is everyone having a good time?
not much nuance come to think of it. the best i can do is say that there was a golden age in the 90's, there was some good stuff in the early 2000's that was largely just feeding off the ideas from the 90's, then there's a 10 year period where interesting ideas were formulated but the music itself wasn't that good. some of those ideas eventually coalesced and bought us the post-2014 golden age. waka made some great choons in the middle of all that.
that plays out across both rap and r&b, and probably to greater effect in the latter, the timbaland-aaliyah collaboration and so on...
the worst period for me was something like 96/97/98. puff daddy era. worst period up until now anyway.
lil durks pretty pointless in the scheme of things isnt he
When are you going to write your rap book, Crowley?
Rap's biggest problem is its never actually had one singular moment, despite the changing of the history to suit such. Def Jam was ultimately a non-existent movement consisting of friends who weren't on their label (Run DMC) who were actually considered retroactive and lackluster by the larger scene, a minstrel act by punks (Beastie Boys), an industrial group of neo-conservatives fronted by an old man from Long Island (P.E.). Their only act who was contemporaneous and actually progressive was LL Cool J and his production constantly suffered and rotted into the past while non-Def Jam rap acts were being produced in much more significant ways.
You think A Moment in rap is real but then you realize how its reflective of larger and larger things. But we tend to think every experience was the same. The scene in True Detective where the cop is running through a drug den in Louisiana in the mid 90s... and they have the nerve to play a Wu-Tang record. Because the people who dictated the history were the people who got there first.
Now there is no history because historicization was done so badly and now nobody does it at all because its seen as such an abuse. All of the access and information results into an ahistorical ignorance which in many ways is fine but its also sad because you can't FIX the past if you just pretend it never happened.