Journey into Hip-Hop: Hip-Hop Was Dead (2/4)

 

This is Part 2 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.

“And something changed when commerce arrived. Good and bad stopped mattering; only effective and ineffective mattered. Whether a record worked on an audience became the standard, rather than whether or not it was any good.” –Questlove, Mo’ Meta Blues

By the late 90s and early 2000s, hip-hop music had risen to prominence in the music scene, but I didn’t like any of it. I felt like I should, because I’d never had anything against the genre, but a new aesthetic had taken over so that the triumph of hip-hop was simultaneously its death.

In his memoir Mo’ Meta Blues, The Roots drummer Questlove actually places the death of hip-hop a little sooner: the Source awards in May 1995:

 

They sat the artistic rappers, the have-nots of hip-hop, on the far right side: Nas, Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang, Busta Rhymes, and us. In the center of the place you had the Death Row crew and all the non-New York acts. On the far left of the place, you had the Bad Boy team. That room was like Apocalypse Now: The Hip-Hop Version. If you had sparked two rocks together the place would have exploded.

The divisions played out in the competition, with Nas’s Illmatic up against The Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die:

One of those two records, Illmatic, was done in the naïve old hip-hop style of just being a great album from start to finish, with great production, great MCing, a sharp perspective, and so on. The other album was done with an eye toward hit singles, and it succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Questlove’s description of how the night progressed is sad:

So both albums were up for the same awards, and of course Biggie won them all. And for every award Biggie got I watched Nas just wilt in defeat, and that killed me inside.

The new dominant aesthetic was one of fame, riches, bitches, gang violence and racial epithets--but all in a sleek pop package. Real instrumentation, scratching, and gritty samples were less noticeable in the music or had disappeared altogether, replaced by a narrow band of weak beats, slower tempos, and cheap sound effects. The rapping was often sub-par, or so fast and contrived as to be incomprehensible, and the videos were Gatsbean nightmares of gaudy cars and suits, booty in thongs, Benjamins, Kristal showers, and overblown cinematic prologues and interludes (as in The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize").

 

 

To this day, when you meet someone who says they hate hip-hop, this is why. There’s often a broader animus behind such comments, but many of the artists and the producers who pushed them were guilty as charged, and they steered hip-hop in a direction from which it has yet to fully recover. One review I saw for A$AP Rocky’s At.Long.Last.A$Ap (2015) recommended it as one of the best new hip-hop albums if you could overlook all the juvenile posturing and casual misogyny.

This is what constitutes praise in hip-hop today?

But no doubt I’m being unfair to some extent. Reviewing some tracks for this post, I found much more to enjoy in the music than I did back then. In Mo’ Meta Blues, Questlove mentions Jay-Z in the context of the genre’s Copernican devolution, but he also expresses respect, and indeed Jay-Z’s last major release, Magna Carta… Holy Grail (2013), showcases an impressive lyrical and musical versatility. Some reviewers said he sounds almost bored on the album, but I suspect that’s because he could rap wonders even in his sleep.

And yet I can’t help but sniff in derision when I see comments online describing music from this period as “old school.” Quite possibly, many today don’t know there was a time before . . .

Other posts in this series:

Arrested Development (1/4)
Mo' Meta Playlist (3/4)
Expanding Horizons (4/4)

 

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)

 

A Gatsbean Odyssey: American Modernity (4/7)

We tend to see The Great Gatsby as a picture of the 1920s, but backwards through the lens of the present. We focus on what characterizes the past for us in retrospect, but we might try to see what was significant to Fitzgerald writing from within those times. The introduction by Guy Reynolds to my copy of The Great Gatsby does this nicely:

“Fitzgerald was born into the America of the horse, gaslight and railroad, but by 1925 the world was made of electricity, cars and telephones.”

When we encounter The Great Gatsby, we focus on bootleggers, speakeasies, flappers, big-band jazz and kooky dances, but Reynolds shows how Fitzgerald was also focused on technology: telephones, photography, cinema, home appliances, motor cars, skyscrapers and artificial illumination. Whereas Georgie in Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons could scoff at horseless carriages as a newfangled invention that would soon fade away, cars in The Great Gatsby are undeniably here to stay, they are ubiquitous, and they are part of the pulse of city.

Fitzgerald is also focused on money, class disparity, the fabulous excess of capitalism high on financial speculation, and the dishonest who thrive in such a climate. Reynolds sums up as follows:

“In The Great Gatsby the American is a [cheating] sportsman, a stockbroker or a crook inhabiting a fluid, mobile, society.”

Fitzgerald’s attitude toward his times was cynical. Reynolds has a number of great phrases describing what the author saw: “dizzying, narcissistic wealth and its sudden corruption,” “febrile superficiality,” “glamour, allure and ultimate artificiality,” “consumerisation of the self,” “trickery, imposture and conning,” “fetishisation of good clothes” and “conspicuous consumption.” Luhrmann highlights these themes by adorning his film with hip-hop music from artists like Jay-Z who are known for their celebration of extravagant wealth.

 

Jay-Z's "$100 Bill":

 

The use of a music genre that didn’t even exist in Fitzgerald’s day doesn’t clash with the subject matter because America today is so similar. The technology may have changed, but the powerful role played by technology and money in our society has not. If there is a big difference, it is that we the normal people are more jaded than the characters in Fitzgerald: We know their world crashes.

 

And soon.

America had bought the ticket, and beginning with the stock market crash of 1929, it had to take the ride.

 

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