Journey into Hip-Hop: Expanding Horizons (4/4)

This is Part 4 of a series of posts discussing my search for a particular style of hip-hop music. It isn’t intended to exhaustively cover the genre, so if anyone is inclined to deconstruct what I don’t know from these posts about what I think I know—feel free to educate me via a comment below or tweet @Gleaming_Sword. 

“This is a journey into sound, a journey which along the way will bring to you new color, new dimensions, new value.” –Eric B. and Rakim, “This Is a Journey into Sound”

Of course, nothing says all hip-hop music must conform to my specific taste. One of the side benefits of my quest for the ultimate hip-hop sound has been encountering a wide variety of music and learning to enjoy different styles. Even albums I enjoy less as a matter of taste--Wu-Tang’s Enter the Wu-Tang, for example--have something to offer.

As in most things, an open mind is rewarding, so I haven’t avoided newer music. Kanye West’s Yeezus is a masterpiece that expands hip-hop’s horizons into dark, industrial geographies, while Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly is sometimes described as post hip-hop for its genre-bending style. On Tetsuo & Youth, Lupe Fiasco packs enough wordplay into one song to boggle the mind:

 

One of my favorite points in this journey came when I suggested on Twitter that Nicki Minaj was not true hip-hop, inviting a stern correction by one of her fans who quickly pointed me to some key tracks, like “Trini Dem Girls,” which has the zoom to satisfy even my criteria. It’s definitely danceable, as demonstrated here:

 

A series of posts like this is bound to end unsatisfactorily. I can barely begin to explore all the music I have sampled along the way--I haven’t even discussed favorites like The Roots or Run the Jewels--and even if I could, it would still be but a small fraction of all the music out there. Even as I put up these posts far into my journey, I’m discovering new music, like the old-school funk and flow of Eric B. and Rakim ca. 1990 and the rhymes-with-punch of the more recent group La Coka Nostra.

And then there’s Arrested Development, my departure point. I recently picked up Since the Last Time (2006) and Standing at the Crossroads (2012), and these later examples of the band’s music have the same verve and values while also reflecting changes in hip-hop over the years. If, like me, you wonder where all the real hip-hop went and nothing else I’ve mentioned has sparked your interest, Standing at the Crossroads, available for free here, could be the place to start your own search for the ultimate sound in hip-hop.

 

Previous posts in this series:
Arrested Development (1/4)
Hip-Hop Was Dead (2/4)
Mo’ Meta Playlist (3/4)

Journey into Hip-Hop: Arrested Development (1/4)

This is Part 1 of a series of posts discussing my search for a particular style of hip-hop music. It isn’t intended to exhaustively cover the genre, so if anyone is inclined to deconstruct what I don’t know from these posts about what I think I know—feel free to educate me via a comment below or tweet @Gleaming_Sword.

 

 

“If Jay-Z is Jehovah, I’m the Antichrist.” --Speech

The history of hip-hop music begins much earlier, but my history of hip-hop begins at Lollapalooza in the summer of 1993. When Arrested Development took the stage, a standard was set that I would find unmatched during the years of hip-hop’s ascendancy, leaving me to ask: What happened to hip-hop? And thus began my search for “real” hip-hop--hip-hop with a rare quality I couldn’t have defined at the time.

In 1993, I was a recent high school graduate who had been raised on Sixties rock, grown up watching New Wave on MTV, and developed a love of interesting rock, but I immediately loved Arrested Development. After seeing the party they brought to the stage with their boom, bap, scratching, African-inspired outfits, dancing, and arm-waving elder Baba Oje, I had to check out their only album at the time: 3 Years, 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life Of...(1992).

To this day, it is my gold standard in hip-hop.

 

 

The album begins with the sound of an old, scratchy record and proceeds with an intro that is a study in building momentum. Within two and a half minutes, you hear strings, horns, guitar, scratching, a wild beat on a trap set, tribal drums, various banging, a siren, music samples, a multitude of voices, and more. You can feel as the album warms up before taking off running. The rest of the tracks are as sonically diverse, plus rapping and singing about family, love, religion, integrity, social ills and African-American pride.

Always positive and bouncing along to some new surprise, it isn’t above controversy or harsh language, as in the hit song “People Everyday,” in which Speech, Arrested Development’s MC, spins a tale of falling out with some catcallers:

 

The next year, Arrested Development released Zingalamaduni, which is as inventive, effervescent and enlightening as its predecessor. However, it didn’t sell as well and Arrested Development, which continues to make music and tour, never returned to the spotlight in America in the way suggested by its stunning debut.

In part, this may be because by 1994, the newly christened “alternative” music genre was increasingly focused on rock, especially grunge. When hip-hop did begin to dominate MTV some years later, it was the antithesis of what Arrested Development represented and would spur me to set out in search of the ultimate sound in hip-hop.


Other posts in this series:
Hip-Hop Was Dead (2/4)
Mo' Meta Playlist (3/4)
Expanding Horizons (4/4)