Platonic ILM Rap Bullshit thread

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hahaha a ghostface album in 2006 being the saviour of rap? - i mean this sort of proves my point

xpost haha sorry alex. i guess i'm corny, what can i say??

xxpost: i'm not talking about sales, deeej, read the question again, christ amighty

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I think it's meant in the spirit of "all white male rock critics critique like this."

Which is bullshit.

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Look at jazz; hell, Benny Goodman was one of those suburban white kids who fed upon those seedy after hours dives. Glen Miller - there's your posuer (of the 40s, anyways). Jazz in the 50s and early 60s is where it's at, so, i'd say tht rap need to age a bit more before we see a greater evolution.

It's an interglacial period, man.

NIGGA, IF YOU AX ME IT'S THE ONLY WAY

TAKE MONEY
TAKE MONEY MONEY MONEY

http://home.uchicago.edu/~jniimi/dylan.jpg

is that what you think mike? i just meant it's not "getting better" the way i felt it was ca. 1998-2002 ... it's now "getting worse"

eppy would you care to fill me in on your thinking here, dude

anyway, as mentioned, even if you need to stick to NY, the new Ghostface is very strong, Cam'ron has a record next month that's much anticipated, the new Dipset mixtapes (The Movement Moves on, Who Else But Us) are pretty solid.

also as mentioned, the South is where it's at these days, with Pimp C out of jail, I'm hoping we get at least one more classic record out of UGK. plus Trae, the most underrated/overlooked rapper around, has his new disc dropping soon. the new T.I. is disappointing, though.

and as long as I'm here, Jay-Z is (and always has been) overrated and Eminem is awful.

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as far as getting "called" on comparing rap's two biggest names (still) to two of jazz's two biggest names - i dunno? what?

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Tracer, I'm in no position to speak authoritatively about this, but here's at least one dynamic that I think might be in play in the sense of "worsening": the current default persona of MCs seems kind of calcified, and it's a persona that doesn't necessarily lend itself to a lot of variation! Or at least it makes variation risky, because a lot of the game has become the ability to live up to existing templates. (They can be highly skilled within these templates, but it feels -- to me, anyway -- like there's a lot of risk involved in trying to escape them. And it's bottom-line sales BUSINESS risk, at a time when a lot of the existing narrative of rap is that it's a personal business enterprise, a competition, a way of climbing up an already-existing ladder.) I think that's part of why Eminem could be one of the big things "happening" to rap over the past decade; he didn't so much have the option to compete in terms of Default Persona, and so he's had much more of a burden to make something new happen outside of it. (We could maybe arrange a much more complicated story around Andre 3000 -- not to mention other pop and rap stars -- and this very visible quest to find new ways to be, ones that sit outside the Default Persona but aren't business suicide.) ("Consciousness" seems to be the one that's viable as business, but I think for some of these artists that seems like as much of a template as rap's Default Persona.) This isn't to say that variation and newness are the same thing as goodness -- but I think a lack of them can lead to a feeling of routine, which is what I think people mean or are reacting to when they say something's gotten "worse." (I.e. maybe it's not "worse," but just not getting fresher and "better" at the rate one expects.)

And so where we do get the variation now seems to be coming less from the rappers and more from the producers, which isn't anything so new but seems relevant: cf in terms of the Southern stuff it feels like a procession of regionalist beats, almost "new dance craze" style, where the form of the writing and production are pushing things and the MCs are more just faces for it. Which, again, isn't new or bad, and totally has lots of analogs in, e.g., black music of the 60s. (Or, more appropriately, other forms of dance music!) But one result of that in the short term might be that even when things are kind of new, they don't necessarily feel new, because they're not entirely wrapped up in an all-round vision -- there are beat and mood variations, like heading to a different party in a different city every now and then (cf electronic dance music again), but nothing necessarily seems to converge from it, which might create a sense of routine. The good news is that this sort of model tends to be the kind that identifiably new and happening and non-routine things tend to spring from -- only in stages and given time.

Again, out of my ass (and after a weekend of listening to too much My Ghetto Report Card), but Tracer's question was a perfectly normal one and surely someone should try to engage with it.

only one thing I mentioned. let me guess: you've never heard a Trae record?

"as far as getting "called" on comparing rap's two biggest names (still) to two of jazz's two biggest names - i dunno? what?"

don't confuse sales with quality, they're separate things. Miles and Duke both had fifty year careers. maybe Eminem is Benny Goodman? jazz survived just fine after he left.

Miles leaving in 1975 did signal the end of jazz as a creative genre, but I just think those specific comparisons are silly.

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Has Tracer Hand copped goldfronts or are his teef really just that yellow ?

xposts: my skin is white and my teeth are tan

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Gay.

Would you accept "not better, but consistently good" as an answer?

P.O.S. and Emily Bloodmobile

there's still been some decent & consistent product i think, but if i name anything in particular some rap nerd or another will get on my case about it.

as a gestalt thing, i think there's less frission generally for rappers to play on. the subject matter of most rap -- poor black urban life -- isn't going through major changes at the moment, just sort of generally deteriorating even more in the same way and at a slow but noticable rate.

which is why the hip-hop response to katrina is sort of a key story -- b/c it's sort of an acid test for southern rappers in terms of whether they can deal with it or not.

there's also the "mainstreaming" of indie-rap production sounds, but then that's just the return of beat-digging dusty fetishism.

Sure, rap is getting worse, but I think that the reason that this is happening is that there is just so much more of it nowadays that the market is being dilluted. The flood of new releases represents, at least to me, a huge land grab - get money while you can. Drop an album with one or (at most) two hot singles, and fill the rest with idiotic skits and half-assed tracks.

