Hip hop. It’d be sad if it wasn’t so funny. It seems that ever since Kanye West released his inner Phil Collins on record, the rap blogosphere lost its collective shit. “Major labels will only release singles with autotune!” “Singing will kill rap!” “Hipsters are rounding up rap fans and shipping them off to gay-disco concentration camps!” “WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?!” But never fear, the sky isn’t falling, in fact it isn’t even raining and just like last time we’ll get over this.
(If you don’t remember last time, here’s a crash course.)
The year is 1998. The internet is the hip new thing. Rap fans congregate on primitive message boards to discuss real-audio streams from Hiphopsite, the REAL winner of the LL vs. Canibus battle and the never-ending epic that is Biggie vs. Pac. But mostly they just bitch about how rap is dead, how Mannie Fresh and Swizz Beats are killing beatmaking and how they’ll never be another group like _______. They complain that Nas fell off. They complain that southern gangster rap is killing New York Hip Hop. They curse rap-rock with the vitriol of religious fanatics and they predict that their beloved art form is doomed.
Sound familiar? It should. Where southern rap fans once proudly stood up for their scene in the face of New York’s hate, they’re now bitter and worried about their brand of rap. Hipster rap or non-rap or blog rap (whatever you want to call it) is seen as an imminent threat cloaked in a bright hoodie, ready to destroy the very foundation of Hip Hop music. “They sing! They dress like white people! They ain’t hood!!” Sounds an awful lot like “They talk funny, their drums are wack” and “they ain’t got lyrics” to me.
Well, Maybe They Were Right About Nas Falling Off
Every 10 years (give or take) a new crop of emcees takes over the scene and every 10 years the previous generation fails trying to keep up. The original party-rapping class of 78 stood helplessly as Kane, Rakim, Chuck D, KRS, Ice Cube and Kool G Rap built on their styles and made them obsolete while the Bomb Squad and Prince Paul did things with samplers that the original DJs couldn’t dream of. The inventors of rap couldn’t stand the cursing and violence from the west coast (let alone the idea of the west coast) and their careers were ended as their fans began looking to these new cats for inspiration. They birthed every emcee from ’88 to 98 but those emcees ended any chance that the OGs would ever have a chance.
Then the class of 98 came of age 10 years later with the memory of the crack trade fresh in their minds but viewed through younger eyes. They were inspired by the crime tales of their elders but also their business sense. They formed labels, aspired to blow up, simplified their slang to move units and name dropped brands. The now older ’88 generation complained bitterly and underground rap became a viable alternative for a while but ultimately southern-oriented gangster rap became the principle face of Hip Hop. New York continued to hold on (G-Unit, Diplomats) but the successful rappers from all regions now looked to the south and the west for inspiration as the city that birthed rap (mostly) ran out of ideas after the Blueprint.
And now? The same thing happens again.
In ’98 New York had shined for so long that it couldn’t possibly continue to reign over rap without falling back to rejuvenate itself. The same can now be said for gangster rap which has dominated rap commercially for 20 years. Right now coming up with a new approach to the genre is like squeezing blood from a stone and already young lions are circling their prey, eager to make their mark on the culture. They care little for regionalism having been fed rap from every era and area through the internet. They’re even more entrepreneurial than their elders but recognize that the bling era is over and that this sort of gaudy behavior can’t exist in a post-download post-economic crisis world. They’re musically open-minded and their beats are as different from Mannie Fresh’s as his were from Premo’s (which is to say, closer than you think). They realize that the last decade’s biggest hits from acts like Lauryn Hill, Eminem, Outkast, Timbaland, The Neptunes, Kanye West and Gnarls Barkley came from thinking outside the box while the quick pop hit is offering diminishing returns. They were probably bumping Nelly and Ja Rule a few short years ago though. And yeah, they love looking fly. Almost as much as Jay-Z liked looking like a coke kingpin.
New and Improved Jay-Z
It’ll take a while for this new generation to take its place and with the music biz dying, it won’t be easy for them to break through. But it’ll happen, if not now then soon and hopefully it’ll involve a new distribution model that’ll bypass the now paralyzed major labels. The Def Jux’s, Stones Throw’s and Bay Area labels of yesterday will inspire kids just as much as Death Row and Bad Boy sparked the late 90’s boutique imprint boom. And of course, not every elder emcee will disappear: it took Shawn Carter 10 years to go multi-platinum (88-98). Dwayne Carter did that from the get-go and is only now reaching his prime. Imagine what he’ll accomplish in the next decade?
So whether the blogs acknowledge it or not, it’s a great time to be a rap fan.
Oh and one last thing. The hipsters everyone complains about? (I’m hella guilty). Don’t even waste your time on them. They may latch onto a few acts to boost their cred (Ghostface, Clipse, Devin, Wayne) but they’ve never even remotely come close to discovering or blowing up a Hip hop act. Their influence is minimal and they aren’t a tenth as important as they think they are. Like the housing bubble, when the true value of these ugly, tasteless trust fund kids is revealed their whole steelo will collapse. Just because they share a taste in hoodies with rappers, that doesn’t make them down. You can already see them squirm as Wayne prepares to unleash his brand of rap-rock on middle-America: the ultimate in un-cool and they can’t do a damn thing about it.
It might be a good idea to brush up on your Limp Bizkit hate though. The Nu Metal kids were as bad as the hipsters and THEY could actually sell out arenas.
