Atlanta Rap 2014-2016
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sadmanbarty
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Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I think the last decade especially has seen a lot of experimentation with the voice in rap music - including autotune - and lyrics have become less important than delivery, to the point of the "mumble rap" thing, where it's not always mumbled but its often almost aggressively difficult to understand.
With my usual cheery ignorance I'll declare that Gucci Mane was a big innovator in this respect. He was mush mouthed, and I remember back in 2010 when I reconnected with rap people were saying they couldn't understand him, he sounded retarded etc. But compare him to some of the new school of mumble rappers and he sounds pretty crisp and clear - Future and Young Thug are nigh on incomprehensible at times, and yet huge stars.
To risk reprisals from ardent Futurologists, a future mixtape might have a handful of memorable lines, one or two revealing moments, but most of the time it doesn't matter what he's saying really.
And actually this extends to Kendrick too - obviously he has a lot more interesting things to say than Future as a general rule but his lyrics aren't impressive in the sense they would have been for a rapper of his reputation and stylistic lane in the 90s. It's all about his melodies, his array of voices and flows etc.
With my usual cheery ignorance I'll declare that Gucci Mane was a big innovator in this respect. He was mush mouthed, and I remember back in 2010 when I reconnected with rap people were saying they couldn't understand him, he sounded retarded etc. But compare him to some of the new school of mumble rappers and he sounds pretty crisp and clear - Future and Young Thug are nigh on incomprehensible at times, and yet huge stars.
To risk reprisals from ardent Futurologists, a future mixtape might have a handful of memorable lines, one or two revealing moments, but most of the time it doesn't matter what he's saying really.
And actually this extends to Kendrick too - obviously he has a lot more interesting things to say than Future as a general rule but his lyrics aren't impressive in the sense they would have been for a rapper of his reputation and stylistic lane in the 90s. It's all about his melodies, his array of voices and flows etc.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I wonder if one of the drivers of this sort of innovation is the low financial threshold for recording these days. Or the ease with which voices can be doubled up, pitched up and down, etc. Basically the advances in production have filtered into the vocals as well as the beats.
luka
Well-known member
yeah its digital innit. was saying this in relation to keef. recording becomes notebook/sketchpad as opposed to primed canvas.
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
pretty
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
pretty
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
Its most appropriate to Keef b/c Keef had a tendency to self-engineer and eventually self-produce. That 2013-2015 period you saw a lot of Keef basically arranging himself and constructing himself as he wanted to be heard in the most literal of terms. I genuinely detest "Auteur Theory" in rap because I obviously default to the idea of scene/dialogical formulation of style and ideas but for the most part he really did veer off and go in his own little space for a while. Lil' B did that in a very different way before him and Keef listened to a lot of Lil' B (though that aspect of him gets drastically underplayed). IDK if the two are related or not.
Contrastingly, Thug depended mostly on whomever in the Atlanta scene was engineering him. (Sadly in recent years some idiot con artist has taken unnecessary credit for a lot of Thug's autotuned experiments when in reality all of that was based on material he wrote and recorded in Atlanta studios; The LA material that guy is responsible for is mostly paff imo and he got to go into the Red Bull Music Academy and act like a creative genius. His work prior to Young Thug was for pop rock bands, he stumbled into credibility). A lot of his ideas, I don't know if they were or weren't processed with his input but then there's a lot of composition in this sort of collaboration that gets uncredited. Fetty Wap had an engineer on all his early material who helped him sound the way he did whom he'd credit very early on and then those two may/may not still work together and if not there's an argument that's why Fetty doesn't consistently sound as enjoyable. Who can say.
Ironically this response is me doing more and not acknowledging Atlanta AT ALL so Luka, Barty & Co. get to wait even longer.
ok, no one really answered your question here, so I will have a stab at this.
I too am also white and middle-class, but I am from New York City and my mother is from Georgia (she's from Savannah, but my aunt lives nearish to Atlanta, so close enough) so I can tell you a bit about the differences between the cities.
for one thing, they are just totally different in terms of urban geography. New York City is the densest city in the US; obviously Manhattan is particularly dense but even in the Outer Boroughs you mostly have a level of urban density that will be familiar to Europeans. This is especially the case in the poorer areas where rappers have traditionally come from - the South Bronx and central/eastern Brooklyn have a lot of massive public housing complexes as well as trains, buses and other kinds of public infrastructure. New York City itself also utterly dominates the wider metropolitan area (aka the Tri-State Area) in economic and cultural terms. Probably around 40% of the metropolitan area population lives in New York City, with another big chunk of the population living in highly urban satellite cities like Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Newark, Hoboken, Jersey City, etc.