On another front, the lack of wide-spread "conscious" rap - rap that addresses issues away from the person speaking - indicates a self-centeredness of the genre that is creating a huge amount of inertia to get away from.

I would like to hear a well-crafted rap song delineating George W. Bush's transgressions as president. Or one telling the story of a family left without a home in Katrina - xxpost Sterling

It is a valid art form, but the life it is imitating now is all money and sex. It needs to delve deeper, in my mind.

Jesus Christ had dreads, so shake 'em...Imagine all the Hebrews goin' dumb, dancin' on top of chariots and turnin' tight ones = bland?!!?

Jesus Christ had dreads, so shake 'em...Imagine all the Hebrews goin' dumb, dancin' on top of chariots and turnin' tight ones = bland?!!?

There we go.

This is like one of those legends where it rains frogs, except instead of frogs it's a barrage of pink penises flailing around in the road.

Sterling I think the biggest thing on that front is that the lives of a lot of young black men -- or at least the ones we'd imagine to be in rap's core demographic -- are stuck in a position that's totally unglamorous, and maybe as such hard to rap about: poor or no employment, no clear opportunity to do much of anything, surpassed success-wise by black women (and possibly living off mom or girlfriend), very much unglamorously stuck, in a way that's too banal and undramatic to cry "freedom" over it. Huge generalization, but if you want to rap about what the crisis is for young black men -- right there is one big issue for a whole lot of them. But while black women certainly make plenty of music that gets at that issue, I can certainly see why it's a tricky one for rap to turn to. (Right now rap addresses it in the form of fantasy, really -- all that fantasy seems to express nothing so much as the lack of fantasy for the supposed "core" audience.)

i mean yeah after the clinton era surge of sort of ill-founded hope, there was also this recognition vis-a-vis fantasy is the thing, this sense that bling was completely fake and etc. so now you get fantasy about not even successful lives, but just more exciting ways to have a lot of sort of terrible problems to deal with.

lots of this is much less to do with actual conditions too than widespread social atmosphere -- shows like black/white, etc. -- which in turn has to do with liberal xenophobia shifting targets from the "urban threat" to the "arab threat".

"Jon Passantino," that goes for you too although you really have become adorable with your Teen Beat pinups of ILM regulars and your Mega-Blackness - oh, and your bitterness, which lends an air of pathetic peanut-throwing haterdom to your whole deal - it is really well-constructed.

i wonder, though, why it makes you feel so uncomfortable to see other people talking about rap.

xpost - yeah but i don't really mind things not being serious, actually i kind of hate "big serious conversations" on ILM

(Arf, have the people rolling their eyes at the sociological generality of this discussion never read any of the countless ILM threads about "white people" in general and "rock" in general?)

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RE: the kids listening to biggie/ pac. Like rock fans listening to Nirvana/ led zep...etc.

it's not rilly party music enough though, or i mean, it was up until recently, after which point it seemed to have a whole set of expectations shoved on it that it sort of flailed in meeting.

i just can't express how completely indifferent jeezey makes me.

the oakland stuff is very party music still. i just wish i liked it more.

...that doesn't necessarily mean it's worse though, although some of the stuff nabisco said abt. the persona being so standard across the board rings true to me at least...maybe i'm just getting old, or can't hear what's good anymore....that being said there is stuff that catches my ear, i just don't LOVE it in the way that i did when i was a teen...although maybe you never love music that much later in life.

i think rap's creative decline is much less a question of "quality" than "freshness" - if e-40 released "the corruptor's execution" or missy released "work it" - today - there's something about the atmosphere or the scene that would make those songs less remarkable, less exciting now, than they were when they actually came out. i think this might have to do with what finney and simon say about there being no cutting edge in music any more. rap has always been cutting edge but it's not now.

Def Jam
Rick Rubin
Run DMC
Beastie Boys

At that time, rap was more or less considered a thing of the past with the general public, and before that again, it was a kind of electro, largely based upon analog synth sounds and sounding a bit like synthpop.

which is why the hip-hop response to katrina is sort of a key story -- b/c it's sort of an acid test for southern rappers in terms of whether they can deal with it or not.

...is one of the most troublesome ideas I've heard in a while. If Southern rappers aren't sufficiently radical they become artistically invalid? WTF?

Indie fans listen to Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and Arctic Monkeys though.

If you did the former, you wouldn't have to ask some of the questions you just did: there have been the seeds of a discussion on this thread concerning whether "new" means "good," and concerning how a lack of freshness can cause the impression that something is getting "worse" -- two potentially complicated issues that totally circumvent the line you're attempting to draw in the sand.

If you did the latter, you would have just said all that stuff straight off, so that people could respond to it and clarify themselves, rather than flouncing around going "pfft" for a few hours.

I've always been pretty distrustful of the "black CNN" idea--seems more like the male Oprah.

I get a kick out of guys like "Jon Passantino" up there. He reminds me of the hard-ass internet toughguys on the s1sk underground hip hop room, trying be so fucking real all the time - missing out on the irony that they are posting/chatting on the same forum as the corny indie fux they try so hard to distance themselves from.

