i was saying to luke the other week that i felt that you had two proverbial 'hats' you wore as a listener; the rock one and the dance one. the only rap you champion, you do so through a dance lens (or even a rock lens every now and then). tricky, timbaland, schooly d, migos... is that fair?
can you get into this by way of todd edwards?
it's okay. doesn't really go anywhere. bit low key for my tastes.
i don't think that's true about the rock lens or the dance lens informing the taste in rap
there are plenty of things that i really love - from 'the message' through 'eric b is president' through 'ain't no half steppin' through to things by jay-z, dilla, outkast, kendrick - where i suspect the reasons i like it are pretty much the same as a real hip hop head's feeling for them - beat, flow, wit, charisma, bass, production, vibe. i don't think there's a particularly dance-resonant (except in so far as hip hop
is dance music) or rock-resonant angle to my enjoyment of those or sense of them being Important and Crucial
there
is though a strand in hip hop where i feel like A/ the psychodrama of what's been staged within the record, what motors it psychologically, and B/ specific sonik properties to do with attack, etc do relate to rock strongly
so for instance DMX i really liked, not
because he seemed to have certain things in common with a Henry Rollins in Black Flag, but through being grabbed by certain tunes and his whole thing, i then noticed an affinity - specifically in the way that Black Flag married aspects of punk to Black Sabbath. i liked the raspy growl, the shouty hooks, the viscerality, the doomy quality of e.g. "One More Road To Cross"
in the Eighties i did have a polemic (partly to wind up all the soulboys on NME and the style magazines) that emphasized the similarities between rap of the Schoolly D / Skinny Boys etc and rock (then considered absolutely verboten and consigned to history by them types). The commonality being noise, stabs-as-riffs, aggression, alpha-male dominance etc - so I would compare what was going on within a rap song to what was going within a song by Iggy Pop or Led Zep. (Def Jam doing the guitar-riff sampling thing certainly bolstered the polemic at that time).
And that's a pretty consistent lineage through rap - gangsta - yes rooted in specific social-racial realities but also in the psyche of the adolescent male - shared across racial lines - and his fantasies of unlimited power and a life with no constraints on desire
the logical culmination of that being the "we are the rock stars of today" thing in recent rap
to me that is the Q.E.D. of that polemic that i've been arguing since 1986.
and it makes sense historically because rock rebellion (in the pre-punk era at any rate) is partly sourced in the Staggerlee Mythos - which gangsta / trapperism is a new inflection of
Conscious rap i tend to find boring for the same reasons I find conscious rock - by and large - boring. The music has to be really really exciting and avant to overcome the non-liberation aspects of being lectured and hectored at. So Public Enemy yes, hooray. Likewise, Gang of Four. But once you strip out the jagged avant-isms or the sonic attack, and you left with the worthy sentiments or critique, I start to feel like i'm being detained. I know all this stuff already (or if i don't, i'd rather get it from a book) and agree with it, broadly speaking. Unless there's some extra sonic level to it I don't want to be educated or elevated.
(((, you mystical bastard