the state of popular rap in 2009

what is it? deej and i were trying to list off the crossover pure rap singles of this year

wasted
swag surfin
5 star bitch
ice cream paint job
i feel good
d.o.a
you're a jerk
every girl
baby by me
run this town
throw it in the bag
ricky bobby
turn my swag on
lol :-)

the hugest ones here are the most overtly r&b ("every girl", "throw it in the bag", "run this town"), and the joint hip-hop & r&b chart this year has been dominated by huge r&b songs. feels to me like if "still tippin" had dropped this june it wouldn't have the same impact as it did in 05/06. i think the biggest pure rap hit of the year is "wasted", and even that was flipped for a softbach r&b joint.

i guess at some level im curious to what degree popular rap is simply less exciting, omnivorous, & outward-facing than it was 5-10 yrs ago ... how its big names are happy just rapping for 'just-rap' audiences (thinking mostly about boosie, z-ro etc. right there ... although boosie at one point circa "independent" seemed like he could go either way)

& to what degree popular rap is exactly the same, but rock critic types in general are just disengaging with rap altogether.

i kind of think both things are happening at once -- there's definitely less popular rap on the charts now than a couple years ago. but at the same time, 'swag surfin' or 'wasted' dont really feel that distant from popular rap of half a decade ago imho

ranking pop rap:

wasted A++
swag surfin A++
5 star bitch B-, B+ for the remix
ice cream paint job B+
i feel good A-
d.o.a C-
you're a jerk A-
every girl B
baby by me B-
run this town D
throw it in the bag B+
ricky bobby C+
turn my swag on A
lol :-) B

wasted - probably the weakest of gucci mane's recent hits, but it's still good obv. I'm just pissed off that gucci mane would write a song in tribute to such a boring word as "wasted" when afaik all he ever does is sit around thinking about new ways to talk about how he's smokin weed
swag surfin - dope, everything a 2009 pop party rap song should be - love how this flows, and it's got a great melody and rhythm
5 star bitch - I approve
ice cream paint job - I approve
i feel good - I think I'd rather listen to this than most ne-yo songs but it's too easy listening to be in the list list imo
d.o.a - T-Pain is better obv
you're a jerk - fun and kinda different for modern pop radio, I like it
every girl - the beat carries this one for me
baby by me - I think this song may blow my mind too much for me to have an opinion on it
run this town - all 3 artists on this are way past their prime, and only jay-z's prime was really worth a shit. kanye must have written this chorus, right? "who's gonna run this town tonight" is such a boring-ass way
throw it in the bag - decent
ricky bobby - never heard this before. listening on youtube it's pretty nondescript but I'd rather listen to it than "run this town"
turn my swag on - I love this because it's just soulja boy braggin about shit in the most empty way possible. his remix verse is good but I'm glad he decided to push the version where he's just going "yeahhhhhh yeahhhhhhhhh" over and over again
lol :-) - guhhh

Kind of tentative about this as an idea, but maybe the lack of a rap mainstream is causing rap to fragment into regional scenes. Obviously that type of thing is always going on, bubbling under the mainstream, but it seems a bit more pronounced this year, with your ATL fruity swag and LA jerks and Dallas bump-bump bass joints.

Also, aren't you guys kind of ignoring the existence of Drake? (Maybe intentionally?) Even if you wanna dismiss "Best I Ever Had" and "Successful" as R&Bified (which seems silly when you include "Throw It in the Bag"), but I would assume that at least "Forever" (which I've successfully managed not to hear) would count, no?

Who is "Drake"?

your mom

otm that that regional thing is always there, it's just that until a little bit ago there were always one or two overriding scenes that defined the rap of the moment (even if they were at war with each other). that's what's missing, seems to me. there's no center to the action, it feels v. diffuse. you can have a hit come out of anywhere, but you don't have that we-taking-over sense from anywhere.

yeah, I think that's otm

crut "i feel good" is by Chalie Boy check it out its a banger

are we missing some rick ross?

here are some songs that i suspect are more popular than ppl realize or than is reflected by the charts:

boi i got so many problems by young problemz, mike jones & gucci mane
6 tre g - fresh
gucci & esther dean - i think i luv her
juney boomdata - pussy poppin

is that cold flamez 'miss me kiss me' song anything resembling a hit?

has nicki minaj had an actual hit yet?

i know shes def popular

i forgot drake on that list duh

"forever" is notable i guess even though it's a song for a commercial

the Chalie Boy joint is "I Look Good"

xp didn't even realize that (a la the similarly titled Chris Brown song?)

like to me, it's baffling that "wasted" isn't as big, as say, "back that azz up"

lol yes i never realized that parallel

deej: it seems the number two jerk track around here is Audio Push's "Teach me How to Jerk", sounds like the Cold Flamez track is v popular in LA tho

"Back That Azz Up" is a better and more immediate (and more dancable and more appealing to women) song than "Wasted"

I mean, I like "Wasted" but it didn't make me go "wow what the fuck is that?" the first time I heard it like "Back That Azz Up" did

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKWYddxzdCc

this song is top ten on chicago radio, possibly for obvious reasons -- chicago triptych of traxster-kells-twista

like to me, it's baffling that "wasted" isn't as big, as say, "back that azz up"

― a goon boy (J0rdan S.), Thursday, November 5, 2009 2:04 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

isnt it? i mean, its not like critics were into juvenile back then either

Chart (1999) Peak
Position
U.S. Billboard Hot 100 19
U.S. Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles & Tracks 5
U.S. Billboard Hot Rap Singles 9

Chart (2009) Peak
Position
U.S. Billboard Hot 100[3] 37
U.S. Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs[4] 3
U.S. Billboard Rap Songs[5] 4

its a bigger rap song, but that gets it lower in the hot 100

Suggest Ban Permalink

"Back That Azz Up" is a better and more immediate (and more dancable and more appealing to women) song than "Wasted"

― swagless price (The Reverend), Thursday, November 5, 2009 2:07 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

im not sure this is all totally correct

at least, 'more immediate'??

Plies has surely had a top 40 hit this year right?

Does anyone wonder if rap could possibly be less likely to download legally & are therefore underestimated by charts

steady mobbin is charting right

ugh i guess that jay sean song counts right

so many people— esp young people— rallying around drake is super weird to me. the guy makes tons of sense as a pop artist but as an MC i don't get the appeal at all. my problem with him— and i'm about to get totally nozian here— is that there seems to have been no struggle in his life that kind of changed his perspective, and that in general that he's too nice. like, if you look at kanye, he's pretty suburban middle class, and the biggest struggle as a kid growing up, like drake, was his parents getting divorced. but kanye is wired to always feel slighted. when he was in college, the teachers told him he wouldn't be shit. even when he was producing huge hits for jay-z, it's that they weren't letting him rap. when they finally let him rap, no one thought that he would do shit. then he tried to artistically ascend beyond what his/our notion of rap music is. i see where is drive is, i understand why he wants to be better & how that fuels his music. it makes him a pretty horrible person it seems like, but it makes him a pretty great and compelling artist (imo 808s is the greatest distillation of this but ymmv). with drake, i don't understand his motivation for rapping. it seems like he wants to be rich & famous, and his music is totally calculated for that. kanye wanted to be a huge pop star too, right from the jump, but he was already taking more risks than drake will in his whole career & he had already formed this identity of the shit on 'college dropout'. with drake, it's like his whole identity is of this golden child who was anointed by lil wayne to be the next great rap & pop artist.

now i would also argue that wayne has marginal struggle in his life as well. he had a fucked up parental situation but there are low income families with way worse, in fact he was also plucked into rap at a much younger age than drake even, and wayne even tries to legitimize himself by bringing up getting shot even tho the first time he shot himself & the second time he got shot thru a bus by some groupies. but right now drake doesn't have near the personality that wayne had & he's not nearly as compelling as a rapper. his rapping is way more formulaic & less inventive, less playful - it's more calculated but still says less about the artist & his listeners than wayne did when he would drop a line like "and to the kids, drugs kill, i'm acknowledging that/ but when i'm on the drugs i don't have a problem with that" in the middle of one of his drowning in lucidity freestyles.

and thus drake's appeal as a rap artist really evades me. i think his listeners have been worn down by the soulja boys & D4L's of the world and have been tricked in to believing that drake is saying more than he actually is. the guy has a pretty shallow eye for the world from what i can tell & his moralizing comes off as really elementary, even on a song whose nakedness i admire like "successful". in fact, that song kinda encapsulates everything about drake. it's cold & calculated - hi trey songz hook even tho he was probably out of drake's price range when it was recorded, hi post 808s beat, hi 'deep' lyrics that scrape at the surface of intellectualism but never really break ground. and hi chorus that spells out exactly what we need to know about drake: "i want the money, money and the cars, cars and the clothes, and the hoes i suppose/ i just wanna be, i just wanna be successful" - left at that

that red cafe is like new york regional rap popular right?