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i also blame mtv

and hstencil

Tracer's argument is something I've heard a long time. Ever since I started listening to rap really. In the rap world they're talking about how New York has fallen off, and that rap in the rest of the country has picked up lately. Not that their perspective is any more 'true,' i just think it'll give you some perspective on how people talk about hip-hop outside of ILM's not particularly representative sampling.

well, yeah. bored of lance armstrong yet??

x-post with deej

Multi-zillion-dollar business in clinging tenaciously to money-making formula shocker!

yeah, i hear a lot of people complaining about "lyrics" and "production" and one level they're sort of right. i don't really want to listen to a whole lot these days except bay area rap and production-wise it IS rather boring, effortless crunk-by-numbers party anthems etc etc. "yes we KNOW that YOU KNOW how to make us dance and freak". and "lyrically" there's not a whole lot of stuff going that's new or fresh, either. but on the level of vocals and delivery, the bay area stuff is CRAZY.

but maybe that's something that's passing us by as "older" rap fans. my students who just LOVE e-40 and keak and D4L and all that don't really seem to care about "how things are said" textually, because tupac did all that, a long time ago, and they don't expect anybody to go there anymore than we might expect ghostface to turn into bob dylan tomorrow. they just care about "how things are said" just on the level of sounds, assonances and weird flows and stuff, and i don't know if that's wrong or what but it's def a different generation from me and i feel like it's been going that way for a while now (since 50 cent?)

someone school me if i'm wrong here.

listening to my students, they are really really really into this track! the chorus has worked it's way into their daily lexicon. if they disagree with something someone's saying they'll say "quit smokin that", phrased and pronounced EXACTLY like the dude from the chorus. if the class gets too quiet or whatever (or just riding on the caltrain or waiting in line at starbucks i've heard it) kids will just start going "bullshhhhhh ... bulshhhhhh".

i could go on and on to them in my best blissblogga-speak about what a big deal it was when timbaland started using 2-step drum and bass beats or when the neptunes laid the foundations the next few years with the "grindin" rhythm and they'll give me blank looks. to them, whatever, it's just beats, hot beats come and go but something like the way the guy says "bullshhhhhhh" is just ... eternal art, man.

Yeah yeah I totally follow this shift from the 90s on in, but ... well, I guess I always figured it was a short-term trend, and not a long-term stylistic shift. Like possibly I never developed the attention span to watch all the possible variations on that get tested out, because I always thought of that itself as a kind of variation.

(Actually I've always wondered how much this was basically a kind of negotiation with white audiences -- rap increasingly becomes "genre in which people say interesting things in interesting ways / voices / etc," a kind of slang-machine and pronunciation-mill.) (Like notice that that's the one thing everyone gets out of hip-hop, whether or not they even listen to it -- the slang, the terminology, the ways-of-saying-things. Even Ellen Degeneres grabs laughs by saying "herre.")

zwan maybe you didn't but i thought missy's whole thing was cutting edge - her futurism, her stubborn oddness, her bizarre videos - which is why a song with such blatant retro stylings as "work it" could still seem like it was veering off in a new direction.

but even more than this is the total evaporation - and i'm talking about ft. greene, here - of the kind of rap atmosphere that provoked spontaneous singalongs on the street when you heard "miss jackson" or "get ur freak on" coming out of some doorway ... people you didn't know singing along with you. the feeing that the radio could tune in the future and you were all in on it, and it sounded like hip hop.

but i can accept that it's me and the people i know who have changed, and that there are plenty of people getting caught up and infected by things now (not that i've really noticed much infectious enthusiasm on ILM, mind) and that rap is in rude health. it's hard to get outside yourself enough to know. and maybe i don't want to. all i know is: rap's getting worse for me and for all my friends.

hahaha vahid that is a great story

x-post um, Tracer, "Work It" was on her fourth album! She'd been doing all that since day one.

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yeah, again i just have a sense that you have rap now that's more or less catering to a generation that finds all of the reasons WE (going on 25 or 30 or 30+ y.o. rap fans) like rap (beats / rhymes / rebel attitude) more or less banal. these kids grew up w/ mindblowing rap production already just floating around in the air (they had faux timbaland beats behind their cheetos ads and phone ringtones and stuff) and lyrics are just in the air (some high school seniors were born in 1990! in a couple years the rap demographic will be people whose parents were fucking to "i get around" ... "our" rap is going to be to these kids like stevie wonder and marvin gaye and, hell, elton john and abba is to us) ...

what's left for these kids is just endlessly new and novel ways of saying things, ways of saying things that they own and can annoy their parents and teachers with and new ways of saying things that they can point at and say, "look that's slang from MY area on MTV, something i have part ownership in is all over the international screen now" and i guess what's left for us is maybe the rockist dream that along they way they'll come up w/ their own big paradigm or whatever like punk or techno or rap and we'll realize it when they do.

Also, the mixtape phenom has to be taken into account here. It's been a plus in that songs too raw or sample-clearance complicated for major label release now have a market (many of my favorite tracks from '05 never came out 'officially') but it's also spawned WWE beefing and created hype for dozens of no name MCs who can spit a blasphemously funny verse or two (there are probably rappers at this moment trying to work a joke about Proof's murder into their next 'hot 16') but who will never release a good album.

they're carrying more r&b mixes than before, and also of course lots of reggaeton however.

so yeah if the east coast isn't that hot right now then that's the whole local vibe.

i can see how oakland is super excited about coming into its own on the national scene -- but yeah, guys like keak and e-40 have been around forever, just like the southern dudes like ugk, etc.

they're hardly a new generation of rappers, & what they're doing, aside from dirtying up the beats and throwing out some myspace gags in their songs isn't that different from what they've been doing for years.

i've been listening to more varied stuff too, including, yeah, more old stuff and especially biggie, but also 80s stuff. jay-z and eminem i'm totally burned out on however. (tho i was listening to lots of early em freestyles for a while) -- i keep them on my ipod just in case i get the urge, but meh.

it also seems as tho hip-hop turned more inward and pulled back on all the international genre-flirting it was doing a few years ago. now would be a great time to reimport some afro-french hip-hop sounds tho -- the polyrhythms would fight nicely into the oakland crunk/hyphy production style.

you kidding right? i mean global takeover is the peak. obviously it's downhill from there to a greater or lesser degree. what more do you want? rap in space? why is this thread here again?

YES THIS IS WHAT I WANT!!!!

or LL Cool J.

