Transition

I fully expect someone to talk about Chuck D.

lauryn hill and outkast, yuck.

hmmm. i thought ethan was off the mark until i re-read josh's question, but now i'm not so sure. i sure as hell don't see it in terms of outkast (how could "we luv deez hoez" be seen as a maturity move in any context?) lauryn hill...i want to agree, but i think it's more that there was always an upwardly mobile/black-boho smarm vibe about the fugees in general that was just waiting to be exascerbated, which she delivered on in spades. it's not "maturity" as such, since it sounds like the hiphop version of college rock.

i'm just gonna go balls out with this theory: hiphop's "sonic pallette" is not refined enough to support the sort of "maturity moves" that josh is talking about, that we see in rock. (nb: i don't see this as a bad thing. not one bit. i'd rather a music be emotionally stunted and still exciting than capable of expressing "any emotion the artist wishes" and a big old stinky pile of 80s don henley crapola.)

the fugees/lauryn hill = digable planets/us3 of the late 90s?

and now thinking about it some more i'm not so sure again. because massive attack/tricky/portishead (okay, maybe not tricky, again to his benefit) could be seen as hiphop "maturity moves" of a sort, except they certainly have nothing to do with american hiphop. (and ethan doesn't think they have anything to do with hiphop at all, and this is my way of making him explain why finally.)

PE/BDP? politics vs wicky-wicky eat-em-up

I don't suppose you're going to explain about this sonic palette business, Jess?

How about the Beastie Boys? Do they count?

yeah certainly they do. again, yuck. i think tribe 'matured' from peoples instinctive to low end to midnight marauders but the sounds got better too so it was okay, their initial immaturity was just a bad de la ripoff anyway. also i think beats rhymes & life and the love movement are the most immature-but-considered-mature-for- some-reason records ever. also jay-z, while not actually 'maturing' as such, has become more convincing i think at expressing a full range of emotion better than he did on his earlier records. the general humility of the blueprint is widely undervalued, i'd like to see that discussed more actually. is humility a mature trait?

of course not, josh. ;)

upon rereading later in the day, "sonic palette" was probably the wrong phrase. i do believe that the reliance on the beat sometimes leaves hiphop hamstrung by it's own construction. but then again it's essential to the proceedings, so hiphop doesnt = hiphop without the beat? (it seems on the surface like that's an obvious statement, but i think it bears examination. could hiphop as such exist without "the beat?") in many ways the content of hiphop has "matured", since we've gone from ghetto kids chatting about the party and getting funky fresh to multi-millionaires chatting up their watches, trousers, and stock options. but the worldview of hiphop is still located at crotch-level, like most pop. nb: again, i don't see this as a negative. it is what it is.

things i'd like to see hiphop be able to express which i'm not sure it's capable of: uncertainty, remorse, regret. does the oft- described "psychic armor" of hiphop prevent it from showing "weakness"? could you have a rap track that was totally naked, shorn completely of defensiveness, swagger, bravado?

yeah okay mark pitchfork jr, have you never heard me & me bitch or something?

i'm sorry ethan, there's only so many hours in the day, and the number of tracks with the word "bitch" in them grows exponentially by the year. why dont you try answering the questions, chucklehead.

Uncertainty, remorse and regret are around track twelve or so of practically every good hip-hop album.

Have you ever heard "Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde?" Their whole thing was self-effacement on that album. Yeah, there were moments of swagger, like "Ya Mama," but likewise they spent alot of time just mocking themselves ...

dare you forgot cann ox!

"maturity" for hip hop does indeed = chuck d and attempted conversion to public intellectual. mature artists = krs-1, q-tip (fred durst guesting = maturity!), krazie bone (guesting w/ tiffany = maturity!), and also common got mature and boring and damn but Mrs. Jackson is a mature track, tho not the whole album.

but likewise they spent alot of time just mocking themselves ...

but isn't mocking yrself just another mask?

regretting the life of gun cuz of yr dead homies then closing the album with a gun tale ain't regret.

and i agree about ms. jackson, 100%. also the "black cadillac and a pack of pampers, stack of questions with no answers" line.

re: sonic palette (sorry, jess)
What do people think of the guitars and the back-up singers and the helicopters (at least, I think there are) at the end of 'Bombs Over Baghdad'? I think they're exciting. Do people think that that kind of borrowing is different from what has occurred with rock? Does sampling make anything other than the beat conspicuously foreign? On the Outkast album, aren't there raps about childhood? I've only heard it once, so I can't remember very well. Being able to look back and to reevaluate one's past suggests a kind of maturity.