"hottest in the hood"

we're ignoring the black eyed peas but i think ill keep doing that

empire state of mind is charting

feels more like an alicia keys song tho

wtf how are michael franti & spearhead charting

Pitbull - Hotel Room Service

Ester Dean - Drop It Low (this might be R&B only?)

Snoop Dogg - Gangsta Luv

Birdman - Money to Blow

I'm looking at various west coast radio playlists and the only one I've come across so far that's picked up on "Wasted" is in Anchorage.

can anyone explain to me how in the past ten years we have gone from anyone with a half decent flow going gold to only being able to name a handful of songs that make it big on the radio with r&b verses? it can't just be recession+downloading right? Did America burn itself out by being every other rap record at the turn of the century, noticing some of them were made by Benzino and Ja Rule making them wish a whole industry pain for duping them into buying such wank records?

I mean, how many copies did something like M.O.P's Warriorz sell? I bet it was as much as say Cudi or Drake are doing now, which is incredibly fucked up.

btw i have no actual idea of numbers sold so if those aren't the right albums, i'm sure you could easily replace them names with others and still come up with the same point.

"i know you want me" is missing, right?

otm that that regional thing is always there, it's just that until a little bit ago there were always one or two overriding scenes that defined the rap of the moment (even if they were at war with each other). that's what's missing, seems to me. there's no center to the action, it feels v. diffuse. you can have a hit come out of anywhere, but you don't have that we-taking-over sense from anywhere.

seems that rap is kind of mirroring the fragmentation of pop music generally here...

i guess at some level im curious to what degree popular rap is simply less exciting, omnivorous, & outward-facing than it was 5-10 yrs ago ... how its big names are happy just rapping for 'just-rap' audiences

is it to do with

- the music they make? ie no matter how much they try, it's just not commercial enough, or doesn't fit in w/2009 trends? seems that the charts and popular audiences are more amenable to the drakes and wales of this world right now, so is making the decision to rap for "just-rap" audiences pre-empting crossover failure?
- their own motivations? how much are all these regional scene artists invested in popular mainstream success compared to say seven years ago, anyway? jordan basically characterised drake as someone with no purpose other than to be famous and successful, but that might be the key - if that's his priority. i'm not a fan but chart artists have blown up on much less. and with their momentum, you have to think that when gucci mane and nicki minaj get round to releasing albums, they'll join the list...

i agree that the illegal d/l issue must be a significant one for rap, but surely not large enough to entirely explain what jordan and deej describe. which rappers or singles do you guys think should be on jordan's crossover list but aren't?

didn't busta have a few big singles this year? "conglomerate" and "hustler's anthem"...

i think gucci & nicki minaj are def both outward-facing, mainstream-oriented wanna be pop stars who also want to be rappers. without giving up one for the other. but that feels much more like the exception now.

boosie, 2 yrs ago felt the same, & like with his bunch of singles (zoom, independent, wipe me down) he was on his way ... then something happened, cant tell what, & suddenly it feels like hes not gonna be pushing any further out, like hes stuck being a 'regional' rapper -- in the broadest possible sense, in that hes hugely popular thruout the south & midwest, just not with pop audiences in any meaningful way

http://www.xxlmag.com/online/?p=61464

lmao @ this headline btw ... tech 9 still underrated

xpost

you're super weird to me.

I was surprised "Break Up" wasn't in the original list

B lieve it or not but its uh possbility dat dude iz my brother my dad name iz michael wayne n he had relations wit mz cita carter real shit

Sorry for irrelevance, but to finally see who some of these rappers are after listening to the anti back-announcing hip hop radio stations is in ways liberating. The mystery is solved and I have certainly been enlightened.

this is a guess based on nothing much -- a hunch! -- but i think there's room out there for some new hardass tuff stuff. i don't pay enough attention to know what or from where, but unless there's been some precipitous drop in adolescent male testosterone, there's a butch part of the marketplace that is a little underserved. (sort of feel this way about the rock side of things too.)

unless there's been some precipitous drop in adolescent male testosterone,

i blame skinny jeans

i was gonna say maybe they're all just juggalos now. but skinny jeans is a better theory.

wow this thread

btw on first look how has "always strapped" not come up, that song's pretty huge

I don't know what counts as "pure rap" as opposed to that tarnished by its association with R&B, so I'm just going to list some rap songs that charted in the Billboard top 10 this year that haven't yet been mentioned:

Flo Rida, "Right Round"
Flo Rida, "Sugar"
T.I. ft. Justin Timberlake, "Dead and Gone"
Eminem, Dr. Dre, and 50 Cent, "Crack a Bottle"
Eminem, "We Made You"
Soulja Boy Tell 'Em ft. Sammie, "Kiss Me Thru the Phone"
Pitbull, "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)"

so many people— esp young people— rallying around drake is super weird to me. the guy makes tons of sense as a pop artist but as an MC i don't get the appeal at all. my problem with him— and i'm about to get totally nozian here— is that there seems to have been no struggle in his life that kind of changed his perspective, and that in general that he's too nice. like, if you look at kanye, he's pretty suburban middle class, and the biggest struggle as a kid growing up, like drake, was his parents getting divorced. but kanye is wired to always feel slighted. when he was in college, the teachers told him he wouldn't be shit. even when he was producing huge hits for jay-z, it's that they weren't letting him rap. when they finally let him rap, no one thought that he would do shit. then he tried to artistically ascend beyond what his/our notion of rap music is. i see where is drive is, i understand why he wants to be better & how that fuels his music. it makes him a pretty horrible person it seems like, but it makes him a pretty great and compelling artist (imo 808s is the greatest distillation of this but ymmv). with drake, i don't understand his motivation for rapping. it seems like he wants to be rich & famous, and his music is totally calculated for that. kanye wanted to be a huge pop star too, right from the jump, but he was already taking more risks than drake will in his whole career & he had already formed this identity of the shit on 'college dropout'. with drake, it's like his whole identity is of this golden child who was anointed by lil wayne to be the next great rap & pop artist.

now i would also argue that wayne has marginal struggle in his life as well. he had a fucked up parental situation but there are low income families with way worse, in fact he was also plucked into rap at a much younger age than drake even, and wayne even tries to legitimize himself by bringing up getting shot even tho the first time he shot himself & the second time he got shot thru a bus by some groupies. but right now drake doesn't have near the personality that wayne had & he's not nearly as compelling as a rapper. his rapping is way more formulaic & less inventive, less playful - it's more calculated but still says less about the artist & his listeners than wayne did when he would drop a line like "and to the kids, drugs kill, i'm acknowledging that/ but when i'm on the drugs i don't have a problem with that" in the middle of one of his drowning in lucidity freestyles.

and thus drake's appeal as a rap artist really evades me. i think his listeners have been worn down by the soulja boys & D4L's of the world and have been tricked in to believing that drake is saying more than he actually is. the guy has a pretty shallow eye for the world from what i can tell & his moralizing comes off as really elementary, even on a song whose nakedness i admire like "successful". in fact, that song kinda encapsulates everything about drake. it's cold & calculated - hi trey songz hook even tho he was probably out of drake's price range when it was recorded, hi post 808s beat, hi 'deep' lyrics that scrape at the surface of intellectualism but never really break ground. and hi chorus that spells out exactly what we need to know about drake: "i want the money, money and the cars, cars and the clothes, and the hoes i suppose/ i just wanna be, i just wanna be successful" - left at that

― a goon boy (J0rdan S.), Thursday, November 5, 2009 3:26 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this post is like 50% truth bombs and 50% complete bullshit. saying the main problem with Drake is that he's had "no struggle in his life" is just a thinly veiled version of the same old street cred arguments. other than the occasional "never met a good cop" tough talk ringing false, that really doesn't have anything to do with why his music sucks -- the problem is quite simply that he's a vacant mimic with no style of his own. if Lil Wayne didn't exist what would he rap like? if Trey Songz didn't exist what would he sing like? we'll never know because he's completely built his sound around aping those 2 guys as closely as possible.

i mean, "i don't understand his motivation for rapping"??? i mean there are millions of wannabe rappers, good and bad, currently working their asses off to be big hip hop stars, and "getting out of the hood" is more a line than their actual motivation. people just wanna be famous, lots of them.

actually the more i think about it, if Drake wasn't biting who he was biting, i'm pretty sure he'd sound exactly like Yung Berg

- their own motivations? how much are all these regional scene artists invested in popular mainstream success compared to say seven years ago, anyway? jordan basically characterised drake as someone with no purpose other than to be famous and successful, but that might be the key - if that's his priority. i'm not a fan but chart artists have blown up on much less. and with their momentum, you have to think that when gucci mane and nicki minaj get round to releasing albums, they'll join the list...