Atlanta is different - for one thing the city itself isn't that big; it's only half a million in a metropolitan area of almost six million people. So Atlanta contains only a tenth of the metropolitan area's population. And the city proper is much less dense than NYC, and the suburbs even more so. Most people live in single-family homes and to the extent that people live in apartments they are overwhelmingly low-slung two- or three-storey complexes; not too many 20+ storey project towers. The whole physical structure is totally different - it's overwhelmingly car-dependent and sprawling. So a lot of the time when people refer to 'Atlanta' it is not just to the city itself but to the vast suburban sprawl that surrounds it as well. For a while after the Civil Rights movement the city was majority black and Democratic while the suburbs were majority white and Republican, but that has become more mixed in recent years as many suburban areas have become much more black (there are quite a few majority black suburbs in the Atlanta area), and the city has gentrified and become more white. One impact of this city/suburban divide (which has been more pronounced than the divisions in the NYC area) is that the public transport system is a joke for such a big area. The car is king, and one side effect of that is that Atlanta has really horrendous traffic. Also, the big sprawl means that Atlanta is much more oriented around malls, strip malls, big box stores, and all of the other types of car-centric retail infrastructure than New York is.
Atlanta itself has long played a very important role in African-American life - there are a whole bunch of what are called HBCU's (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) there, and the Atlanta area has developed a very large black middle- and upper-middle class. The metropolitan area is one-third black, and the population has been booming as black professionals from across America have flocked there for job opportunities. There are a lot of big companies headquartered in the Atlanta area (Delta, Coca-Cola, CNN, etc) and the economy has been pretty strong. So there are a lot of opportunities! On the flip side, that means that in Atlanta there is also a pretty big class divide between different parts of the black community. You have well-educated professionals in good jobs as well as a lot of poverty and struggle. New York City of course also has a black middle-class and some of these issues as well, but in my experience at least Atlanta is more obviously black and black success and wealth is more visible.
Even beyond the black population, Atlanta has been economically booming for a while - the population has grown really rapidly in the last few decades (this also contributes to the horrendous traffic).
Also, another difference is demographic, in that I would also say that the black population in Atlanta is more African-American, i.e. descended from slaves who lived in the Southern states. In New York a very large proportion of the black population are immigrants or the children of immigrants (predominantly from the Caribbean), whereas Atlanta, although it of course has black immigrants, doesn't have such large or prominent communities of Jamaicans, Haitians, Trinidadians, etc. Nor does it have big communities from the Spanish Caribbean, like New York does - far fewer Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. The Atlanta area now has a pretty sizeable number of Latino immigrants, but they are mostly Mexicans and Central Americans afaik. Puerto Ricans and Dominicans have played a big role in the history of New York hip-hop and really in New York City culture in general, which is probably not something that Europeans are all that aware of. So their absence will also affect Atlanta in comparison to New York.
Also, white Atlanta is very different from white New York. Obviously the Atlanta area has taken many white transplants from other parts of the country, but in the metro area most whites are still Protestant and of British descent, whereas in New York most whites are either Jewish or Catholic and, um, not descended from Brits. I am sure you would know this already, but Southern whites have historically had quite different opinions on the role of government and on optimal levels of taxation from Jewish/Catholic New Yorkers. This is wandering quite far from music, but these choices also affect how Atlanta is, and how it has developed, which probably does affect the music in some weird and undefinable way.
The last piece of the puzzle is the weather. Have you ever been to Georgia in August? It's like walking through a giant open-air sauna. It's hot and sticky. Sure, New York gets hot and humid too in the summer, but the South is just way worse. It really affects the general tenor of everyday life - things are simply a lot slower.
So, I am not really sure how that feeds into the music, but Atlanta is very different demographically, economically, politically, climactically and geographically from New York City, so it stands to reason that this will play some role in the differences in musical output.
Whoa, that was an essay.