Next:

a year or so but i don't keep tabs or files like that one dude.

really? I didn't remember any in any of the films, but I haven't heard all the albums. Anyhow, he thought going to the moon was some bullshit.

hip hop should, uh, rap about comic books more too. i'd be down with that. and, uh, sample like weird stuff y'know.

yeah this is the main thing.

xpost hip hop still hasn't teamed up with the other DJ genres like techno or house (or trance!) in any kind of real way

I could use something Westerbergy - snotty and slightly nihilistic, without trying to be really threatening. Licensed-era Beastie Boys if they had big ballads, or David Banner without the pimp/murder thing. There may be some indie act that qualifies.

bleh.

Anthony's constant rapper-to-rocker analogies are making my heard hurt, I'm outta here.

x-post poor baby

anyway, I think the second-generation Houston Screw sound is a relatively new thing, and the best tracks (Trae-Swang, Paul Wall-Ridin' Dirty, S.L.A.B.-You Know How We Do It) are more interesting to me than anything Jay-Z ever did, with the exception of U Don't Know. Eminem I've never been able to listen to, I didn't know people took him especially seriously.

I think rap needs to reach out to DJs and writers like Lemon Red and Emynd and the Fader Crew. Their writing about hip-hop is actual WRITING, not just scanned press releases like The Source or XXXL or Pounds. I think those guys getting rappers like Bun Bee to "collabo" with rappers like MIA and TTC created the most interesting music of the last little while-- to my ears, anyways. Groups like The Fiery Furnaces and Sufjan should be reaching out to fellow artists from the Southern and Bay rap scene.

I'd be willing to place a wager that a lot of people on this thread haven't been following the music close enough to have heard a lot of it. Dem Franchize Boyz, Marc Decoca, Pimp C, Trae, Pastor Troy, Lil Keke.

"Look at jazz; hell, Benny Goodman was one of those suburban white kids who fed upon those seedy after hours dives. Glen Miller - there's your posuer (of the 40s, anyways)"

get one history book.

Friday April 28, 2006

THE PIONEERS OF HIP-HOP

Starring:

Doug E. Fresh

Slick Rick

Kool Moe Dee

Whodini

MC Lyte

Special Guest

MC Hammer

@ The Show Place Arena
Upper Marlboro, Maryland (New Sound System)

Tickets: $60.00 ON SALE NOW!!

Doors open 7:00 p.m., Showtime 8:00 p.m.

This thread is around somewhere, but haven't found it with the 'search' tool yet...

haha isn't e-40 older than nas??

by the way, I went ahead and started Rolling 2006 Hip Hop Thread

http://www.mccormacksociety.co.uk/mcccds/those%20were%20the%20days.jpg

Okay, I noticed this thread since earlier this morning today, and since it still seems to be active I guess I'll put my little two cents in...

Well, I think that I would really agree with Tracey Hand's feelings about rap. It doesn't help that rap is still the top music because it does not have the fundamentals of being able to reinvent itself. I've heard rap latch on to other genres, even country of course, which tells me that it must be running out of ideas.

But of course I think pretty much all music these days is running out of ideas.
This thread got so many responces in such a short amount of time, it only makes me think that there must be a lot of defenders of rap out there which makes me.........sad. Or laugh. Forgive me, I can't tell right now.

But I didn't read every single comment, so.......

Whatever. My two cents.

Yeah from a production perspective this is an important point. Sonically hip hop seems to be all about internal genre splicing now - this city has a twist on that city's sound.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing but I think it stands in stark contrast to 5 years ago or so when it seemed like every track on an album would have a different genre affectation (Foxy's Broken Silence I miss you!)

I know this opens me up to charges of only liking hip hop when it sounds like something other than hip hop, but, y'know, I find this to be true of all genres of music.

1. first off, maybe rap is suffering from the same "fordism" that some accuse mainstream pop of suffering. the brains of most musical acts are the producers more than the "artists" in front, and now more than ever.

2. most tracks, even innovative ones, are actually fairly quick to make, and most producers have LOTS of tracks lying around. and they are just tracks, not pieces of art (at least not yet, if they are good), and it really comes down to the artist to choose which ones to rap over, and also to what tracks the labels are happy with too (money money captailism blah blah blah).

3. my friend has heard plenty of house and techno, and is actually fairly current (even going so far as to recreate bass sounds from some of the Areal and Sender records he has heard). but the nature of mainstream music production, and ESPECIALLY radio means you have to compress the shit out of those records and master them really loud, with every sound flat with minimal reverb. obviously, there are exceptions! this is an issue with mainstream rock too, btw.

4. my friend is much more interested in making r&b right now, and i doubt he is atypical.

other thoughts:
1. maybe(!) this is the "late disco" era of hiphop... we are past the auteurs, the concept albums ("whats going on", "songs in the key of life", any good HM & BN's album on philly international) and into glitz and, dare i say, uh camp?... southern tracks are party tracks, and more about singles. the neptunes were baker-harris-young ;-P

2. there has always been the danger of lyrical stagnation since rap for a while now has been much more focused on the descriptive as opposed to prescriptive. rap songs are like the litany of hastily-written books about why bush sux clogging up the "political science section" of B&N.

i think what tracer misses most is the overarching narrative, which means that maybe no individual track or unheard album will excite. am i right?

But much like, say, disco in the late 70s, someone who engaged with the music in a casual, radiocentric way might well miss out on a lot of the really creative things that are going on.

So I'd agree with Tracer in that highly visible rap right now IS worse than the highly visible rap of a few years ago, and that people are less excited about it.

But I'm pretty sure that if I was prepared to search hard enough I could find lots of good rap. And that's not even to get into reggaeton and other styles which (to all intents and purposes, even though their genealogy might be different) amount to "non-US rap".