― lex pretend, Thursday, 5 November 2009 09:31 (4 hours ago) Bookmark

But it wasn't that long ago that Mikes Jones and co. were ridiculously popular and they weren't exactly invested in whats popular or how to create mainstream success. 'Still Tippin' and 'Stay Fly' and 'Hustlin' and a bunch of popular records are really quite weird and not 'mainstream' and yet sold very well and made stars of the artists. What is stopping say the Alabama types doing the same?

can i just say i kinda root for drake because he was jimmy on fucking degrassi, that shit is adorable

rapping wise tho yeah he's basically a wayne clone to the point where i have to be like '...ok this isnt just wayne autotuned is it?' on some jams

I think we need a revival of socially conscious, educated rap. Black guys and ladies can be smart and deep, too, you know.

i don't know how nationwide this is, but locally we had a couple of rap/r&b stations, the one that leaned more heavily on "just rap" folded and became right-wing talk radio 24/7 and the clear channel r&b heavy station is like #1 or 2 station in town. if this is happening elsewhere, might this explain why harder tracks don't have the same audience they did even 5 yrs ago?

i dunno, popular rap was pretty soft in the early and mid 00's too -- for a while it was all Murder Inc R&B hooks, then it was pillowy soul samples on everything -- every era or rap has its pop shit and the 'real' rap that positions itself as a counterpoint to it

if im reading j0rdan right, its not so much that more pop-friendly hasnt always been there if not more dominant in the past, but i think he's saying at some point the harder songs had a regular place in the charts thats just not happening as much

presently, anyway

How can we work on getting more of this in 2009/10?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyqp2f6VPos

yeah i think that's true to an extent. the way i look at it, industry desperation is kind of the invisible hand guiding all of this -- it used to be, a rapper would have a 'proper rap song' as a lead single to launch their album, and then after it's out maybe do an R&B joint to broaden the audience and sell a few records. now, people are just throwing anything at the wall that will stick, and will sometimes release one song with an R&B hook after another over and over trying so hard to get a radio hit, and just leaving the 'proper rap song' as a blog leak or a straight-to-youtube video.

popular rap is definitely still sounding great, i think it's just that hip hop is easier for most people to digest when it's a little diluted, whether with rn'b or electro or whatever. tbh i don't think pure rap is not as popular a genre as you guys're making it out to be, i think this year is just short on chart-ready rap singles. in a year when black eyed peas have spent basically half the year on top of the charts probably people just aren't looking for pure rap. but they rarely ever are, popular rap is at its most successful when it's most melodic and it tones down its thuggishness to open up to a larger audience. of all the rappier songs in the first post, "swag surfin" is the most chart-ready i think, and it's a shame it did poorly but i consider it more a great party rap song than would-be pop hit. where something like "stay fly" is fun for everyone to dance and "AA-AA-AA-AA-AA-A-A-A-OHHHWWW" along to.

the problem is quite simply that he's a vacant mimic with no style of his own

this is otm re drake and also just points to a lack of breakout personalities in the last few years. you've got your maybe-babies like pill and your role players like gucci mane, but so far no "next 50," "next wayne," "next t.i.," "next kanye," or whoever. i don't know if it points to an actual lack of blowup talent (which seems unlikely) or shifts in the way careers and buzz are built, or demographic changes in the marketplace or what.

and the b.e.p.'s are definitely the pop-hiphop elephant in the room. except it's almost an invisible elephant. you bump into it a lot, but mostly don't really notice. they're such a weird phenomenon, like they're somehow the biggest band in america but simultaneously seem sort of barely there at all.

yeah totally, it's depressing how every big star has a mini-me now...Asher Roth is Em and B.o.B. is Andre, obviously, but then you've got a thousand wannabe Kanyes and Waynes. even stuff that's supposedly really fresh and regional, the Cold Flamez guy just sounds like another Wayne clone to me, can't stand that fucking song. xpost

i think for a long time rap career arcs were always very short and distinct -- every big star had their breakthrough album, one big album at the top, then the flop that either took them out of the game or kinda put them back on the same level as everyone else. Jay's original run was exceptional for just how long he was able to stay at the top, to the point that he's just grandfathered in where every album is a big deal, like U2 or something. and that's also cleared the path for guys like T.I. and Kanye to kinda do the same thing, and just coast along and be fixtures year after year even if sometimes they make records that maybe deserve to flop and take them down a notch. so it definitely seems harder for smaller stars to really get up to that next level without the existing A-listers getting taken down a peg.

it is kind of amazing that we're ending the decade with a jay album in the top 10. (it'd be more amazing if it was a good album, but still.)

i think for a long time rap career arcs were always very short and distinct

do you think this was kind of exceptional for rap at least in its nascent commercial stages? "grandfathered in where every album is a big deal" seems kind of the norm for big rock and pop acts and breaking into the charts just as difficult for new acts etc. like maybe rap has truly arrived when their biggest acts will push units based on star status/past glory alone?

this post is like 50% truth bombs and 50% complete bullshit. saying the main problem with Drake is that he's had "no struggle in his life" is just a thinly veiled version of the same old street cred arguments. other than the occasional "never met a good cop" tough talk ringing false, that really doesn't have anything to do with why his music sucks -- the problem is quite simply that he's a vacant mimic with no style of his own. if Lil Wayne didn't exist what would he rap like? if Trey Songz didn't exist what would he sing like? we'll never know because he's completely built his sound around aping those 2 guys as closely as possible.

― solangedarobot (some dude), Thursday, November 5, 2009 8:28 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yeah i mean, i'm trying to subvert the street cred argument by saying that the two artists he most obv mimics have minimal 'street cred' too but still turned out to be great artists (for different reasons of course). i do just think that being in a kid's tv show isn't the best path into becoming a a great rapper, it's hard to relate to someone like that, rarely do rappers start out rapping about how they're already too famous.

on another note, the sad thing is that even tho drake has so obviously aped wayne, wayne has done the same back to drake, spitting some ghosted shit at awards shows & what not. you can def see horrible formulaic "x like y" rapping taking wayne down & drake has always leaned more heavily on that style of rapping than wayne has, but now wayne's rap is totally plagued by it. some of the lines on 'no ceilings' are so sub-drake/joe budden that it's sad. "i make the pussy micro soft like windows vista", "we the motherfuckers like MILF" etc - it's terrible

like, someone tweeted (wayne? someone in wayne's camp? idk) some supposedly super-hot drake line that was like "i'm the one, twice over/ the new eleven" and it's like these dudes just sit around all day looking at shit and trying to figure out the most baseline pun that can be drawn out of it and then they put it in a rap song. like, uh... "i'm sweet with the white/ like this bowl of cereal" (i made that one up)

but ok let's look at billboard's current hot rap songs chart (where, unlike the R&B chart, every song at least has a rapper as the primary artist, whether it's a 'pure rap' song or not):

1. forever - rap posse cut but one of the rappers sings on the hook
2. empire state of mind - R&B singer on the hook
3. run this town - R&B singer on the hook
4. wasted - straight rap song (lol the billboard entry now says "featuring plies OR oj da juiceman")
5. throw it in the bag - R&B singer on the hook
6. successful - R&B singer on the hook
7. baby by me - R&B singer on the hook
8. money to blow - rap posse cut but one of the rappers sings on the hook
9. best i ever had - rapper sings on the hook
10. gangsta luv - R&B singer on the hook
11. everything everyday everywhere - R&B singer on the hook
12. be on you - R&B singer on the hook
13. hotel room service - straight rap song
14. ice cream paint job - straight rap song
15. i'm going in - straight rap song

are people consuming tons of softbatch r&b rap or is that all that's really being pushed & promoted?

hotel room service - straight rap song

^^ pitbull sorta sings a hook here don't he?

i think for a long time rap career arcs were always very short and distinct

do you think this was kind of exceptional for rap at least in its nascent commercial stages? "grandfathered in where every album is a big deal" seems kind of the norm for big rock and pop acts and breaking into the charts just as difficult for new acts etc. like maybe rap has truly arrived when their biggest acts will push units based on star status/past glory alone?