TL;DR: Atlanta is very different from New York
Last edited:
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
Luka demaned I finish what I started so I'm gonna try to demonstrate my points a lot more thoroughly for the moment...
There's basically two generational lines that occur in Atlanta Rap in this decade. The first is the one who came before who existed in what I'd call the "Crunk" generation. All these rappers owe their existence to the crunk boom first and foremost as that was a result of the big explosion of Atlanta being a new mass movement culture who could dictate trends; post-Outkast country rap existed but the successes were tangible and harder to determine (and at least one or two acts like Polow da Don from Jim Crow, Youngbloodz and even T.I. himself were loosely affiliated with the Outkast camp) beyond a couple of hits or some critical favor.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6E0oGIWpiGs" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
In fact you have T.I. making a cameo here for this Polow-produced, Big Boi featuring Youngbloodz record.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HV2r0XfRJUY" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Aaaaand here's Youngbloodz reinventing themselves into crunk rappers.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/E1u9u7mq9Ck" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
And T.I. dabbling in the crunk trend.
It has to go without saying that Crunk is a big factor into what became KNOWN AS TRAP in the turn of the decade via Waka Flocka Flame because in reality he's a throwback to Crunk in that 2nd wave by himself (though Luger's production certainly was a major force in that). The reality of the situation is you can for many acts see a transition from that country-rap sound (to which trap was a sub-genre originally which TI and Gucci (not Jeezy)) existed on as local phenomena. Not mainstream just by the nature of it being such a singular and very ATL thing. Both of them actually were able to further their success off Snap Rap which was a sort of minimalist take on crunk by the likes of Nitti, Soulja Boy & others.
As this happens there are some acts who kind of work as bridges between the generations such as Crime Mob and Dem Franchize Boyz (I wouldn't call D4L necessarily one of these because of their age but they no doubt held major influence) where the career model is not only shifting from going from the traditional business models of self-promotion to 'virality' via Myspace, Youtube, Imeem, & other digital avenues of easy music distribution, but also an attitude. This occurs all over the nation basically and in different attitudes but the whole spiel is that it becomes easy to get your music to your peers without having to be 'anyone'. You don't need to be on the radio, you don't need to be on TV; there's nothing more legitimate than being able to watch it on your computer the same way you might try to watch or listen to actual Musical celebrities. The piracy and cheapness and ease of being able to make music finally also goes into the digital realm. (For the older UK heads obviously there's a parallel to grime here though the culture is so much more different b/c Grime is a hybrid and doesn't really easily exist in rap as you already know, whereas all this just happens in rap as rap is supposed to go.)
What you have resulting is a scene dominated by kids, for kids, making literal Teen-Pop Rap. At first it comes out of Snap going into a very bright and fizzy direction (possibly due to a prevalence of ecstasy on the scene) that's definitely coming out of Gucci but also a couple of post-Gucci Atlanta rappers like J-Money/Futuristic and Yung LA.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jTS_zOSiGBo" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Luka calls this stuff 'annoying' and ultimately he's right because it's basically a juvenile scene sonically and energy-wise. A lot of the energy goes to weird jokes about flashiness that are fueled by the post-virality notion that if it pisses people off its good and pokes fun at mores in a way that deflates the machismo of rap.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6d3lBL1PFhQ" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This gets ugly because as the scene is dominated the older generation just blatantly copies it because the few who are commercially viable and still making music (because few if anyone are mature adults and have survived both the Crunk Wave ('02-'04) and the snap wave ('05-'07). So you have teens being brats and adults playing at being teens in a sense. There's a lot of ideas from younger kids starting trends being ripped off; specifically you often see Travis Porter, one of the largest phenomenon groups, watching as their collaborators such as Yung LA go off into the commercial sphere while they remain a grassroots phenomenon. I've got friends who talk of their crowds causing literal riot cops being called on them at SXSW in 07 but it took forever for them to finally have a retail album and by that time a lot of the buzz had deflated and we were in the trap boom by that point.
