After much deliberation, I've come to the conclusion that over all hip hop just isn't a very good genre. I've always been the kind to say that it's just as good as any other genre, but I realize now that all the amazing albums are outliers.
My roommate is very into the genre, it's pretty much all he plays. He's very into underground, although he does play the occasional big artist. He always tells me how great a track is, or how "weird" it is, and it just ends up being either boring as fuck or just really low effort garbage. It's literally just one sample or beat played on loop for a whole song. There's almost never any variation, and any song that's good is almost always because the song that it samples is good.
This isn't to say that the genre can't be good. Because it can be, and every now and then it can be amazing, but the majority of the shit that gets praised as "new" and "innovative" is just the same old shit with maybe a slightly abnormal beat.
I'm just getting really fucking sick of this music. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the genre, but it's just so lazy and people are ready to praise it as fantastic when it's literally just some dude speaking over a small section of someone else's song, with some booms and baps added. And nowadays they don't even fucking rhyme half the time and just repeat random nonsensical phrases. It's just not good.
After much deliberation, I've come to the conclusion that over all hip hop just isn't a very good genre...
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I really feel like live band based hip hop is the next evolution of the genre, if the beats were more that just beats and instead the musical vision of a group of instrumentalists, I feel like we would be able to incorporate new influences and more inventive musicality than just a generic producer "beat." Anyone else feel this way?
> It's just not good.
because people don't care to make good (pop) music anymore. in the 60s and 70s, music was kind of all that young people had so they were really excited to make good music. Nowadays music is just background noise, no one cares since there's a million other things to do
A bad roommate can ruin absolutely anything. It's understandable, sorry that happened to you. Try not to hold it against the hip hop culture for your roommate being shitty.
This is honestly exactly how I feel, but I kind of doubt the genre is going in that direction. Plus it's just much easier to make some lazy ass shit on your laptop than actually have instrumentation.
"People see rock and roll as, as youth culture, and when youth culture becomes monopolised by big business, what are the youth to do? Do you, do you have any idea?
I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture."
-Thurston Moore
-Radio Dept.
-Michael Scott
-Wayne Gretzky
I feel like just rapping without having it pegged to some forced esoterica is what needs to happen. Hip-hop is constantly restrained and staggered by its own toxic mentality.
he's not shitty at all, we got along ridiculously well. I just don't like his music.
As someone who got really into electronic music production and drum machines, I've found a newfound appreciation for hip hop.
It's not a bad format, it's just that the hypebeasts love to eat shit, because they have terrible taste, but there isn't all that much room to do with it either.
It's fucking garbage. Not artistic redeeming qualites. Literal music for the masses of idiots
>Anyone else feel this way?
Of course, this is the sane way to approach hip hop. A lot of the classic groups that are unanimously seen as titans of the genre are firmly based around performing live as a band.
>live band
>2017
hmmmmm NO. People have explored far more new sonic ground on computers than they could with instruments. Hip Hop is built on using new technology to create new sounds. Hip Hop would have died if it was a live band thing. I think you need to listen to more music and put down the foo fighters cd son.
Have you seen live Hip Hop shows? they have bands playing the beats sometimes.
This.
this would be nice to see, but as this user said I doubt it. Have you watched rappers live? Just watch a Kendrick gig on youtube, he's always out of air and needs help to fill in the blanks. Trappers are not even singing, just lip syncing etc... it's easier to just make some shitty beat in FL studio and call it a day
>huurr you need to play boring guitar or else your music isn't really natural "art"
It's built on using Nexus presets you fucking idiot.
>hurr I don't read posts before I comment
>guitar is the only instrument
>hmmmmm NO. People have explored far more new sonic ground on computers than they could with instruments.
This works in principle, but not in practice, you need instruments to make a decent live performance. I can write every song on my laptop, but if I'm going to play it live I'm going to arrange it for guitar, bass, drums, synths, etc.
A decent musician knows how to create multiple renditions for the same song in multiple ways, most hip hop musicians are not "decent musicians" by a long shot, so a lot of hip hop is really terrible live. It's why when I go see music live, it's a rock band.
So Electronic musicians are also terrible live? you must be tripping man.
>So Electronic musicians are also terrible live?
That's different man, I see a lot of experimental electronic live.
I thought it was implied that the band was making the music using instruments, not just replaying the song live. I don't know why I said "live band" instead of "band that plays instruments making the song". Also idk what you're trying to argue exactly. It's 5am and I have no sleep, sorry
Hip-hop is no different from a variety of other genres born out of urban multicultural art in the mid 70s and 80s. Its low base quality standard assures that it is commodified for a horde, and easy to engage with. However, because of its indefinite structure and methods, one could also introduce many elements to develop the style.