― sexual alien v. sexual predator (m bison), Thursday, November 5, 2009 10:40 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah that's true, of course, but i think it's somehow different for rap, maybe because sales/media presence are priveleged so much more and status is so obsessed over -- nobody really sits around with the assumption that because Coldplay or U2 is the biggest selling rock album of the year they're the most important act that every conversation begins with them, but there's this preoccupation with Jay and Kanye and Wayne etc. to the point that it's like fuck can't we focus on anybody else?

i guess the pitbull hook is kinda singsong but he's also shouting for half the chorus and sure as hell ain't crooning drake-style or autotuning it up, so it's all relative

pitbull is thru the looking glass

makes songs. don't sing too much. mostly rap.

it's funny to remember how when 50 first came out it was a big deal that he did all his own hooks and they were kind of melodic -- quickly became apparent that he had like 3 choruses he recycled over and over, but for a time he kept crowing about being a "songwriter" and how he didn't need to sample an old '70s R&B song or have Pharrell write a hook to make a big crossover hit that works on R&B radio. i mean think about how few choruses Jay actually performed on his big singles.

now i would also argue that wayne has marginal struggle in his life as well. he had a fucked up parental situation but there are low income families with way worse, in fact he was also plucked into rap at a much younger age than drake even, and wayne even tries to legitimize himself by bringing up getting shot even tho the first time he shot himself & the second time he got shot thru a bus by some groupies.

wayne's struggle is (was) the struggle to be the best rapper in the world. the guy seriously wanted to the best at what he did, and not in the sense that every rapper wants to the best but to the point that he seems to have basically locked himself in the studio for a couple years.

the guy has a pretty shallow eye for the world from what i can tell & his moralizing comes off as really elementary, even on a song whose nakedness i admire like "successful". in fact, that song kinda encapsulates everything about drake. it's cold & calculated - hi trey songz hook even tho he was probably out of drake's price range when it was recorded, hi post 808s beat, hi 'deep' lyrics that scrape at the surface of intellectualism but never really break ground.

to some degree i think this is the appeal. the generation that buys drake has so grown up with or even beyond the cliche that rap hates women, rap promotes violence etc.. that it has almost come to believe it. drake's surface intellectualism allows these types to congratulate themselves without ruining their fun

drake's surface intellectualism allows these types to congratulate themselves without ruining their fun

this is otm i think

in a way i think drake's success might be born from a kind of a subconscious rap-societal effort to fill the absent centre that people talk about upthread - synthesizing a reassuring, non-specific upper-class with vague, and vaguely legitmizing, star power, clean-cut handsomeness and so on - almost all to cartoonish extent, as this generation prefers of course. nor is he a million years older than his fans and doesnt grandaddishly dress them down every so often. (the flattering surface intellectualism point is also true.)

ion the other hand weezy really made me laugh with "and we gon be alright if we put drake on every hook" on 'money to blow' (not sure he was meaning to though). i almost feel (or hope) drake's very slyly being tolerated as an moneymaking injoke and the game is *this* close to turning around and flipping on him, perhaps once a young 50-type redeemer comes along.

yeah i liked how noz termed drake's style his "honest misogynist game" -- there all these disingenuous layers of 'depth' with him, where he'll say some ignorant rapper shit and then turn around all puppy-dog-eyed like "oh what have i become, i'm so disrespectful of women, i'm sorry, please accept me with all my flaws," in a way it's more obnoxious than if he was just talking about hoes and bitches unrepentedly - xpost

^ 4real

yeah the "drake on every hook" line is definitely very funny and knowing -- i kinda feel like a lot of people are toeing the line ont he drake thing just because it helps them or people in their line of work to have a seemingly surefire superstar coming down the pike. not to talk shit on other writers, but it seems very telling that the only critics who really seem on board with the whole drake thing are in NYC and/or are pretty entrenched in the industry and deal with the major labels a lot.

can someone tell me what drake song to listen to in order to hear his fake deepness

"successful"?

i almost feel (or hope) drake's very slyly being tolerated as an moneymaking injoke

it's true and his success is almost less obnoxious b/c of it (he remains obnoxious himself) - surely he can't sustain his career on what he's shown so far...

i don't think i've ever knowingly heard a drake song and i'm cool with that tbh.

yeah "successful" is the archetypical fake deep drake song

[Drake]
Drizzy,
Ah yeah Trey I fuckin feel you,
They be starin at the money like its unfamiliar,
I get it,
I live it,
To me theres nothings realer,
Just enough to solve your problems,
Too much will kill ya,
And when I leave,
I always come right back here,
The young spit'a that everybody in rap fear,
A lot of yall are still soundin like last year,
The game needs change and im the mofucking cashier,
Nickels for my thoughts,
Dimes in my bed,
Quarters of the kush
Shape the lines in my head,
Take my verses too serious ya hate me,
Cause im the one to paint a vivid picture no HD,
Yeah,
I want it all,
That's why I strive for it,
Dis me and you'll never hear a reply for it,
Any awards show or party I get fly for it,
I know that it's comin' I just hope that I'm alive for it.

[Drake]
Yeah,
I want things to go my way,
But as of late a lot of shit been goin sideways,
And my mother tried to runaway from home,
But I left somethin in the car and so I caught her in the driveway,
And she cried to me so I cried too,
And my stomach was soakin wet,
She only 5'2,
And 48 hours was all before I showed up,
And brought a thousand dollars worth of drinks and got pulled up,
Damn. my reality just set in,
And even when the Phantom's leased them hoes wanna get in,
I do a lot of things hopin I neva have to fit in,
So tryin to keep up with my progress is like a dead end,
My girl love me but fuck it my heart beat slow,
And right now the tour bus is lookin like a freak show,
And life change for us every single week
So its good but I know this aint the peak though,
Cause I want...

the 'best i ever had' video blowing up in his face when he thought his depth could assimilate kanye's humour value was highly amusing

got be honest tho i like the "sweat pants hair tied chillin with no make-up on / that's when you the prettiest / i hope that you don't take it wrong" in best i ever had

wife & i lol'd when we first heard that line

i think the only reason kanye wanted to direct the video is because he had a pavlovian response to "every single show she out there reppin like a mascot"

i still have no idea if the "and i say the same thing every single time" part of Best means he says it to the same girl every time or he just has the same line for all these different girls, like if it's actually a cheating song or just a love song -- i'm guessing that's the kind of ambiguity that benefits him and the song though

read that as

got be honest tho i like the "sweat pants hair tied children with no make-up on / that's when you the prettiest / i hope that you don't take it wrong" in best i ever had

― mark cl, Thursday, 5 November 2009 16:22 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

so drake is sort of the definition of a "douchebag" as far as i can tell?

this song is terrible btw--songs that are half singing shouldn't be so formless and boring.

