Can we thread a history of rap/hip-hop

("the sex pistols are old, right?")

How do you think the breakthrough artists of '92-'94 (Wu, Redman, Snoop, Nas) are going to fare five to ten years from now?

can you give some examples of some undie rappers that do that or how they imply what you suggest? seems like you are throwing the baby away with the bathwater, painting everthing with the proverbial broad brush. (which isnt to imply that I dont know what you mean in some ways, fully recognizing that retro aspects of part of the so called backpackers).

absolutely!

also: last poets to thread!

likewise anti-pop is surely retro as hell, but it’s retro that a. hasn’t been done to death yet (latin freestyle, hard electro edits, etc etc) and b. the production techniques to achieve such are surely “of the moment.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with looking back (timbaland sampled a fela track for chrissakes on miss e, something ian penman hilariously referred to as “total futurism” or some such and dave tompkins claimed was nicked from blackalicious!) but looping something through an akai and truncating it to sound dusted and older than time is just so 1992.

as for lyrics/flow: Jurassic 5 are a cliché, but some things are clichés for a reason. And I know shit like edan is supposed to be partially tounge in cheek, but when you release a record in 2002 with song titles like “MC’s smoke crack” it better be lapping your fucking stomach lining.

also "everything" can be hiphop, but hiphop isn't "everything."

the other part is of course believing that its a skyscraping music which can never be knocked down.

these two things are not mutually exclusive.

i'd go so far as to say that if you're not committed to the idea of natural selection/progression in pop/music you don't get hiphop and never will.

But Hip-Hop, like all things, changes. It's not just the artists that get older, fer instance, but also the audiences- and maybe they won't be able to understand/emphasise with whoever's "on top" right now, or maybe they WILL but will regardlessly also want something that speaks to *them* specifically. What are those supposed to do? Just start listening to Soul/Rock/Blues? What if they don't want that? "Hip Hop has always been a young man's game", but how d'ya explain that to someone who has grown up and grown old loving the stuff?

Purely productionwise, would a record automatically be wack if its artist doesn't keep up with the times? I mean, the real cool beats- Bambaata, DJ Premier, Jam Master Jay- still sound great today, why wouldn't we want more of it (as well as newer, innovative stuff too of course, we can have it both ways) ?

We fear the hip hop nu-garage equiv! Luckily it probably won't happen (that way at least) as chart hip hop is already folding onto itself while still popular via Blueprint soul and Missy take-it-back reconstruction. Of course this is about as "retro" as electroclash's claim on the 80s, more of a gathered interest in permutating the scene under a cozy brand. It's all still for the kids in any case.

Daniel, the type of hip hop fan you describe who feels alienated over the youthful drive at the top of the hierarchy will most likely turn to the equally large pool of artists who share their interests. I'm not sure what you mean by speaks to *them* as "speaks" can be such a loaded term, but I think you mean a similar, perhaps-gasp-mature, sense of earthiness in the lyrics/vibe, which is still everwhere ('nu-soul' hip hop, Common, Roots, Blackalicious, etc.). Jess seems to be implying that this person does not get hip hop in the same way he does and will get left behind in the post-primo dustcloud. And there are plenty of people like that - there's so much "behind" going on *now* in hip hop I can't imagne somebody desiring more backwardness.

why anyone should listen to music that doesn't "speak to them" is beyond me. it reduces music to an exercise. but someone who's "grown up and grown old loving the stuff" will have internalized the progression. if not they haven't "grown up with it at all": plenty of people stop liking a certain genre (or music period!) at a certain point on the timeline. (i find it typically coincides with the end of high school or college.) "growing up" with something to me (like, say, yr family and yr friends) implies rolling with the punches, the good the bad, the droughts the feasts.

it's the old eno "scenius" vs. "genius" argument, but hiphop's got a way of proving who "keeps up" and who doesn't and it's called popular opinion. (it's not particularly fair to class premier with bam or jmj becuz he's still scoring.)

i don't think anyone has to "get" hiphop any particular way. the undie crowd is still signifying in their way. it just does nothing for me in particular and i'm sick of hearing about it, ad nauseum, from people with typically a very tenuous grasp on the genre (when not out and out hostility towards "hippop". this goes double for those "in the scene", not just rock/pop/indie fans.) but i really do think popular will still rules, will rule, and i can't even imagine the genre working without it. otherwise it turns into hstencil's beloved ragtime revival.

We fear the hip hop nu-garage equiv!

Well, I like some Nu-Garage; as long as it adds an interesting new take on an old formula, I'm ok with it. Not everyone has to be highly interested in what the newest thing on the block is; in fact, some ppl will look downright *embarassing* if they try to (or to put it more simply- "more of it" could result in Hip-Hop Kinks as much as it could in Hip-Hop Hives)

But mostly, I was talking about older artists- if Hip-Hop is a "young man's game", should they be satisfied with dropping a classic record in their youth and then...what, retiring? Starting their own record label? I know many here disagree, but I think that Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Marvin Gaye and Lou Reed- to quote but a few- made wonderful records during (or after) reaching middle age, and I can't see why Hip Hop would be so restrictive that the same couldn't happen to, say, Rakim.

Jess seems to be implying that this person does not get hip hop in the same way he does and will get left behind in the post-primo dustcloud.

And I sez that that's a very arrogant way of looking at things. Any genre that has survived for as long as Hip-Hop is surely multi-faceted enough that there is no one way to "get" it; even better, new ways of getting it will spring up all the time. As for getting "left behind", I believe that the audience I described really *couldn't care less*; they're not looking to stay on top of the newest trend. Neither innovation nor traditionalism are bad things- fans of one approach considering themselves superior to the other is.

haha daniel did you even read my reply?

it wouldn't be wack but it wouldn't be new, either. so why bother?