My bias is this: Twenty years ago, it seemed like everything in American punk was beginning to suck. Production slickened up without actually getting better. Lots of bands broke up or signed to majors. I began turning to stuff that excited me more--like rap. It wasn't until a few years later that I heard what was going on in Olympia, or in post-Minor Threat D.C. There was good music being made in underground scenes around the world, I just hadn't heard it yet.

I play this game of catch-up all the time now. It's part of loving music and also having a life. There's no shame in going backwards through a catalogue. There are new Devin the Dude and Atmosphere fans every week. I think Juvenile, P.O.S., and Lil Flip are all making entirely different, exciting music. Maybe not with as much consensus behind them as Aquemeni, but who needs it? I was never a huge Eminem or Jay-Z fan, anyway. In Minneapolis, Unknown Prophets just released a pretty great album, on the heels of I Self Devine, and people are coming together around a new Trama album. Things keep getting better, and you might hear about it someday.

When I drove down to New Orleans in February, I listened to a live hip-hop concert simulcast on St. Louis left-of-the-dial radio for like three hours, doing 80 miles per hour (good signal range). It was a benefit for a death row inmate, with a live MC battle where participants had to rap about the case and the issues surrounding it. Just phenomenal. I assume you can multiply this type of thing by the number of cities in the United States.

one thing i'm really noticing when i listen to old wu-tang or biggie or whatever is that in comparison contemporary rap has so many of the qualities of other pop music: melody, changes, less separation between raps and beats. when you listen to something from the golden era it's more or less just boom bap with rapping on top. these days, not so much.

as mentioned upthread, rap has shifted from vocalist's to a producer's medium; and consequently from albums to singles.

i'm not sure whether or not has rap gotten worse? why?, but one thing i will say for the now is - some of the strangest pop music ever has come out of rap in the last few years. the reason lyrical content has calcified is to provide some continuity to the crazily shifting music.

Would Ghostface count as highly visible?

1) im old

2) i live in new york or have a ny-centric mentality, where the east coast hasnt produced a worthwhile new mc in like 5 years

3) i yearn for the highs of my mid 90s/early 00s ilm-nutured 'popist epiphany' (even tho i liked tag team & mc hammer as a kid! tee hee!), and when i hear tracks now which are causing similar popist epiphanies for corny white rock kids im not feelin em as much as my first

4) i listen to rap by skimming the top 2% of the weirdest or most popular tracks, and the texture & aesthetic & content of those seems different from it was when i started liking rap 3 or 5 or 10 or 20 years ago. i have no interest in listening to the remaining 98% of rap released to see if any of the things i like are there because i cant force it into some herbish ilm pop narrative about kids in the street singing along & because i could spend that time listening to more corny rock music

5) im really, really old

Spank Rock: "What It Look Like"
genre: dance

Yoyoyoyoyo is all over the place, busting holes in globalization's chintzy, prefab ideology; there is no unity, there is only ass shake. I've had too many conversations about how ironic I think these cats are or aren't. Point being, when producer Armani XXXchange strips the bass down to these loopy, droopy lines, words matter less. "My tongue is the drum, my mind's the machine" is the credo and it should be, lasciviousness is rewarded on this battlefield, we think. Frankly Spankro sounds like he looks, squeezing geek chic for all its nu-cool cache. This is something lots of people can relate to, we all want to rock horn rims while the girl twirls her assets right next to us on-stage. The good news is the music is even better than it has any right to be considering it's budget-recorded. The bad news? Who knows how much they mean it. [Sean Fennessey]

The stink of desperation hangs heavy.

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/x1/x9749.jpg

who cares?

People do this with all genres.

Things that happened in the hip-hop domain recently that seem important:

- Three 6 Mafia win an Oscar (for a song about being a pimp)
- Eminem talks about retirement
- Eminem's friend and bandmate shot dead in hometown
- Neptunes and Timbaland 'just' mainstream pop producers these days

Loads of other stuff probably, you tell me I've not been keeping up much at all. But this seem like another important period for the genre despite a noticeable increase generally in declarations of increased widespread stagnation. But relative to other successful genres, as ever it seems unfair to single hip-hop out here.

All genres should doubt. By which I mean the players involved question what they're doing, why they're doing it, where it's going etc. - seems healthy. I often wonder whether there is enough of that going on in the most successful genres (of which hip-hop is one). It's not a level playing field of course but because I tend to want to view it as one (in order so that it may become one), I tend to think all genres should follow the same rules/go through the same processes.

So I'm interested in the points in history at which 'rock n' roll' or other subgenres of Rock or Pop music were targetted in this same way. But I suppose 'all the time' is the correct answer!

herbish ilm pop narrative about kids in the street singing along & because i could spend that time listening to more corny rock music

4.1

actually even that's too high

next week: is Grime ever going to get good or whuuutt?

Are these the only available options?

this is so sad how when ppl are like "hip hop needs more of x" its nearly inevitably some corny indie-rap idea

What would be some non-corny-indie-rap-like ideas for more exciting hip hop?

i listen to rap by skimming the top 2% of the weirdest or most popular tracks, and the texture & aesthetic & content of those seems different from it was when i started liking rap 3 or 5 or 10 or 20 years ago. i have no interest in listening to the remaining 98% of rap released to see if any of the things i like are there because i cant force it into some herbish ilm pop narrative about kids in the street singing along & because i could spend that time listening to more corny rock music

= how dare you judge Dave Matthews Band without having listened to every bootleg of every concert they've ever played!! I bet you faggots all listen to the Backstreet Boys!!

not ghostface and dipset, that was a tangent to my main point/s. devin and trae was a more specific answer to the original query, obviously not new or underground to anyone paying semi-close attention.

you think many people in this thread have heard a full album by devin, or anything by trae? doubtful, from a scan of this and the archives, but maybe I'm wrong.

and the paul wall track I mentioned was an album track, not a single, so it's quite possible not that many people have heard it, dunno.

well SOMEBODY has to :(

xpost: cool, if it did, then great. how about Trae?

rock. bottom.

and it's not like i haven't even tried to investigate what exists of a JC scene or whatever either.

so i fail to see how this is an illegitimate gripe.

yeah ned not my most shining moment - i could be 100% right that (nyc?) rap has become more insular, less fun, and is stuck in a club-loop grind but i would still deserve ridicule for the way i put it out there - i'm big enough to accept that!

it's good to check every once in a while.