^^successful, i mean

i still kinda like that song, mainly for the beat and the vibe, first couple times it came on the radio it definitely stood out and was a little arresting -- the little "ahhh-ahhh-ahhhhh" synth riff before any vocals start is by far the best part of the song though

i like it in the context of the radio because it's def sonically and tonally different

Wow, this thread is the insanity. How can you sit here and say that to be a "proper" hip hop artist you have to be from the ghetto, dodge bullets, and basically be the Black, gangsta cliche that has plagued rap for all these years? You can't have credibility in rap if you come from the burbs and a stable household is a lame ass arguement, especially coming from those who've never even seen a ghetto. As far as not being able to relate to someone who started out as an actor on a kid's show, this generation has a lot in common with Drake being that this is a generation that was told they could be/do anything, and a lot of kids are very success oriented...that's why so many of them are running commercial rap right now. And how many rappers have tried to break into acting at this point? Drake's "style" is very savvy in that he's mimicking urban radio right now. Listening to his mixtapes, he sounds like someone else from track to track....which isn't exactly a bad thing. I think a lot of the hate comes from the fact that he's "pretty". All of this commentary is reminding me of criticism of LL Cool J.

people kinda make fun of LL for doing all the lip-licking girl songs, but at the end of the day he gets his respect both as an actual GOAT rapper with real rap songs and because he basically created the girl song market. Drake hasn't earned that kind of respect.

Wow, this thread is the insanity. How can you sit here and say that to be a "proper" hip hop artist you have to be from the ghetto, dodge bullets, and basically be the Black, gangsta cliche that has plagued rap for all these years? You can't have credibility in rap if you come from the burbs and a stable household is a lame ass arguement, especially coming from those who've never even seen a ghetto.

i don't think anyone here is making this argument

yeah i think he is just trolling.

haha that post is such a compelling mix of *smh*, rong, and incoherence

(what's smh?)

shakin my head

lol

it's true tho: i hate drake cos he's pretty

dude's "pretty" i guess but he's also kind of weird-looking

drake is not remotely physically attractive

basically once i found out that drake was on degrassi it explained everything

so many people— esp young people— rallying around drake is super weird to me. the guy makes tons of sense as a pop artist but as an MC i don't get the appeal at all. my problem with him— and i'm about to get totally nozian here— is that there seems to have been no struggle in his life that kind of changed his perspective, and that in general that he's too nice. like, if you look at kanye, he's pretty suburban middle class, and the biggest struggle as a kid growing up, like drake, was his parents getting divorced. but kanye is wired to always feel slighted. when he was in college, the teachers told him he wouldn't be shit. even when he was producing huge hits for jay-z, it's that they weren't letting him rap. when they finally let him rap, no one thought that he would do shit. then he tried to artistically ascend beyond what his/our notion of rap music is. i see where is drive is, i understand why he wants to be better & how that fuels his music. it makes him a pretty horrible person it seems like, but it makes him a pretty great and compelling artist (imo 808s is the greatest distillation of this but ymmv). with drake, i don't understand his motivation for rapping. it seems like he wants to be rich & famous, and his music is totally calculated for that. kanye wanted to be a huge pop star too, right from the jump, but he was already taking more risks than drake will in his whole career & he had already formed this identity of the shit on 'college dropout'. with drake, it's like his whole identity is of this golden child who was anointed by lil wayne to be the next great rap & pop artist.

seems a weird comparison, kanye west's rapping is so unbelievably bad and he just seems like the 00s puff daddy most of the time. you say drake is boring but his actual lyrics and what he raps about show far more depth than anything kanye's ever done imo.

this is when the penny dropped for me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOgc5a8ty1I

i basically agree w/Jordan..

like drake has no fire in his belly...no persona that really sticks with me.

it's not like his lyrics have any more "depth" than...well any rapper...

basically i think his whole low-affect, non-aggressive persona makes people think he must be "intelligent" because that's always been a signifier of "intelligent" rap for ppl that say, hold up Tribe as some ideal of "conscious" rap even though they often rapped about nothing too (but Tribe was amazing as musicians and rappers and Drake is a nothing)

he sounds like he's gonna fuckin' fall asleep in the booth

xp to ronan

i'm not sure if what drake raps about shows more depth than any other rapper - and well lyrically, if drake ever drops anything half as good as basically anything on 'college dropout' i'll be pretty fuckin surprised

^^tbomb

passive aggressive is a bad look for a rapper IMO

too many of these guys post-kanye are all like that.

i'm not sure if what drake raps about shows more depth than any other rapper - and well lyrically, if drake ever drops anything half as good as basically anything on 'college dropout' i'll be pretty fuckin surprised

the guy in the little video clip in "Through the Wire" whose rapping "Without a arm I spit, without a arm I spit....without a arm I spit" is 100000x better than drake.

"THAT'S HOW LONG I BEEN ON YA, THAT'S HOW LONG I BEEN ON YA"...repeat x 10.

I find Kanye ultra boring, loads of melodies carrying boring lyrics and no decent flow to the rapping for the same reason.

I don't think people see Drake as mega intelligent but I don't know, I haven't asked them all, is he really non-aggressive?

actually like "brand new" best of any of the drake stuff i've heard fwiw.

I dunno, I just can't believe anyone likes Kanye West.

uhh it sounds on a lot of these drake songs like he's pretty much biting either wayne or kanye at all times, so....

"DON'T ACT LIKE I NEVER TOLD YA"

yes, those are words

that's not one of kanye's best songs, and i think most would agree that he was already on the decline at that time....college dropout is a classic IMO

i actually don't mind drake's singing voice and think 'best i ever had' is a nice song. but yeah, his rapping is average or below. that's not a problem in itself but he is getting massive hype and guest spots on jay albums etc. to get to his position most rappers have to have put it work on the mixtape circuit for a few years etc. for me anyway, this is what annoys me about the guy.

parallels with kanye are interesting and i've thought before that drake reminds me of kanye when he started rapping. the difference is when Kanye started dropping high-profile guest verses he was already a huge producer and had earned his respect - you always got the feeling no-one wanted to let kanye do a verse on their songs but they felt they kinda owed it to the guy. what does anyone owe to drake?

(what's smh?)

― Samuel (a hoy hoy), Thursday, November 5, 2009 10:53 AM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

shakin my head

― k3vin k., Thursday, November 5, 2009 10:54 AM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I've been reading that as Sydney Morning Herald, so thanks for clearing that up.

the lykke li thing does sound a bit like kanye I accept..don't like it. the music is fairly un-kanye, i've never heard a kanye track that just had a nice bassy repetitive beat. for all the talk of rapping styles I think it's worth noting that the music both are rapping over is completely different. I never liked College Dropout, just too songy...I know Drake has songs too but I like the rnb feel rather than the hyperactivity of Kanye's stuff.

Kanye is definitely a perennial amateur as a rapper and I can't really fault anyone who'd never wanna listen to him rap, even if he occasionally drops a really good verse and everything he's constantly trying to do kinda clicks together right. but I mean...Drake does the same flow on every song, same ad libs, same pause and "...yeah" before starting a line, he's a polished vocalist but there's no technique and not a whole lot of content either.

the "Stronger" chorus is a good example of why Kanye is one of those rappers that probably shouldn't bother themselves with writing choruses, which is at least one thing Drake is better than most at

kanye can be, and nowadays more often than not is, a huge irritant, but he's fully earned his stature and respect - two really classic albums, even graduation and 808s are half classic, not to mention his production work. he's a good rapper in the sense that when he's on form, his style brings the best out of his lyrics. i mean even considering just post-autotune nutsy kanye, it's inconceivable that drake could drop even a guest verse as amazing as kanye's on "put on".

fyi, kmt = kissing my teeth, so we don't have to go through an embarrassing explanatory charade re: an aeons-old abbreviation somewhere else

imo kanye's bad raps are still memorable for being dumb/silly/funny (of recent vintage, i'm thinkin like the "now im mad, real mad, joe jackson") v drake's transparently formulaic raps

'best i ever had' is a nice song, tho

the parallels w/ kanye are interesting insofar as he's basically just biting his (and wayne's) style with zero personality or talent, really, of his own. that nasal vocal timbre of most of his shit grates on me to the max. i too find his singing voice much more pleasing but that aint saying much; for me he basically stumbled accidentally into one very good hook and should have just retired after "best i ever had" dropped. it's telling that the nicki minaj version is like a million times better

xps

woah trying to do the math but how bad are you when nicki minaj is a million times better than you??

yeooooo-kay i am going to VERY FUCKING DELIBERATELY change the subject now and ask: what about '5 star bitch' made it a hit as opposed to like, any other random rap song of 09? i don't get it.