This is why hip hop has albums like Paid In Full, Life After Death, The Cool, and More Life... Four albums between 1987 and 2017 that offer distinguishably different styles and tone. Incorporations of dance, pop, reggaeton, jazz, and funk are all measured differently throughout each album.
The problems you pointed out aren't exclusive to hip-hop. It's something that music has suffered forever. Simple repetitive rhythms played over and over again with weak ass lyrics and verse chorus verse structure goes all the way back to traditional folk music. The truly mad artists who manage to stand out in the horde are few and far between everywhere you go. Look at punk, metal, dance, rock, r&b, country, or anything else except for jazz or classical music which demand an exceptional acumen to drive the music home.
Beastie Boys did this
Can't tell if autistic pseudo intellectual or trying to bait
It's hit or miss, really. Check out this live performance of Deltron 3030:
youtube.com
Del's performance was shaky at best but damn everything else sounds so good
I remember when I also thought "live bands" were the way forward for hip hop, but nowadays I see that's probably not going to happen for a while. That's just not what people are interested in currently, both the musicians and the audience. As much as I would personally like for it to happen, bands are too much of a "muso" thing and kind of old-fashioned as well. Soundcloud + DAWs, that's what brought these guys success. Incorporating live instrumentation on top of that would just be a hassle, plus it's unnecessary considering that you can just emulate those sounds in Logic anyway. And if you really need some hot licks, you can just hire somebody to do it for you on the record, then play back that sample.
I've seen far more people learning DAWs than guitars or keyboards in the past few years. It adds to the appeal that these are not things that were available to your parents. The DAW is the young person's instrument these days, guitars and keyboards are for old people.
O shit wrong person meant to mention this fucking idiot.
Hip Hop the best music on earth I could live my whole life and if you told me there's only one genre you could ever listen to again I'd pick hip hop.
And Kodak's No Flocking >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Thot B's Ghostwriter Chronicles
>The DAW is the young person's instrument these days, guitars and keyboards are for old people.
But it's not true. The DAW is limited, not in a musical sense, but in a social way. Young people are picking up on this.
I arrived at this very conclusion years ago. I have conversations with an older black friend often about urban music and how it went from the classic old school music with melody AND a message to just a message and no melody. He is really sad to see young African Americans listening almost exclusively to hip hop when their culture has much richer music in old school and jazz, and that those haven't been expanded on as much. Rap only has melody these days if they're ripping off other peoples music, especially 80s tunes these days. We really hope that some kind of revolution occurs in urban music to take on another rich and, well, less lazy form. I mean how many songs can you put that Casio clap into, or say "AYYYY" after every verse before it gets old.
...
>booms and baps
lol yoooo niggaaa is it still 1987? What the fuck y'all niggas listening too. You gotta play the good shit.
>live band based hip hop is the next evolution of the genre
Nah fuck all that shit. KL tried that with TPAB. Was cool. We off that now. Got no replay value. Didn't bump. Chance doing that shit too with his Social Network band. Ain't working. Best song on his tape had two hittas, Chainz and Waynes. Roots out here doing they thing but shit, they practically retired. House Band shit. And that's what that live intro shit sounds like in rap. The music gotta be soft. As soon as niggas get around pianos and drums and shit they start thinking they gotta talk concious and shit like I wanna hear you preach. I DON'T NIGGA.
Where Hip-Hop is going is BIGGER. No joke, the best song out right now, and is where the music is going in the Future is Lucifer's Early 20 Rager. THAT SONG IS THE SHIT. Nobody realized it yet, but that song is going to be very influential. I talk to producers all the time and they think that track's just incredible and the best thing on the tape. That shit's going to be very influential in the future.
Hm, actually yeah, I wasn't considering that particular aspect. I was just imagining the part where you make your jam at home and put it on Soundcloud and get a million views, but would you really be at a loss at a party? Would it actually be a buzzkill to just show off all the shit you made, compared to just whipping out the guitar or keyboard and dicking around making random sounds?
Either way though, I don't think there's much interest in actually being proficient enough with real instruments to start a band. Even at that "we can't play our instruments" level.
Gonna be waiting nigga because Jeezy been saying ayy since like 04.
Not to mention rap concerts are the best ones to attend now. OP You go see a Travis Scott show live and see what you think of him afterwards.
This is a very "old person" way of thinking, and you could have made this exact same argument in the 80s when hip hop was just starting out. There aren't even any tunes, how many ways can you do the whole chanting and playing-back-records-by-other-people thing? Well, as it turns out, fucking millions of ways. People have doubted hip-hop's longevity for the entirety of its existence, and it's proved them wrong every time. It is NOT going away. It is the next "jazz". For better or for worse.
