i corpse therefore i am
I bought 'Feel So Good' on cassette when it came out, must have been one of the first rap singles I bought.
Also bought 'I Wish' by Skeelo on cassette which to this day I absolutely love and revere as my short-man anthem.
'Danger' was one I heard early too.
Makes me think we should do a one hit wonders thread.
i corpse therefore i am
Was listening to the new drake album today - I quite like it but anyway
Was there a rapper who instituted this whole self-pitying 'it's lonely at the top'/'they'll appreciate me when i'm gone' sort of thing? I'm thinking Jay-Z, maybe? I know Puffy and co did the whole 'playa haters' thing first but was it Jay-Z who first took it emo?
Beast of Burden
i corpse therefore i am
Beast of Burden
Beast of Burden
my new theory is that enimen killed rapping for everyone by making it sound corny and thus led to young thug, future, migos etc
i corpse therefore i am
Surely Lil Wayne led to Thug/Future et al and he was attained his 'Greatest Rapper Alive' status by rappity rapping in a way not a million miles away from Eminem? (Right down to the bassless voice) Then there's the rise of crunk and snap music, which I seem to recall was the first of this new school of rapping that was spoken out against by the East coast figureheads e.g. Wu Tang - Soulja Boy et al... Then trap, which continued to shift focus more onto club/car-stereo ready beats, and autotune, T-Pain and latterly Kanye/Drake popularising sing-rapping...
inb4 Crowley corrects my rap history
Beast of Burden
The autotune stuff kinda predated trap and the East Coast sensibilities were talking down Southern Rap as early as the late 90s, but generally nah that's p. spot on.
I had a theory with a friend who asked why the content is so rote in the rap that comes out of Wayne in the Thug/Migos/Uzi/etc. direction and it's that that the melodic dimension in addition to the technique creates a whole new focal point that skews the balance. Originally the dualism was rhythm and words, and then throwing in melody changes to how people shift that around mentally so you can focus and kill one but slowly rot in another. Eminem was perfectly functional and a perfectionist in the original dualism, to a fault in some ways.
The irony is people will say his lyrics got excessively corny but as a technician he's fine whereas I think he got really awful as a technician after he kind of went through the whole Rebirthing-era of his albums post "Recovery" and using rock drums to allow him to run roughshod with flows and then decide everything on a proper rap beat just needed to machine-gun blast things with syllables. It's horrendous when you think about where the actual beats are and his relationship to it. Good example of my argument:
Like so we all know this song sorta/kinda and how Busta is the verse everyone loves because it's like "Yaaay Busta is great, steals the show" but if you pay attention beyond the double time... he's all over the place rhythmically in no correspondence to the beat and in all honesty he's just saying bullshit. Wayne on the other hand, still pretty dexterous, diff flows, diff rhyme approaches. The former is more flashy, but is it fundamentally better than the latter? Not really.
Wild Horses
New Keef (Mansion Music) is fucking GREAT. He just seems to get better and better. This is not the highlight but first one that's really stuck in my head.
Last edited by DannyL; 16-07-2018 at 10:14 AM.
i corpse therefore i am
Beast of Burden
i corpse therefore i am
On that subject, I was slightly irritated by this recently, in a piece on Drake on Passion of the Weiss:
The writer appears to miss, or pass over, the rhyme of 'gauge it'. (Cos for some reason he only counts the 'on/an' rhyme and not the 'dayt'/'sat' rhyme.)On “Elevate,” he uses a simple end rhyme, like he does on many tracks, but quickens his delivery of lines at the top of the bar so it sounds more complex (“When I was pumping gas on road trips to go from Cincinnati on to Dayton/ I couldn’t gauge it I wanna thank God for working way harder than Satan”). It’s not awful or devoid of skill, just lackluster and predictable.
Not defending Drake but it just seemed funny to me that the writer is assuming this professorial tone ('lacklustre and predictable' oh how dreary) while missing a clear rhyme that the least educated listener can hear easily.
Beast of Burden
Beast of Burden
Those rhyme scheme videos are interesting as hell but always still gauge things in a poetic meter way.
My dream for a while was to learn how to do rhythmic notation and start to transcribe rap verses on charts as a sort of admittedly self-indulgent weirdo way of demonstrating placement and rhythmic considerations in a musical sense in rap. Useless idea but it was lingering with me for a while.
Beast of Burden
i mean even that thing on drake gets past what you would be discussing in terms of poetic meter usually as soon as it says quickens his delivery
that puts you outside what you would discuss in literary terms but it's a good point anyway. something like this
foregrounds all the elements you can't really talk about in traditional literary terms.
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