their unwavering commitment to higher caliber bitches

actual answer...that is rly curious to me, too. lot of similar sounding tracks out at once, how does one rise above the rest

rtc that's kind of how i feel abt several of these songs

"5 Star Bitch" is weird...beat is all Lil-Jon-5-years-ago, and the hook is just Webbie's "Bad Bitch" with "5 star" in place of "bad bad," both songs even have Trina on the remix...just seems like an odd breakout hit for a guy that radio previously hadn't played a lot.

yeah actually "random rap song of 09" was sloppy of me, the anachronism of it is the whole ¯\(º_o)/¯ rather than any kinda modern malaise.

can't say i am super au fait with yo gotti but i always loved this one, great beat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRGZpoeB0o0

i remember reading on Al's blog he said something about how Yo Gotti has way more interesting songs & that seemed like a random one, truth bomb

i was hoping something like Phone Ringing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtJ_vhL9fd8

or "Sold Out" ... i dunno, dude's had 3 'cocaine musik' mixtapes packed we some pretty serious jams

i mean just in general it seems like theres a lot of good shit going on in rap below the surface ... charts have never felt more unrepresentative of whats working in rap

yo gotti is probably just under the gucci/oj type dudes in terms of regional chi popularity ... hes touring w/ them right now actually

this is otm re drake and also just points to a lack of breakout personalities in the last few years. you've got your maybe-babies like pill and your role players like gucci mane, but so far no "next 50," "next wayne," "next t.i.," "next kanye," or whoever. i don't know if it points to an actual lack of blowup talent (which seems unlikely) or shifts in the way careers and buzz are built, or demographic changes in the marketplace or what.

― STRATE IN2 DAKRNESS (tipsy mothra), Thursday, November 5, 2009 9:19 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

This was way upthread but I think maybe-babies like Pill is giving Pill too much credit -- unless he starts writing songs I cant imagine him becoming a superstar. he doesnt have the personality. i also think gucci's obviously past role player at this point, i mean basically every rap song without drake on the charts had him right? (not really but hes on a bunch of the R&B tracks this year)

gucci's clearly the blowup talent

i remember reading on Al's blog he said something about how Yo Gotti has way more interesting songs & that seemed like a random one, truth bomb

i definitely said it seemed like an odd song to blow up but i really don't know his stuff well enough to have said the latter part

ok maybe i just read that into it.
but yeah he has a bunch of songs that feel much more singular

heres a totally off-the-top theory: chicks are digging a chick-oriented song that is butch & not R&B

the mixtape he put out earlier this year is really good - i blogged about it - still haven't heard 5 star bitch

I hate to say shit like this because it plays into so many unfortunate critical clichés, but maybe rap's coming up on a shift like rock had in the late '80s/early '90s (canonical timeline simplification: Nevermind), where fun-loving pop rap will recede from importance for a bit and suddenly every A&R guy will suddenly care about undie backpack sensations AND the public will too.

I dunno. I realize it's partly my listening habits, and partly nostalgia for pop culture narratives, but I'd like there to be a huge sea change in rap where somebody can "change everything." Then five years of everybody aping that, a descent into dreary "worthy" rapping about feelings and shit, and then fun times party rap will feel fresh and interesting again and everyone will be relieved.

i dunno how well that holds up, i guess to what extent was funtimes rock music like...club music. i feel like rock music hasn't been club music for a long-ass time and that's something that has been consistent and probably essential about rap from the start

Eh. Rap's been a mixed genre forever. And rock in the '80s, big radio rock, did get played at clubs and parties. I don't think rap's like house or disco or techno, where they all have a much closer relationship to dancefloor utility.

cf. gangstaz don't dance they boogie, etc

The Lil Boosie album feels so shiny and fun to me that it's odd to think it would seem less (potentially) commercial than southern rap circa 1999. Maybe there's less novelty for people now.

No results found for "moved from the boombox to the dance floor"

"my radio, I like it loud. I'm the man with the box who can rock the crowd"

I'll bet it's way easier to construct a cool r&b/dance beat and have a backup singer with a catchy hook,
than it would be to have your dj scratch a basic beat over which you have to rap a whole song.

I know this story is 20 years old now, and I'm really not a hater.

I'm praying for the live band thing to get more popular. If the wheels of steel are dead, let's have live drums, bass, keyboard and guitar.

dude judging by the amount of songs any given rapper writes in a year-including mixtapes, albums, singles and guest spots-i'd guess it's probably very easy to do.

not easy in the oh-anybody-could-do-that sense, but easy like it probably takes them a half an hour and a spliff or two on average to pen a verse.

I hope this bekay gets popular

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoK9yO9KmAw

ok someone feel free to sum up the last 800 posts into a list of jams i should download

i can confirm that plies da realest is chock full of good poprap jams, and tha blueprint 3 is as good if not better than album jay-z's done outside of reasonable doubt, the black album and the other 2 blueprints (ie. not an all time classic but still not bad at all)

what the fucking fuck. Blueprint 3 better than Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3 or The Dynasty? nevermind, i'm not even gonna.

is there anything actually worth hearing on the blueprint 3? only heard "venus vs mars", "d.o.a.", "run this town" (all varying degrees of horrible) and "empire state of mind" (jay's wince-inducing flow and its general hollowness aside, it does have an undeniable power of sorts, thx alicia).

i like "Real As It Gets" and "A Star Is Born"

lol @ plies & blueprint 3

lex, my favorites were "on to the next one" and "off that," which are about a 7 and a 6, respectively.

I cannot for the life of me find the power in "Empire State of Mind" that people speak of. It is so calculated to be perfectly mediocre that it barely seems to exist to me.

I was spinning heavy metal at a hipster bar in downtown Portland tonight. A whole crowd of med students came in and asked for "Jams" and dance music. All I had with me (besides 2 crates of metal) was a Street Jams comp on my phone. So I played Twilight 22, Afrika Bambaataa, and Herbie Hancock. These kids wanted Kanye West and had sincerely never heard of Herbie Hancock. It made me sad.

you showed them!

Yeah, but then I switched back to Black Sabbath and started getting requests for Madonna.

shit man it sucks when youve got such good taste and everyone else is a herb

if i was in your shoes i probably would have tied a noose and hung myself at the bar

hot tip: no one under 30 dances to "rockit" unless they post to ILM

do young folks like US3 still?

someone call me when rap tracks are no longer 99% shitty synth sounds k thx bye

someone call me when ppl get the fuck over synths not being samples

shakey you might like the marco polo and torae record, marco polo is an A+ dj premier imitator

also some of the alchemist stuff, and sean price

someone call me when ppl get the fuck over synths not being samples

I don't really care about synths vs. samples cuz I love tons of synthesizer music but I tried to listen to some Gucci Mane singles (don't even remember which ones) and I couldn't get over just how fucking tinny and cheap and genuinely AWFUL the actual sonic components of the song were. Like it sounds like they were made for $50 with a Casio keyboard from 1995 and not in a good way. Every time I dip back into popular rap I'm amazed that these shitty gated drum sounds and EQ sweeps is what people want to hear. its mind boggling.

argh trying to find the best Gucci Mane example I can remember, video was a cartoon (a really shitty looking cartoon! like, animation shittier than South Park!)

stupid?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu4kLNahXz4

Yes that one

the crappy cartoon is the result of his old label trying to capitalize off his buzz

i have no problem with those synths

actually the cartoon is pretty funny

http://www.youtube.com/v/XzLzwGHoHAc&color1=0xb1b1b1

maybe they highlighted a boring part or something but that sounds like shit

― hoos-kingofthedrugs (deej), Tuesday, November 10, 2009 11:10 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark

why you think one of these sounds fine and the other sounds like shit is a mystery to me... I mean sure they aren't the same song, but the production style and actual sonics are pretty similar. overly busy, tinny drums, cheap synth stabs, etc.

the beat on one is boring, & the lyrics are rote

'stoopid' is more madcap. its not my fav gucci song or anything, pretty mid tier beat, but the other track just sounds generic.

i find it helps your sense of discernment if you dont just dismiss all rap music made w/ synths out of hand but thats me

no need to be snarky, I thought I made it pretty clear synths per se are not the problem. Not all synths sound alike, you know. A DX7 doesn't sound like a Microkorg and neither sounds like a Moog Prodigy or whatever... I wonder if there would be a way to get at production-style data for rap over the years and kinda plot how changing technology and budgets impacted its sounds - certainly since the mid-90s hip hop and r&b have basically erased the genre boundaries between each other, and computer-centric production styles have taken over. Nothing wrong with that in general, but the weirdest thing about it to me is that pro-tools and its ilk allow for this near infinite vista of sound, but popular hip hop has retreated to this bizarrely limited pallette - string patches, simple sine waves, super-fussy (but thin) drum programming, etc. So much stuff sounds like it took 10 minutes to make, and was made with the cheapest possible gear and with the smallest expenditure of creative energy possible. The lowest common denominator sound seems the most prominent. Weezy's "A Milli" for ex. - a super basic, very short loop (that sounds terrible!) endlessly repeated. With drums that sound like cardboard underneath it. Its like there's this sonic race to the bottom. It reminds me of the countless shitty punk bands that sprang up around the ethos that you didn't "need to know to play" an instrument (which is true in some ways, but taken to extremes its ridiculous).

