Seriously, what's the appeal? And when I mean appeal, I don't necessarily mean in the context of liking hip-hop for what it is: fun, disposal music, but the near worship of it from journos and fans alike as the most groundbreaking thing to happen to music since cavemen banged rocks together.
>Innovation
Hip-Hop seems to perpetually lag 20 years behind rock in this regard. Rock musicians were rearranging samples of tape loops, (Beatles) of themselves (Mike Oldfield), and performing all varieties of studio trickery to warp and twist sound into "something new" before hip-hop was even conceived (Dub was also doing this in the 60s).
A praise for hip-hop that is often repeated is that it isn't bound by any genre limitation and can sound like anything. Well, so can rock, and it's already sounded like pretty much anything you can think of.
>Well, hip-hop is younger and still has territory to explore.
The territory it's exploring has already been done.
>The bass lines!
Funk bass lines from the 70's are more complex and better executed than anything some hack can come with up on a 808, which is why hip-hop has to sample them. And then throw in Jazz bassists like Jaco and Stanley Clarke and the Jamaican Dub pioneers, and hip-hop further fails to impress.
>The beats, the production.
Largely simplistic compared to Downtempo, Drum 'n Bass, (real) UK Dubstep, Acid Jazz, etc. And hip-hop artists even lose out on sampling creativity to plunderphonic acts.
>The lyrics
There's some creative lyricists out there, especially in the alt-hip hop scene, but most the acts who are celebrated as "innovative," have cookie cutter lyrical content: drugs, violence, the club, and they're all named Lil and Yung these days.
So what's the appeal? Is it because teens like offending their parents by listening to face tatted rappers who irresponsibly take Xanax? Going back to 80's and 90's gangsta rap, the offending the parents theme seems to be consistent.
Thoughts?