“Hip Hop, started out in the park/We used to do it to avoid the narcs.”
-Jay-Z — “I Do It for Hip Hop”
Like it or not, embrace it or shun it, all art forms, all movements and all people evolve and devolve. That’s just the nature of things. Nothing gold can stay. While manifestations of adroit and traditional rap music still exist, aberrations from what now seems like classic hip hop are now the rule, not the exception. Hip-hop is not dead, but that’s only because hip-hop doesn’t mean any single thing anymore.
Hip-hop music did not begin with Tupac Shakur; its roots date back far before him. However, I view Tupac as the progenitor of modern rap music, an era beginning roughly with the dawn of the ‘90s. As Jay-Z clarifies in the epigraph above, hip-hop began as a cathartic pastime that engaged an underprivileged group of people and allowed them to express life’s difficulties by cleverly articulating those troubles through lyrics. Then Tupac came around and really brought the art form into the limelight.
For roughly a decade and a half, the umbrella of good rap music had a somewhat clear nucleus and successfully straddled the line between mainstream success and staying true to poignant self-expression and complex rhyme schemes. During this time, artists like Jay-Z, Nas, The Notorious B.I.G., Eminem, Common, Outkast and Kanye West produced a sonorous picture of what rap music can be when it’s at its best. These artists eloquently painted a picture of the goings-on around them and matched their lyrical prowess with intricate flows and beats that adeptly benefited the listening experience.
Rap’s image today is markedly different from what it was even six years ago. I believe this point to be best emphasized by Drake’s Take Care, which I view as an amalgamation of bad rap, bad R&B, bad pop and bad house music, despite securing the award for Best Rap Album at this year’s Grammys. But that’s what’s poppin’ on the radio.
Of course, the Grammys are not the end all be all encyclopedia of what constitutes good music. But what’s telling is that Take Care overtook Nas’ Life is Good and Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor 2 to usurp the 2013 rap throne. Both of the latter albums constitute rap in the classical sense, whereas Drake’s album seems like a foreign genre to anything 2Pac would have conceived of producing.
But here we see the evolutions and devolutions of modern hip hop. There is no longer one thing called rap music. The innovation and creativity of Kanye West is partly to blame for that. But the real culprit is the marketability of hip-hop culture to consumers who couldn’t care less about its roots or the intricacies and complexities of its many apexes. Again, this isn’t any single person’s fault, it’s just the nature of capitalism.
But for every artist like Drake and B.o.B, who blur the genre of rap by infusing it with pop-singing and musical instruments that are unorthodox in the rap realm and for every Chief Keef (who venally makes music for the lowest common denominator by glorifying gratuitous violence and emphasizing the best possible life as one entirely composed of promiscuous sex, hard drugs and improper grammar) there exist artists like Wale, J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar, who pull mainstream rap back into the realm of self-conscious lyricism and intellectualism.
Artists like Macklemore, who blend radio beats and pop sounds with genuine emotion, heartfelt writing, political undertones and stimulating concepts further convolute the story. Whereas Chief Keef flawlessly emphasizes the devolution of rap, Macklemore’s panache is the perfect example of how rap has evolved.
There is no such thing as rap anymore. There are songs whose essences have roots in rap. There are artists who embody what rap used to be. But rap has become so diverse, so dynamic that there can no longer be one umbrella term to define the musical manifestation of the hip hop movement. There are now only subgenres that emanate from the late parent movement. In many cases this is a tragedy. In many cases this is a blessing. But in any case, it is simply what it is.
Do you think hip-hop’s getting better? Or do you really like Drake? Let Zachary know at pestine@wisc.edu.