I miss Pappawheelie where is that guy

it's true that standards have gradually been lowered as far as synth-based beats being some really shamefully basic preset shit, sometimes it's done in a way that's still pretty creative sometimes not. i would say Gucci's not a great artist to make an example of, though, just because he has a couple in-house producers that really have carved out their own sound and have some cool synth sounds going on that aren't super played out, although he also has some really awful cheap-sounding beats too.

Is 'Swag Surfin' the Lil Wayne song or the F.L.Y. one? Wanted to listen to that one but have no idea which ones you are all referring to.

it's the same song, F.L.Y. did the original and Wayne did a freestyle over the beat

rap is still popular?

xpost = Thank you. Still a little confused tho, which is the one mentioned upthread, the most popular one between those two? I already took a quick listen to both of them and the FLY one seemed to me the most ripe for clubs and mainstream radio but I could be wrong.

the fly one is the actual hit - wayne rapped over the beat on his recent "mixtape", a collection of loose tracks disseminated to internet rap listeners

er, loose isn't the word but 4get it

Reading this thread has inspired me to seek out new rap, which I haven't kept up with in years. I guess I prefer the sound of the newer rnb oriented styles. Though I like what I've heard by: Webbie, Lil' Boosie, Twista, Nicki Minaj. Gucci Mane has a few songs I like, but I grow tired of all of the ice talk. and I do like a lot of the cheap synth sounds being used in rap. Thanks for inspiring me to seek out new music.

"lol @ plies & blueprint 3"

obviously we like different shit. i though vols1-3 had strong singles but weak album tracks. lemme put it this way - if you thought black album and blueprint 2 were jay-z's finest moments as opposed to Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3 or The Dynasty then you're probably gonna like blueprint 3 a lot. i think the beats are more varied, and i like when jay flows over techy timbaland-esque beats, so i like this album a lot.

wrt plies - it's probably a producer thing, i often pay more attention to the beats than the lyrics, especially with this poprap stuff, and that plies album has lots of slick, well produced beats.

weak album tracks like 'reservoir dogs,' 'come and get me,' 'snoopy track,' 'imaginary player' ....

..."where i'm from", "it's hot (some like it hot)", "so ghetto"...

vol 2 and vol 3 are all but fat free imo

ok, ok, maybe you're right actually, i didn't like vol.2 that much when when it came out but i'm listening to it now and perhaps i was mistaken.

still, i submit for your consideration: Money Cash Hoes, It's Like That, Dopeman, Things That U Do...

money cash hoes was a single, and is awesome

I love the "A Milli" beat

' i like when jay flows over techy timbaland-esque beats, '

timbaland does 5 beats on vol 3

"who's gonna run this town tonight" is such a boring-ass way

I forget what I meant by this

"timbaland does 5 beats on vol 3"

which leaves 10 other tunes, plus i don't think it's tim at his techy-est there. but whatever, i already said i take it back!

look, i guess what i'm really trying to say is that i think blueprint 3 is a solid effort and i don't get why more people aren't into it

run this town and empire remind me of what i came to like about american gangster, it's like rap-for-grown-ups without him actually mentioning the fact that he's over 30 now.

you dont think he's at his techy-est? have you heard is that yo chick?

that's not on my version of the album (admittedly bought at a pirate stall in bangkok and ripped to mp3 like 5 years ago, maybe it's on the album but it just wouldn't play on my copy?) it's definitely a single from whatever album it's on regardless - i have the 12", and i said i liked the singles from those albums didn't i? DIDN'T I?!?!?

shit, i told myself i was gonna come home and work on a track instead of get into some goddam flame war :/ look, vol 2 and 3 and especially the dynasty are just not my favorite jay-z albums, and i like the new one. you guys don't have to agree. if it helps any, i promise to bump all three albums in my car this weekend, loud, and see if i was misjudging them before. ok?

now back to our discussion of the scheduled discussion of the state of popular rap in 2009.

i meant "previously scheduled discussion" but what i wrote kinda sounds more like the reality of ILM actually lol

Not to rub yr face in it but the Timbaland tracks on Vol 3 are like the best music ever really.

"Weezy's "A Milli" for ex. - a super basic, very short loop (that sounds terrible!) endlessly repeated."

i was with you til you said this. id much prefer more beats like a milli - minimal, heavily bassy, perfectly constructed, compared to a million more tossed off synth beats with dull/barely-there riffs and melodies that sound impossible to tell apart. most rap has the same eurotrance sound as the rest of pop in 2009 which isnt especially novel. the reason mainstream crits prob dont have much interest in rap anymore is cos the novelty has worn off obv, theyre sick of it, (its hard for a genre to recover from mainstream ubiquity) and a lot of new popular rappers havent really moved on much from hip hop a few years ago, which for mainstream crits looking for whats 'hot' isnt very exciting. popular rappers/producers seem to be in that slightly unsatisfying middle ground where theyre making music thats meant to please the masses and the hardcore rap fans at the same time. that 'out to conquer' impulse doesnt seem to be there anymore, no doubt cos all the pop dreams have been dashed now and im guessing rappers/producers dont quite know where to go next. a milli at least seemed less compromising, unconcerned with melody, just about rapping for the sake of rapping. i wouldnt mind seeing some more risk taking like that.

yeah "a milli" (while I don't like it) isn't a good example of a shitty synth beat, I muddied the waters there a bit

imho, hip hop could just do with a few brave new ideas/risks. like most pop genres, i think its at a bit of a middling ebb right now, and that lack of knowing who theyre making this for isnt doing it any favours, esp as its just come off such a big commercialised boom. artists prob dont know who theyre pitching to anymore (or they do, and its 'everyone', which is kinda zzzz).

yeah you could be right. I was just stuck on thinking of it more in terms of recording technology rather than demographics. Like, there's this technology available to basically make hip hop sound like ANYTHING at all but yeah so much is stuck on those eurotrance sounds, as you say. Someone needs to step up and place some boundaries around the music, establish some kind of aesthetic parameters that are forward-looking, in order for me to care.

yeah i agree. the pop attitude is so ingrained in the music now that i find most of the production backing guys like gucci or boosie who i might otherwise like just turns me off. not that i want them over spank rock beats of course, just something thats not so flimsy/throwaway. rap could maybe do with redefining itself against the mainstream rather than just trying to be part of it. its like that old noz post about rappers no longer being scary. i could make the same point about producers.

there is nothing 'flimsy' or 'throwaway' about gucci or boosie's beats. times change, old heads start hating

whats most likely going to happen is that there will be a big shift towards much more polished production, esp as larger hard drives become the norm & basical bedroom record techniques become more sophisticated ... the sound of rap right now isnt going to be the sound of rap forever, altho it might feel like it to ppl who arent feeling it. but this era of beatmaking is gonna age perfectly fine as an aesthetic once its no longer the dominant sound ... looking 'forward' to hearing 'forward-looking' artists copying bedroom production values of the late 00s on stones throw in 2016.

anyway, titchy is confusing a bunch of different aesthetics -- there's nothing particularly euro trance-y about the beats for gucci & boosie; thats more like the underground atlanta comp killer mike dropped earlier this year. then there's the whole swag surfin super fruity KE beat style ... you're talking about entirely difft production styles & lumping them all together. Even Gucci's main producers have entirely difft styles from one another.

i think a lot of the 'flimsy' or 'throwaway' comments come from just the very trebly two-note synth riffs and tinny snare type beats that have been standard since the Lil Jon era -- sometimes it's a very surface-level take on beats that are actually pretty full and fleshed out and sophisticated, sometimes it's apt; i mean i like some of Zaytoven's stuff a lot but "Make The Trap Say Aye" is the definition of a flimsy throwaway beat to me.

yeah but how is that not saying "this zaytoven beat is bad this one is good"? im not a huge fan of that beat either but zaytoven does the same trick on like 'washing powder money' or 'im gettin money' both of which are great beats imo

yeah but "Make" is easily on the best known songs he produced, probably the best known one before the Usher, so it's a relevant example if we're talking about popular perception of that producer/scene/sound

pretty sure if shakey hears "im gettin money" he will also not like it

"i was with you til you said this. id much prefer more beats like a milli - minimal, heavily bassy, perfectly constructed, compared to a million more tossed off synth beats with dull/barely-there riffs and melodies that sound impossible to tell apart."

