luka

Well-known member
my new theory is that enimen killed rapping for everyone by making it sound corny and thus led to young thug, future, migos etc
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
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
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
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:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8gyLR4NfMiI" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

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.
 

DannyL

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.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
On that subject, I was slightly irritated by this recently, in a piece on Drake on Passion of the Weiss:

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.

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.)

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.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
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.
 

luka

Well-known member
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.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy

Meek Mill feat Young Thug - Backboard (2018)

Young Thug is still great isn't he - I'd stopped paying attention
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy

ASAP Ant feat. HoodRich Pablo Juan - Diamond Dust REMIX (2018)

This beat is lovely

Like a lovely hug

Or like dying from an overdose of sleeping pills in a sleeping bag all cozy
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
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.

the aspirationally-professorial tone is why quite a lot of pitchfork reviews of rap dont quite work for me. trying to write about the music far too respectably.
or trying to mount some sort of psychological analysis of the artist above all else which can end up making the writer look a bit naive and lacking in life experience as they try to show how full of wisdom they are. young journalists trying to sound like theyre about 50. might also just be that rolling stone (?) kind of american music journalism.

The beat feels expansive and expressive, like Zaytoven is playing from the heart with Future following where he leads. And though its hook, typed out, reads as a flex—“What I’m supposed to do when these racks blue?”—it feels more like a sigh when Future sings it, or a corrective to Howlin’ Wolf’s definition of the blues as brokeness opening the door for evil. What Howlin’ Wolf didn’t account for is how that door never really shuts.

Literalists might say the tape glamorized drug abuse as a coping mechanism, but that would suggest any of it felt remotely glamorous. Mostly, it seemed, Future just wanted to forget who he was; nothing felt as good as feeling nothing at all.

As he’s evolved, Keef’s detached from that behind-the-beat pocket and shifted to a more aggressive style—one freed from the rhythmic grid other artists treat as a requisite constraint, without being untethered from it altogether, a la certain Lil B releases. This unpredictability lends a chaotic tension to the music.

He’s unafraid to use space, preferring the compositional effect of short burst phrases, rather than long, familiar cadences. (E–40’s new single "Choices (Yup)" is an example of a more traditional rapper working in this style.) Like King Louie, he will lock into a particular pattern for several lines, using extreme slant rhymes ("I just hit a stain, finagle/ I just hit a stain, finito"), as if trying to demolish the distance between words themselves, or to camouflage his thoughts. He’s made rhyming a word with itself into an art form of its own—he likes to complete the circuit early, or to let words stay static while the meaning shifts ("Nigga don’t slip, you lose it, then you lose it").
 
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luka

Well-known member
good quotes. it really is the worst form of writing on the internet, by some distance. only thing that rivals it is young philosophy undergraduates and post-graduates on twitter

Creative industries have been torn apart by the “attention economy”. The logic of clickbait seeps into literature (sad box-ticking tropologies), music (time series analysis: “x must happen 15 seconds into the track”), television (modulating content in response to viewership)The effect of statistical work on the userbase of these platforms being fed back into dark UX patterns is a teleological snare: it recursively primes cue reactivity for the behaviour analysed. The endgame is to diminish prefrontal inhibitory control of users, increase compulsion.That reward processing is sensitised in this way means only the most extreme content is selected for: aggressivity, histrionics, peacocking in all its forms. Everything becomes a performance. This is comorbid with the general tendency of modern behavioural marketing to encourage self-reinforcing lifestyle addictions. The telos of catallaxy as a distributed information processing system is to integrate the dopaminergic circuit and reduce individual agency.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Re: Pitchfork journalism, here's a good interview with Noz

http://www.lebronjames.co/interviews/andrew-nosnitsky

'Totally, I think that enthusiasm comes through. That’s why it’s such a bummer that music writing has shifted in such a way that no one can be passionate about as many things as they need to write about to make a living.