I really hate it when people on Sup Forums pretend to be black, it always comes off as so incredibly forced.
literal retard in the thread confirmed looool
In all fairness I am kind of old. I just don't understand how they went from inovative music with melody to literally 3 beats and angry lyrics (unless ripping off other music) and gained popularity.
>And nowadays they don't even fucking rhyme half the time and just repeat random nonsensical phrases. It's just not good.
Because a lot of these guys perform these songs live with lots of crowd interaction. You really should see how something like D Rose or any X or Dex or Uzi show live.
Three minutes and it's over. A good groove and a nice, usable chord progression can have people entertained for an indeterminate period of time. Hell, even the most Top-40 listening normies are starting to get hip to that concept.
The communion of minds and spirits in real time is an integral part of the musical experience. It's never going to go away, regardless of what the marketplace is doing.
It's because you're too stuck in your ways to hear the innovation in hip hop. Or rather, you don't see how people could interpret the tricks the musicians are throwing in as "innovative".
You're glossing over meaning in favor of connotation and context and calling it a new language. That every stylistic quirk gets touted as an "innovation" or a "step forward" means we're talking about completely vain music.
I seen Anderson Paak and The Weeknd this summer and they both had live bands. I hope this is a trend.
What meaning is there in a note? In a triad? In a scale? In a series of those notes arranged in a particular order? Whatever meaning you find in that order, why can't someone else find the same meaning in a series of samples and textures and percussion hits? It's all just sound. What's vain about that?
Meaning in a note is the frequency that it resonates at in relation to the others. The meaning in a scale is the tonality that that set of notes generates. Studies done around the world shows that tonality is not a "subjective" concept.
It's all "just sound," and these terms provide a way to describe and discuss these sounds. You're suggesting that be discarded in favor of literally, nothing else.
I should mention that I chose those words deliberately so that we would get this conversation, because this is exactly the same argument that was raised over serialism and atonality in the early 20th century (which continues today). You want to blame someone for this kind of thinking, blame the modernists. They are the ones who indeed suggested for you to discard all of those concepts if you want to make something new.
Im not thinking as old at Beethoven lol, Im thinking more like Earth Wind and Fire. The change occurred really fast in musical terms, and not for the better.
XO tour life is the best trap track in existence though. I wouldn't mind if it went that way
I'm not looking to blame anybody, but just for people to realize that by not knowing the rules, you end up falling into the same patterns used. It's always the people who say "theory limits creativity" that are stuck in v-i progressions in minor literally always.
At the end of the day, serialists and atonalists were pedantic fucks, and hardly wrote as effective music as the guys who experimented with modalism and ethnocentricism. If you don't know the "rules" you don't even know what you're breaking.
I'm not saying there aren't any great rappers, but hip-hop as it exists today is, musically and lyrically a celebration of ignorance. No amount of rationalizing is going to change that.
this
No, they know the rules. They're just different rules. Serialism had its own rules. Tonal music had its own rules. And now hip hop has its own rules. A particular set of rules creates a particular sound, and when you change the rules, even slightly, you get a slightly different sound. I concede that a lot of hip hop's "innovation" do lead back to previously explored ground, due to the unfortunate boneheadedness of all pop music, but you were never meant to look at it that way. That was not the intended perspective. Those flaws just mean that hip hop's way of thinking is just a more naive and kiddie version of actual modernist thinking.
It's hitting me now that John Cage did create hip hop on Imaginary Landscape #4. It's the exact same train of thought, further down the line.
Also I am not going to defend hip hop lyrically. Maybe someone could but it wouldn't be me, and I'd disagree with that person.
But what I'm saying is that they're not rules. It's a set of nomenclature that describes a very real phenomenon that doesn't disappear because a different system is used. If anything, said new system is tacked on to move around larger blocks of matter, but the atomic level doesn't cease to exist. It's not a bad thing, but people should be thinking on multiple levels of magnification.
they suck tho
To go into a different realm of analogy, that's like saying that Python's not a real language because it gets transformed to lower level C. If you made a language that was exactly the same as English, but the "words" consisted of only commonly used English PHRASES, and actual English words were treated more like SYLLABLES, you could still end up with perfectly understandable English. And what you're advocating is like if we learned the etymology of English words, and the meanings of all the syllables, in addition to all the words themselves. It would be HELPFUL, but it wouldn't be necessary. Remember that hip hop amateurs are just looking to make music, in their chosen medium.
I think we're getting closer to an agreement actually.
Please tell me one good thing about hip-hop then
ooga booga where da white womyn at dawg