The TIME Barrier.

blissblogger

Well-known member
put me in mind of this
almost the polar opposite of the Scuba thing, in part b/c it's not just a collection of rave golden age signifers but also an evocation of the more universal experience of being on the cusp of adulthood, fucking around with your friends, creating the kind of memories you'll look wistfully back on 10, 20 years later. which after all is what people are really reflecting on. I also like how it manages to condense 20 years of nuum history into something that sounds contemporary (well 2010 contemporary) and not just like a pastiche. tbh I've always kinda thought that Zomby record sucked. plus how can you go wrong with Shola Ama.

yeah that is much superior - nice evocation of something (although being in B&W as signifier of the past is a bit obvious)

but nostalgia is a legit subject for music - including nostalgia for music

all those "back in the day" rap songs
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
all those "back in the day" rap songs

absolutely

I think the difference is, nostalgia is a universal human experience/emotion, while details of any era are specific to that era.

hence can't just capture the feeling with a bunch of lazy signifying cliches, but you can use those signifiers to tap into something more universal.
 

luka

Well-known member
it took you guys long enough to get there but this is the essence of the greatness of Rakim I think

you could argue his influence was more delayed than Kool G Rap. lyrically lyrical stuff was done to death by the late 90s but lotta more recent things fuck with that kinda illusion

i think everyone was much more interested in explaining how rakim might not sound great (a novel idea) than explaining why he was great (done to death)
 

luka

Well-known member
i cant hear him as anything but great so it was like uh, what, how is that possible?!
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Tbf Ive never for the life of me been able to get into Chuck D or KRS One despite recognising their importance
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
i think everyone was much more interested in explaining how rakim might not sound great (a novel idea) than explaining why he was great (done to death)

fair point. what I should have said was that's a pure distillation of the defense of Rakim's greatness, one line that sums it up to naysayers.

after all it's much harder to prove the greatness of something everyone agrees is great, the way it took Bertrand Russell hundreds of pages to mathematically prove 1+1=2
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Tbf Ive never for the life of me been able to get into Chuck D or KRS One despite recognising their importance

for me KRS One is yes, Chuck D mostly no. did people really listen to Public Enemy for the rapping tho? I mean for the message yeah but the actual rapping
 

CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
I find them both hectoring I suppose. Give me Slick Rick and Rakim any day.

Doubt I've listened to enough of either though, really. Esp. KRS.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I'm still interested in Barty's point, though - there does seems to be a step-change in what you expect rappers to sound like over about the first half of the nineties, even if that doesn't stop me getting into Rakim. If I was going to try to pin it down I'd say it's that the flows get looser and less locked on the rhythm and rappers make more of a feature of imprecise diction, accents, nonverbal noises.

It's at the same time that slow beats get a lot more prevalent and explicit gangsterism gets more mainstream, both of which are presumably related on some level.
 

luka

Well-known member
a record is an enviroment but it's also a social enviroment. what is a social enviroment? think of it in terms of diction. what registers are in use. what can and cant be broached and how. how this differs from context to context.
the tentative and allusive, cautious language of courting or the bruising and boorish language, albeit frequently hilarious, of male groups.
 

luka

Well-known member
I'm still interested in Barty's point, though - there does seems to be a step-change in what you expect rappers to sound like over about the first half of the nineties, even if that doesn't stop me getting into Rakim. If I was going to try to pin it down I'd say it's that the flows get looser and less locked on the rhythm and rappers make more of a feature of imprecise diction, accents, nonverbal noises.

It's at the same time that slow beats get a lot more prevalent and explicit gangsterism gets more mainstream, both of which are presumably related on some level.

compare and contrast black moon album versions with remix version. buckshot's remodelled flow.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Jay-Z is a good example of that evolution - his earliest raps are very fast and showy, but in a quite constricted way, and then as he became successful he became THE 'conversational' rapper.
 

luka

Well-known member
Jay-Z is a good example of that evolution - his earliest raps are very fast and showy, but in a quite constricted way, and then as he became successful he became THE 'conversational' rapper.

yeah but thats a different time period
 

luka

Well-known member
Diction has multiple concerns, of which register is foremost—another way of saying this is whether words are either formal or informal in the social context. Literary diction analysis reveals how a passage establishes tone and characterization, e.g. a preponderance of verbs relating physical movement suggests an active character, while a preponderance of verbs relating states of mind portrays an introspective character. Diction also has an impact upon word choice and syntax.

Aristotle, in The Poetics (20) states that "Diction comprises eight elements: Phoneme, Syllable, Conjunction, Connective, Noun, Verb, Inflection, and Utterance. However, Epps states[7] that in this passage "the text is so confused and some of the words have such a variety of meanings that one cannot always be certain what the Greek says, much less what Aristotle means."

Contents

1 In literature
2 See also
3 References
4 External links
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
early rapping would have been still largely conditioned by its recent origins as live performance, and then secondarily being as played as records in a club

so it would need to project outwards and have a legible rhyme scheme, that to today's ears sounds like doggerel

but as rap evolves, rapping styles adapt to the studio recording as the prime locus (the music is also getting access to the radio now, which it didn't for a long time, early on - and also maturing into an album based form)

so the vocals sit majestically in the midst of a cinematic recording, rather than project outwards across a space

things get looser and more intimate because they are able to

i should think that will only intensify as more and more people listen almost entirely on headphones - and a little bitty low quality ones as well - perhaps that's one of the things Drake is, the earbud rapper

it's a bit like the change in singing in mid-century popular music

you listen to an early musical from the 30s and the singers are still coming out what is essentially operetta - projecting across a large space, without amplification- the singing is stagey and it belts - you have to reach the people in the cheap seats - even when it's a movie, the reference point is still musical theater

then Bing Crosby, Sinatra etc discover what can be done with a close microphone and invent crooning, a stylesuited to recording - intimate, right in your ear - Sinatra pretty much invents the LP-as-whole-listening-experience thing
 

luka

Well-known member
Eric B and Rakim™‏Verified account @EricBandRakim

You are now witnessing the devolution of rap music. The death of poetry and smoothness, they use this. The absence of a message. The inability to create meaningful change through words and verses, but the worse is, they don’t even know they hurt this artful purpose, it’s tragic.
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