-- J Abbey (jo...), April 13th, 2006 11:47 AM.

dk's written a lot about Trae, maybe a little bit on ILM, deej's blog has had posts about Trae, hell, I saw a Fader blog post about Trae recently. I'll grant you that a lot of of people here probably haven't heard of him, but some have.

then again the only ILM threads i read are about techno or robyn

Almost daily, the telephone rings at Carly Simon's farm on Martha's Vineyard. The recorded voice begins: ''This call is from a federal prison."

It's John, her godson, calling to check in with ''Mama C."

''I look forward so much to those calls," she says. ''We talk about our day, we talk about books, we talk about our songs, we talk about my family, we talk about pain. I confide in him. He's become practically my best friend."

John Forte would seem an unlikely best friend to the well-known singer/songwriter. He's a black convict from Brooklyn serving 14 years in prison for drug trafficking. At 30, he is half Simon's age. He's a rap artist with dreadlocks that hang practically down to his waist. In the past several years, the two have formed an ineffable bond born of their music and mutual affection and strengthened by her determination to help get him out of prison. When he was arrested and allowed one phone call, it was to Simon.

''I loved him before this happened, and our friendship has really blossomed into a very, very deep love since all of this has happened," she says. ''John has become sort of my full-time responsibility. I feel like I just want to defend him in every possible way. It's endlessly frustrating to me, because I want him out [of prison] now."

So the guy whom Sterling was condescending to was actually condescending to everyone else? Great.

really, just say something you mean, it's hard at first but it feels good

The newer stuff in this genre hardly ever gets classified in the journalistic hip-hop sphere because it has one foot in this sort of ridiculous rapping and the other somewhere between indie rock and Cartoon Network. There are probably half a dozen tangentially hip hop things that didn't exist in the same form a decade ago that barely get considered in threads like this despite selling records.

--this is IN or AROUND the williamsburg area--
(it is *not* okay to contact this poster with commercial solicitations)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol1llUK3lUw

xpost fair enough but dude like vahid who im pretty sure bumps alot of dance music & not just skimming over top 40 jason nevins remixes of kelly clarkson or whatever

xpost oh eppy it was fucked up from the get-go

i think this is funny and appropriate and all but at the same time hip-hop just pervades culturally more than anything else around, more than 'Dahnce Music' (esp. now) and even whatever passes for pop that hasn't been infiltrated by hip-hop influences. or even when it's not dominant (UK charts) it's standing out for certain reasons - and if you're not hearing it much on whatever TV or radio you've selected you are hearing it constantly in the outside/real world. maybe part of that is down to where we live but really, any big city will suffice.

all of which makes me sometimes think hip-hop is really the biggest force out there still - so liable to attract these sort of questions more than other genres and phenomenons. good points well taken nonetheless.

1) is it fair of me to dismiss the taste of someone like, say, mr miccio (sorry!!) because i skim off the top 2% of pop-punk and decide it's crappy. i don't think it would raise a lot of eyebrows if it did. although it just occurred to me that i more or less do this all the time on dance threads so maybe i should shut up about this.

2) is it necessarily WRONG to need to fit music into your own narrative? ok you might have reservations w/ one person or another for being "herbish" but tell me all the best rap writing isn't hermeneutic/intrepetive anyway. or maybe you think that's the worst rap writing and that's your point? but then why post photos of the greg street car-show odyssey on the blog? i hope not for anthropological purposes or something.

I don't care if you're white black a bitch or a fucking bum off of the streets. If you rap about shooting people, smoking blunts, wearing timbs, drinking hennessy, and whatever else, I'll buy your music. If you rap about your girl, but don't call her a bitch, fuck you. If you rap about the economy and how its hurts migrant workers, fuck you. If you rap about your rap telekenisis or some equally retarded nerd shit, fuck you. That basically how I break it down to an extent.
-- dat nigga delmar (djtry82...), January 27th, 2004.

You really wouldn't care about that?

1) t.i. - king
2) boss hogg barbarians - every hogg has its day
3) scarface - my homies vol 2
4) young buck & dj drama - case dismissed
5) army of the pharoahs - torture papers
6) dj burn one & da backwudz - grippin grain
7) b.g. - heart of tha streetz vol 2
8) ras kass - revenge of the spit
9) bhi - the snap movement

t.i. on jimmy kimmel doing 'what u know' w/ a live band http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwIZuAJ64IA
10) bubba sparxxx - the charm (just for 'as the rim spins')

isn't it only like 11 or 12 tracks to begin with? I remember being kinda shocked by that when I looked at it in the store, especially since at least 4 tracks have been out since way before the album and I only liked maybe 1 of them.

not that a 3 month period is a very long time, but you're not helping your case if you can't do better than that.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0402/040114_music_erstwhile.php

back to relevancies: anyone heard Killa Season yet?

It's not like basing yr opinions on rap on what you read in boomkat or something.