Why not bother? It could be a variation on a theme- there are infinite ways to play around with a certain sound.

"growing up" with something to me (like, say, yr family and yr friends) implies rolling with the punches, the good the bad, the droughts the feasts.

This is irrelevant to do with a genre since there are no droughts- Hip Hop hasn't been dull for twenty years, and I highly doubt it will be in twenty years time either. Your ability to understand or appreciate the great new things varies, of course. Some people will try to always keep up, some people will just stick with their fave artists/sounds. Why should this second category be despised, or why should it be impossible for artists who have this category as audience to make good music? And what about those (such as myself) who do both? I'm as excited by the prospect of a new Rakim album as I am by the new Missy Elliot single or whatever The Neptunes might be doing right now. Sticking by artists through good times and bad times comes naturally to me if the artist is good enough, and I hate this idea that after someone is 35 it is impossible that he/she might still have something interesting to say, even if they don't conform to what's happening right now.

it's the old eno "scenius" vs. "genius" argument, but hiphop's got a way of proving who "keeps up" and who doesn't and it's called popular opinion.

All genres have that last time I checked.

i don't think anyone has to "get" hiphop any particular way.

We agree then.

x-posting is the gene-mutation of thought

Surely it's more just that you have to break through when you're young, rather than you have to be young to have a career? There are a number of artists who're still big, in both the commercial and credibility senses despite having been in the game for a long time and being no spring chickens. Scarface just dropped the best album of his career and he must be well over 30, no?

Perhaps the problem for hip hop is that it doesn't have a real MOR-paddock it can farm off its aging rappers to (cf. rock and U2). Someone could create some interesting generalisations in the service of music crit by asking: what do black Americans listen to when they "grow up"?

Personally, I don't think the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is that far removed from the earliest days of b-boy...breakbeats, graffiti, breakdancing, "flows"...the traditions of "hip-hop"...wouldn't be that out of place next to the jam sessions, day-glo, hippy-twirl-dancing, "rapping" of the pschedelic community of just a few years earlier. In fact, I think the existance of Parliament-Funkadelic/Sly & the Family Stone/Jimi Hendrix and other psychedelic/funk/rockers (many of which stylistically influenced hip-hop heavily) help that cultural juxtaposition make much more sense, as they bridged the two seemingly separate worlds very noticeably.

There's a point in these kind of histories where the connections become nebulous enough that they're more a matter of choice and inclination than anything else. ie "rap" is a superword heheh. We don't have to stop in the 1950s; we can go way back, like Allen Ginsberg knew, for instance...

"SC: I'm sure your familiar with poetry slams, and the type of poetry that tends to be recited. Could you say something about that?

AG: Well, there's an element of aggression in it I don't particularly dig - just the very notion of a poetry boxing - slam, you know. I took part in some of the earlier ones, back in Taos, New Mexico, where it was in a boxing ring - and even in New York, in the early seventies, in a boxing ring - Fourteenth Street, just kidding around. But the form of the slam, with a lot of rap in it, is a very ancient form. In the white cultural world, it goes back to the poet laureate of the fourteenth century, John Skelton, and his Skeltonics, which were quick triple and quadruple rhymes with short lines like rap. And the boasting, or aggressive aspect, that goes back to African origins, with the toasts and boasts of the griots - griots, they're sort of like holy, or sacred story-tellers and singers. And the boasting, and maybe insult to the enemy is an old, old, old word-battle tradition - slam tradition, you might say. It was taken up in American in the form of sort of double-talk language to evade white people's understandings, to talk about real issues, on the part of the slaves.

And then it went on to the signifying monkey cycle. Do you know about that? "Oh", said the monkey to the tiger, "What a fine, sunny day. Your mother's blank is blanky, and I'll blank her every way." Generally, it consisted of very obscene insults to one's family - mother, father, sister, brother - and as a kind of imaginative lie on the part of animal contestants in the poetry slam: "the monkey to the tiger". It's called the signifying monkey - he's signifying, or, you know, not quite insulting, but making innuendo. And the key is: you rival each other with the most extreme, obscene insults you can, and the one who gets mad first looses the game. So, the white world has lost the game because it got mad at black rapping.

So, it's an ancient tradition, and people don't understand that."

http://www.xlnt-arts.com/stevecapra/intervie/ginsberg.htm

the basic attributes of African music:

1. Loop= circular rhythms.
2. Cut = without notation there was no harmonic progression. Progress occurs through "cuts" (can i take it to the bridge fellas?)
3. Call and response.

To prove yr. point I mean, unless you want to assert that these were *reintroduced* by afro-centric movements, & I doubt seriously that the garveyites did so nor the 70s nationalists (tho i suppose clinton might have, he's a pretty sharp guy).

And futhermore you have to reduce all of non-african culture to high-european classical etc. and deny the prevalant folk-cultures of the rest of the world.

Far more useful I think to look at black american culture as stemming from an american-generated traditon and particular circumstances. The most serious historians of black american culture, Genovese for example, have argued how slavery generated a culture far less than how the slaves maintained African cultural forms.

Not really, but rather that there's nothing particularly "african" about a number of traits which would arise in any folk-culture.

and oops yes my last sentence was backwards -- Genovese argues that slavery generated a culture and NOT that the slaves maintained African cultural forms. he cites E. Franklin Frazier's sociology which is also v. spectacular in its own right.

And don't underestimate the block party/sound system link.

http://www.jahsonic.com/Rap.html

handy timelinemainstream infographics above a Jeff Chang piece. lol@ "Dom" Imus (surely unrelated) as recent anchor point propelling momentous nappy-headed hos controversy to the level of, what, the rise of crack

Eminem & Kanye's anti-bush videos = youths vote in record numbers

They did?