Cosign.

'i wish more beats sounded singular' is like, well duh

but more beats sounding like a milli is not good -- how many of u think 'drop' by rich boy is song of the year

or every post-a milli bangladesh beat

yeah i was gonna say, there's plenty of those (mostly ehh) beats to be heard if you're into that

pretty sure if shakey hears "im gettin money" he will also not like it

I dunno post a clip and try me

De-lurking... I can see how it may be tempting to imagine some utopian rap beat w/ synths performing backflips in 5.1 & epic cavern drums & full string sections but it sort of misses the point (+ a bonus argument could be made for more obv. auterist tech-nerd producers like Quik / Tricky Stewart / et. al. ). If DIY messing around on accessible drum machines & synths just sounds like glorified MIDI files, then I guess yes the genre might seem pretty limited. But hearing that reliably tinny snare again and again isn't much different from e.g. the use of 808s in 80s rap or that moogsploitation thread or whatnot. Some records will be inspired, others will be 'smallest expenditure' & those might be pretty good once in a while too. Like, somewhere in 00 I remember thinking, well I can be disappointed that 'What's Your Fantasy?' isn't some Philharmonic Bernard Herrmann pwning my soundstage, or I can accept these terms and enjoy this really great track.

here's im gettin money
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mt2dZTR5kc

but i think these are the two best zaytoven beats of the past year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzgbWPOGvuI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmNgeqARI6s

Zaytoven beats are throwaway now? Zay's beats are more interesting, more experimental and just plain weirder than anything I've ever heard from this ridiculous 'wonky' genre

the last one of those is the best but they're all pretty eh (and remarkably similar)

its interesting to me that a lot of rap has completely dropped 4/4 funk rhythms, that slowed-down southern thing has totally taken over

that Gettin Money hook is terrible fwiw

sometimes i'm sick of listening to slow rap tempos, but at parties i remember that it's great for dancing (b/c you've got that double-time there if you want it).

yeah sometimes I think they just slowed the tempos down so that you could actually stuff more drum hits into each measure and make it double-time (its like two for one - its a slow song AND a fast song!)

this is the best zaytoven beat - so chill & melodic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFGoesHvs04

^^^diggin that one

yeah that one is fire, 'fast break' might be the first one i :O'd at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSBonOPVsnU

"white folks think im playin for the falcons"

"'i wish more beats sounded singular' is like, well duh"

i was talking about that a milli aesthetic (ie more mid range and bass as opposed to nothing but thin treble), rather than inferior carbon copies.

looking forward to the madlib of 808s in 2020.

midrange on a milli? how do any of the tracks we posted not have bass?

i cant be bothered to argue if you dont think modern popular rap is way more about treble than anything else. i dont hear anything esp interesting being done with bass in most modern hip hop/R&B/pop, unless you count its general merely perfunctory presence as going against traditional notions of black music=bass to be notable in itself. hence, why i like a milli, purely for that funkiness/heaviness.

the bass in modern hip-hop/R&B/pop = the sub-bass 808 kick. this doesn't lend itself to funky complex basslines but it's certainly prominent (unless you're listening on speakers that don't have good bass response)

(unless you're listening on speakers that don't have good bass response)

I would think most people aren't considering loads of people are listening to shit on their phones/ipods/computers

and yeah kick-drum sub-bass /= bass

why not? if you had big basslines in a lot of these tracks then there wouldn't be room for the way-larger-than-life kicks.

(not that there aren't some current tracks with good basslines, but this is a pretty defining characteristic of modern rap beats imo)

I may be in the minority here, but I think popular rap is about as good as it's been all decade, or at least as good as it's been since the Neptunes' sound lost its new-car scent. It's tuneful, melodically innovative, fun and inviting. There's still a lot of inane singles I can't defend, but even some of today's worst artists are capable of some genuinely inspired singles (see Soulja Boy's "Turn My Swag" on). Meanwhile, Kanye West's 808s album opened up the genre to sounds, textures and emotions that were once entirely foreign to the genre.

this is another dope, low key, melodic zaytove beat, with more unique drum programming than he usually does

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvpBpkI30Gk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvpBpkI30Gk

\(o_O)/

oh lol, i forgot that i turned images off & was puzzled as to why it was just a link showing up, sorry

zay toven more like tay zonday amirite

already made that great, underappreciated dn iirc

man this was a dope yo gotti track -- forgot about it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0uDGAUwOqs

263 posts and not one Waka Flocka mention?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLH3XLZirHU

actually he got mentioned a bit in the gucci thread, but this songs awesome either way

wacka flocka is like when you're in the elevator at work with your boss and he farts and everyone tries to pretend like they don't smell it, best to just move on.

nah wacka's pretty much solidified as OK if just for "o let's do it"....that song is fuckin dope. and maybe a handful of other verses like "real as they get"

but the version in the video is kinda unlistenable because of all the gaps

man i'd been hearing people rap on that shitty beat on mixtapes for months, didn't realize it was the track from a kinda big hit song

ha yeah waka's someone i don't mind hearing on a gucci song here or there, but can't bring myself to care enough to seek out a mixtape of his own

tbh if you're thinking about "the state of popular rap in 09" and you think waka flocka yours is a fucked up mind

his best contribution so far was inspiring one of my fav whiney login names of recent months

yeah all these people must have "fucked up mind"s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSh2sDQ51JY

fuck y'all. "O Let's Do It" is a banger

Roscoe Dash "All The Way Turnt Up"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctc6WCWGIns

last addition to "the state" of the year?

rev is otm btw

actually no one mentioned "Bedrock"

i feel like that song will be huuuge soon

or is it already

i hear it all the time now. kinda fuckin hate it tbh, and i loved "every girl."

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=jackson/100126

two gucci mentions on ESPN in a week!

hahaha scoop otm! ying yang twins!!

• DJ Khaled: All he has to do is use his Def Jam South president status and bring any of the artists that he gets on his mix tapes (Akon, Usher, Rick Ross, T-Pain, Young Jeezy, Plies, Lil Wayne, et al) and do one song: "I'm So Hood." SB halftimes will never be the same.

hahahahaha i want to everyone to know that if dj khaled does a super bowl halftime show i'll donate all money to my name to charity and jump off the top of a building because it would be the peak of my life

• Jay-Z: Has the catalog, has the cachet, has the name, has the wife, has the connects, has the swag, has the résumé. If Hov doesn't eventually get the gig, then no one ever will.

this is actually really, really otm

yeah it totally is, outkast too. old people like outkast, right? let them do it

lol @ "eventually"...by the time jay gets it Vol 8...The Glo-Fi Covers Album will be #1 or something

what is glo-fi?

do i even want to know?

hahahahaha i want to everyone to know that if dj khaled does a super bowl halftime show i'll donate all money to my name to charity and jump off the top of a building because it would be the peak of my life

― waka shame (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, January 27, 2010 2:14 PM Bookmark

you should jump off a bridge

m@tt idk what glo-fi i either really, i think it's the same thing as chillwave?

if we combined the powers of glo-fi and chillwave it would be totally micro-hypnagogic IMO

but to me it's pretty much all about purple wow in 2010

Never knew they made a video for this. It's like watching old home movies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUZx98Ei-ls

that vid is crazy

I saw "glo-fi" for the first time today on a promotional sticker for some indie band and then I saw it on this thread. it did not strike me as something I would ever want to hear, although I may be wrong.

Thread is an incredible time capsule

we had all the goats in here