(likewise vahid I always thought yr beef w/r/t dance music listeners was with people who were boomkat-readers or could analogously be associated with boomkat-readers somehow)

If people who have herbish ILM tendencies have turned off rap because of those tendencies, what is it about rap that has changed such that the typical ILMer can no longer get it (regardless of whether that's ILM's fault or rap's fault - let's suspend judgment for a moment)? The stereotypical ILM hiveminder (by which I generally strictly mean myself) liked Lil Jon and David Banner and Trap Muzik, how do they not like Young Jeezy etc? (actually I like Young Jeezy, but not so much that it totally ruins my point...)

I mean can we begin to navigate some middle ground between "it's rap that's changed" and "it's you that's changed" and work out how it's not either but both?

rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated

http://img114.imageshack.us/img114/5964/04130616101ct.jpg

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/1229/04130616099ag.jpg

Yeah the relative absence of pop-rap (as in tracks like "Pimpin' All Over the World" or most Nelly even Bow Wow, rather than guest appearances on R&B tracks or stuff like Will Smith and the Black Eyed Peas) seems striking. Actually is "Like You" the only proper big proper pop-rap single this year? Am I forgetting something? I guess you've got hits like "The Whistle Song" (just breaking over here in Australia now) but that seems more like club track X novelty factor (see also Daddy Yankee) rather than, y'know, out'n'out pop - if there is really a difference there, I'm not sure.

Going out to hip hop/r&b clubs, the musical vibe feels a lot more serious now, only not serious in an intellectual sense so much as in a physical sense - like the difference between early 90s vocal house and stuff on Relief or Cajual in the mid-90s, maybe. I can't think of a better analogy for it at the moment anyway.

This shift is also oddly reflected in the shift from dancehall to reggaeton as the carribean accompaniment of choice - even with the more catchy reggaeton the insistent throb feels a lot more deliberate than dancehall at its technicolour crossover peak circa. 2003.

Perhaps it's inevitable that you therefore get a bit of split between the more dilettante pop fans who enjoyed the openness of the early 00s stuff (and I'm thinking of "Hot In Herre" more than "Get Ur Freak On" here) and are a bit dumbfounded by the seemingly intentional narrowing of the music, its more inward gaze... and then the hip hop fans who are going with the music on this journey, who can't understand why hip hop becoming more itself could ever be a bad thing.

This is a perfect sentence.

really didnt ilm heads just stop caring cuz there was not as much rock for a while but now there is??

Eurgh, frightening thought. I didn't ask for the Killers or Interpol or any of that. (If you can stand it, listen to "The Funeral" by Band of Horses for two seconds. It's the new-in-thing among some circles and it's HORRIBLE.)

I dunno about ilm heads, i guess it depends on what/who yr/we're talking about. I don't get the sense that the people who were feeling early 00s rap & r&b etc. have returned to rock in a massive way. After all ROCK WAS BACK as early as 2001 with The Strokes so it's not like ILM hasn't had almost 5 years of rock-back-on-top to potentially distract it from hip hop.

my review of king on popmatters has generated little to no interest and/or traffic apparently, whatever, he's cool but he's JUST NOT ARCTIC MONKEES innit

*alternately, "he'll"

ell-oh-ell

My point was that most jazz douchebags would be loathe to proclaim a love for Steely Dan unless their love for jazz was firmly rooted in Bob James and Grover Washington, Jr. Both nice guys, really, but Steely Dan is to rock as Eric Gale is to Jazz. Pleasant. Cheery. Nonconfrontational.

Has nothing to do with whether I'm suspicious of BJM. WTF is that supposed to mean???

-- J Arthur Rank (deconstruct...), April 13th, 2006 7:14 PM.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have to stifle a yawn or a chuckle when in some thread about the supposed importance of some rawk gawd someone said that creativity in jazz ended when Miles left the scene in 1975. Steely Dan is pleasant. It's lightweight. In six months time, I'll think the same about BJM.

No. It was the Platonic ILM hip-hop thread where that contention took place. Sorry. Not rawk gawd, hip-hop hop head.

-- J Arthur Rank (deconstruct...), April 13th, 2006 7:17 PM.

xpost haha

- dude at house party, echo park, 2004

it's on this page: http://www.djayres.com/mixtapes/mixtapes.htm if you scroll down a bit. the dancehall mixes ("island influence" and "sun lovers") are pretty good, too. i really want to hear his "roll out" mix (bottom of the page).

oh yeah, and the "it's the motherfuckin remix" are like the most underwhelming thing i've ever heard. the nadir of totally pointless mashup culture. it's not completely worthless, though - the stephanie mills + "tom sawyer" blend is pretty cool and "rubberband man" over "use me" is just amazingly great.

1) sqad up feat mannie fresh - parking lot
2) young jeezy - trap star
3) bohagon feat crime mob & d4l - wuz up
4) rick ross - hustlin
5) bubba sparxxx - as the rim spins
6) tre 380 - hokey pokey
7) dmp feat nottz - oooh
8) ga girls feat diamond & princess - ga girl
9) boss hogg barbarians - you got mail
10) 334 mobb - chevy 4 door
10) bhi - bubble gum
11) young buck - i need a freak
12) tight - dick dump
13) j-live & r.a. the rugged man - give it up
14) riskay - dope girl
15) copywrite feat king dom - thats a wrap
16) juvenile feat skip & lil jon - why not
17) master p, t-bo & choppa - we soldiers (g&w remix)
18) trillville feat project pat - hee haw
19) attitude - first things first
20) d4l - trap'n
21) army of the pharoahs - all shall perish

-- The Good Dr. Bill (fadeout9...), April 12th, 2006.

Everything currently bad and wrong about rap can be blamed on D4L.

-- The Good Dr. Bill (fadeout9...), April 12th, 2006.

Everything currently bad and wrong about rap can be blamed on D4L.