Why give up on the sonics, Jess? Half of what people mean when they say a rock musician has made a "mature" album is sonic -- enough mid-tempo minor-key acoustic numbers and suddenly you're "mature" and "introspective" as can be, even if you're singing about sniffing glue. Which is why Us3 and Digable Planets and the Fugees get this "maturity" cred: they borrow their sonics from old mature-person's genres.

Rock gets called "mature" when it nicks folk, essentially, and hip- hop gets called "mature" when it nicks jazz.

Atmosphere is great 'loser' hiphop.

Nitsuh's on some sort of currency here - "mature" is often (though not exclusively) synonymous with "traditional" in rock crit parlance. Although I was actually thinking about this the other night a bit, about how styles which aren't particularly "mature" can become mature. The Church's Hologram Of Baal, which is what I was listening to at the time, does this for jangle- drone-shoegazer by making everything sepia-toned and faded- sounding, which acts to obscure the comparative sonic outthereness of the production. I think more often than not "maturity" acts like that - a layer or colour within the music that acts like varnish, changing completely the appearance of music that is not necessarily that different at core to its youthful counterparts.

Which leads me to my answer: Pete Rock & CL Smooth.

Oh, and Guru's been making maturity of a sorts his schtick for a while now. Perhaps hip hop simply needs more successful elder statesmen who don't sound hopelessly lost in the past (relative static stability of rock sonically allows for "artistic progression" on a public level much more readily than hip hop's constant stylistic turbulence).

i gave up nitsuh because i couldn't explain it, which is where you came in. peasy. ;)

josh's question comes with a lot of baggage because i think most people around here will agree that maturity moves ala nitsuh's "appropriation of folk" are a bad thing, and most pop genres are much better "immature" and being what they are rather than striving for "more." (not sure that the theory holds up in practice across the board; i can't hear much "folk" in the 80s don henley i reference earlier, but i can think of few musics more noxiously "mature" in the sense we're talking.) when taking "maturity" as an essentially bad thing (be it henley and james taylor singing paens to their yoofs or chuck d and fucking ice t intellectually vamping - beyond their capability - on national tv), we're immediately put on the defensive, hence nasty cocktail jazz-hop like us3 being referenced. but what about someone like bob dylan - who's new album i would assume is doing what he's always done more or less (i havent heard it), but tempered and obviously shot through with his age and place (unselfconsciously.) guru's new "teacher/maturity" schtick seems close, but still a schtick. i can't decide if jay-z's own "love and theft" thirty odd years from now would be a good thing or not...

tempered and obviously shot through with his age and place (unselfconsciously.)

But is that objectively the case or just yer take on it? Which may seem obvious, I grant.

What a great question. It brings to mind the New Yorker piece about Jay-Z (who wrote that?) which suggested that the way to mature in hip- hop is to grow out of it, and into other ventures (larger entertainment concerns, activism, clothing, acting, lecturing, etc.) I have a feeling there is something particular to hip-hop that makes growing old more difficult, but I'm not sure what it is (maybe we can figure it out tomorrow.)

I hope I live long enough to see a 60-year old rapper make an interesting album about getting old.

maturity is a TRAP!!!

'It brings to mind the New Yorker piece about Jay-Z (who wrote that?) which suggested that the way to mature in hip- hop is to grow out of it, and into other ventures (larger entertainment concerns, activism, clothing, acting, lecturing, etc.) I have a feeling there is something particular to hip-hop that makes growing old more difficult, but I'm not sure what it is (maybe we can figure it out tomorrow.)'

Well, there's your answer. What's the percentage of people from any walk of life who get into these careers and actually make a go of it? The bigger likelihood is that the rank-and- file of ex-rappers end up (back?) selling drugs or being couriers. Plus, if somebody's stated goal is to sell records so they can start up a retail concern, then a) How good are those records likely to be, and b) why should anybody buy them? However, people still spend money on such records because they 'inspirational'

Dave, are you saying the level of inspiration a record can produce is directly (even solely?) related to the artist's intentions?

records that make some kind of moves at 'maturity' or 'maturing':

new c-murder?
last petey pablo
new beanie sigel

- maybe i had it totally off before, and in hip-hop SOME maturity signifiers (not all of them, obv.) can come way earllier because of what it is

- i think i may have originally had in mind, though i never mentioned it, attributions of 'maturing' to punk and indie and etc. records; i didn't mean to confine the range of examples to like uh mick jagger solo albums