The most positive reaction I can have to music journalism now is like "yeah, that’s good. They didn’t fuck it up." That enthusiasm is gone, in the sense that somebody really needs to tell you about something, they’re excited and they want to share it. That’s what always drew me to music writing, but it has nothing to do with what you see on these websites. It’s somebody who probably agreed to review a record before they even heard it, then had to file it by 9am the next day so they could start working on the next thing.

That was a huge fear for me, a situation where I had to project this totally false magnitude of interest in Mac Miller so that I could eat.

I got really spoiled because my contract with XXL was just "file two things a week, as long or short as you want." I asked if there was any other direction, but that was it. That’s really how you learn to write, too. I wish that could be my job. That was the Gawker model, too, and I think that’s the reason that the only people doing good journalism now are Gawker graduates.

You have to care to write, it’s not like fucking building treehouses. You can’t just phone it in. We’re at a time where the value of writing is in question, but the entire business model of these companies is to churn out this writing that objectively has no purpose. Don’t you want to make a case for this? There’s so many smart people, and then they’d get a job at Complex and get fucking trapped summarizing a Drake Instagram post or something. Or maybe they love Drake Instagram posts. But you’re absolutely doing it right.'
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
Re: Pitchfork journalism, here's a good interview with Noz

http://www.lebronjames.co/interviews/andrew-nosnitsky

thanks. lot of good stuff in there.

I think that a lot of it’s a function of getting older, but it’s also a function of how music’s consumed, and who’s controlling these channels. All this fucking new Juggalo shit would’ve gotten no traction twenty years ago. Imagine what Insane Clown Posse’s streaming numbers would’ve looked like in 1997. And would The Source just be like "oh, we gotta put Twiztid on the cover." You can acknowledge, like, this is some shit for gutter white kids in Iowa. It is rap music, it has its values, but we don’t have to make it the center of the conversation.
this is where i am as a rap fan lol:
Hip-hop on the whole is in a really bad place spiritually right now. Obviously it’s always been very much a genre for capitalism, but the way people engage it now… I always use the example of Grand Puba wearing Tommy Hilfiger, where the whole thing was that black kids weren’t supposed to wear Tommy Hilfiger and so he was like "fuck that, I’m going head-to-toe Tommy Hilfiger." Or like the Lo-Life stuff, where they decided they were just gonna jack all the Polo. They literally would just go into the shop and walk out with a rack of Polo. It was capitalist, but antagonistically so. But now, if hip-hop engages with fashion, it’s like "I wanna sit next to Anna Wintour." It should be like "fuck Anna Wintour!"

And also, I’m old. So much of what I’m saying is colored by the lens of I’m a thirty-five-year-old man right now. Sometimes I wonder why I even have opinions about, like, the new Travis Scott record right now. It’s almost embarrassing to care. Like I think about when I was fifteen, and if some dude who was thirty-five was like "I don’t like Outkast" I’d be like "fuck you dawg, how do you even know who Outkast is?" I don’t think anybody over thirty even knew any of the music I listened to. Maybe the senior editor at The Source or something.
 
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
"I remember when we used to resolve conflicts by rapping in the park"

This is exhausting whinging and misreads of situations based on select perspective and it's just tiresome.
 

luka

Well-known member
it's been clear to me for years that he doesn't have what you might call a winning personality and a lot of it is whingeing but some of it is just a generational perspective, which i can relate to. the bit about mourning the internet i can relate to. i wouldn't be so quick to make sweeping generalisations about young people not caring about music or whatever but different conditions breed a different type of relationship. things have changed and the degree to which you're inclined to lament and wail depends on your personality type i guess, and how invested you were in the superceded models.
 

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
ha, i do like travis scott. i do wonder why i should invest in all the debate around it though, like noz, esp when a lot of that seems so facile. but then maybe that is just age. im sure a lot of facile debates mean a lot to teen rap fans.
 
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