-- The Good Dr. Bill (fadeout9...), April 12th, 2006.

More importantly: who will finally deal the mash-up trend its death blow & how much can I pay them

a/k/a

DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN

update 1: further research reveals that cassidy sounds pretty good when being blasted as a 30-sec ringtone out of a mobile phone in the stairwell
update 2: boss hogg barbarians are hilarious and really good
update 3: the massive projection involved on this thread is embarrassing, but my point from the get was that exactly the same songs can, if they come out at different moments, be "good" or "bad" depending on perceived health or excitement of the scene. (tho ignorance is not the same as bad health eep)

http://www.probertencyclopaedia.com/j/Jean%20Reno.jpg

i read this as dreamhelovessnot.jpg

dreamhelovesgunot.jpg

I mean, I have lotsa beef with the state of rap, ethan could be right that it's a function of aging or nabisco could be (=is) right that rap personae aren't really surprising or risk-taking or terribly interesting, but wayne is currently as good as either biggie or tupac

period, full-stop

get it get it

I know you know your shit better than I do but I seriously don't think he's all gimmicks at all! he does do plenty of those punning lines but that's just his style, I don't think that makes him "gimmick" - I mean, is being clever a fault?

I wouldn't say Wayne is a gimmick rapper but honestly I'm kind of hoping he'll switch it up a little more on his next release, its been two-three albums and how many mixtapes since he started this slow cadence thing?

The album is solid, great keyboard patches throughout. these great preset-casio drum rolls on "over here hustlin'." amazing song called "1st key" does this sampling-himself thing that's really dizzying. Melodramatic emotional stuff musically, in a great way - Anthony I think you'd like it. Worst sketches in recent memory though, I do not give a shit how many times people have seen "the godfather" or the sopranos or whatever the fuck else

that baby cd from last year was garbage tho

saw baby / wayne perform on bet rap awards thing this weekend, nothing creepy there at least.

but wayne is currently as good as either biggie or tupac

uhhhh "best rapper alive" /= best rapper ever

^ dude was gr8 in the color purple and sister act

yeah, it's on the FJ album. but yeah, it's funny how the radio leaves that verse alone, but in the video it's unintelligible, for 20 seconds all your hear Joe say is "that _________________________/ that _________________/ that _________________/ shoooooulder leeeean"

and anybody who knows me knows i got nothing but love for punchline-heavy braggadacious shit but to put dude on a level with pac is fucked up - hes kool moe dee with a drawl

dude you know how much I love Tupac, I don't make the comparison lightly! but then again I think you take 'pac's philosophical side a little heavier than I do

(really? i got way burnt out on it and like "Rubberband Banks" more anyway)

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/harry2.jpg

my shining f*cking moment.

by the way i totally did get that CD comp from eth.

(l-r: ethan p, mr. lif, strongo hulkington)

xml

More trouble could be brewing for Compton, CA rapper The Game, as his business partner in the Atlantic City-based Black Wall Street East recording studio was arrested and charged with money laundering on Friday (Nov 17.)

John "Johnny Hooks" Abbey, 38, was charged with laundering over $100,000 for the 9 Tre Gangsters, a dangerous faction of the Bloods street gang that is engaged in criminal activities throughout New Jersey.

Police raided a house in Little Egg Harbor New Jersey and a construction company Abbey was invested in. Police also searched the offices of the Black Wall Street East, but declined to reveal if The Game, was a suspect in the investigation.

"The investigation has led us to various financial tools used by the gang to finance their operations and to move proceeds of their crime," state Division of Criminal Justice Director, Gregory Paw told the Star Ledger. "It was a significant issue for us to learn how they have infiltrated legitimate businesses and used sophisticated techniques to finance their endeavors."

Abbey was charged with first-degree racketeering conspiracy and held in lieu of $750,000 bail. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of the charges.

The Black Wall Street East was launched in October of 2005 with Game, a former member a Los Angeles faction of the Bloods.

According to the Game born Jayceon Taylor, other Black Wall Street facilities were scheduled to eventually open in New York, Atlanta, Miami, Detroit, Chicago.

In related news, The Game must appear in court on Dec. 12, to answer charges of impersonating a police officer in New York.

Rap insider Chuck Creekmur, who runs the leading Web site Allhiphop.com, says he got a message from a friend recently “asking me to hook her up with some Red Hot Chili Peppers because she said she’s through with rap. A lot of people are sick of rap ... the negativity is just over the top now.”

whats with everyone's cover color schemes looking like trapper keepers

“[NBA Commissioner] David Stern seriously needs to consider moving the event out of the country for the next couple of years in hopes that young, hip-hop hoodlums would find another event to terrorize,” columnist Jason Whitlock, who is black, wrote on AOL.

http://www.damagecontrolradio.org/graphics/ELP/ElPBun3BLOG.jpg

el-p and bun-b collaborating on one heatrock

why does everybody on def jux look like theyre in fall-out boy now

I kind of assumed B was wearing baggy jeans and had pissed himself there for a bit.

El-Pete Wentz

haha nice bag of weed there

instead of actually listening to this im just gonna do a blend of pocket full of stones over fire in which you burn

http://home.uchicago.edu/~jniimi/keithjessmatos.JPG

"jon passantino" - i'm not sure what your point is, since none of those people have posted?

generic fat joe record >>>> your favorite album

this used to be true ;_;

stfu BIG HOOS aka the steendriver

― and what, Sunday, April 1, 2007 3:21 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

^^^ advice for life

PD187: BAD BOY ROLL CALL
PD187: G DEP!
PD187: BLACK ROB!
PD187: MARK CURRY!
PD187: LOOOOOOOOON!

RIP the days of effortless crunk-by-numbers party anthems

I was sure someone was going to be talking about the new Q-Tip in this revive