I'm jumping across timelines back and forth here but the 2nd generation I indicated is where both Thug and a lot of his most immediate peers (Skooly, Rich Homie Quan, Cash Out, Migos) and acts in cities that are utterly disconnected to Atlanta but would tangentially mine similar territories and also both be influenced by and/or influence the parallel scenes (The post-hyphy scene with Lil' B who begat the jerk scene with YG and Chief Keef in Chicago to a less explored degree). In this generation the primary understanding of rap is how to use the voice as an irritant, almost in a blues-like tradition (as opposed to the Older "Bluesman" recognized Country Rappers such as Boosie). A lot of these rappers, you go back to their earliest available material and so much of it is STRAIGHT OUT of the futuristic playbook with both its autotune usage, the cadences, the whining voices (which Thug has still kept in pretty much earnest). You look at Young Thug's earliest 'hit' in Atlanta:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sosAMnL8fc4" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
And you easily can slot it next to material such as
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q-DK2x07Qg8" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zmmNq1Ividg" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Luka and Barty are not wrong to argue that Thug has taken these sort of understandings of rap to a further level of technique and actual skillset along with good traditional rapping. But its emerged from this scene and understanding how to harness comprehending rap on this level via autotune, via appreciation of melody over lyrics, via this higher-voiced effervescence. But as a person I once saw on twitter say "If you're the kind of person who used to listen to the F.L.Y. album on your iPod, you know there's nothing that 'weird' about Young Thug" and it was by far the most succinct statement to how far the narrative on him had been spun poorly.
There's a lot of stuff here I'm failing to mention such as you know, why this scene eventually got recodified into masculine presentation after the trap boom and of course Future who's both a over and under emphasized figure in this scene in particular but I think this is enough for a base argument.
There's basically two generational lines that occur in Atlanta Rap in this decade. The first is the one who came before who existed in what I'd call the "Crunk" generation. All these rappers owe their existence to the crunk boom first and foremost as that was a result of the big explosion of Atlanta being a new mass movement culture who could dictate trends; post-Outkast country rap existed but the successes were tangible and harder to determine (and at least one or two acts like Polow da Don from Jim Crow, Youngbloodz and even T.I. himself were loosely affiliated with the Outkast camp) beyond a couple of hits or some critical favor.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6E0oGIWpiGs" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
In fact you have T.I. making a cameo here for this Polow-produced, Big Boi featuring Youngbloodz record.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HV2r0XfRJUY" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Aaaaand here's Youngbloodz reinventing themselves into crunk rappers.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/E1u9u7mq9Ck" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
And T.I. dabbling in the crunk trend.
It has to go without saying that Crunk is a big factor into what became KNOWN AS TRAP in the turn of the decade via Waka Flocka Flame because in reality he's a throwback to Crunk in that 2nd wave by himself (though Luger's production certainly was a major force in that). The reality of the situation is you can for many acts see a transition from that country-rap sound (to which trap was a sub-genre originally which TI and Gucci (not Jeezy)) existed on as local phenomena. Not mainstream just by the nature of it being such a singular and very ATL thing. Both of them actually were able to further their success off Snap Rap which was a sort of minimalist take on crunk by the likes of Nitti, Soulja Boy & others.
As this happens there are some acts who kind of work as bridges between the generations such as Crime Mob and Dem Franchize Boyz (I wouldn't call D4L necessarily one of these because of their age but they no doubt held major influence) where the career model is not only shifting from going from the traditional business models of self-promotion to 'virality' via Myspace, Youtube, Imeem, & other digital avenues of easy music distribution, but also an attitude. This occurs all over the nation basically and in different attitudes but the whole spiel is that it becomes easy to get your music to your peers without having to be 'anyone'. You don't need to be on the radio, you don't need to be on TV; there's nothing more legitimate than being able to watch it on your computer the same way you might try to watch or listen to actual Musical celebrities. The piracy and cheapness and ease of being able to make music finally also goes into the digital realm. (For the older UK heads obviously there's a parallel to grime here though the culture is so much more different b/c Grime is a hybrid and doesn't really easily exist in rap as you already know, whereas all this just happens in rap as rap is supposed to go.)
What you have resulting is a scene dominated by kids, for kids, making literal Teen-Pop Rap. At first it comes out of Snap going into a very bright and fizzy direction (possibly due to a prevalence of ecstasy on the scene) that's definitely coming out of Gucci but also a couple of post-Gucci Atlanta rappers like J-Money/Futuristic and Yung LA.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jTS_zOSiGBo" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Luka calls this stuff 'annoying' and ultimately he's right because it's basically a juvenile scene sonically and energy-wise. A lot of the energy goes to weird jokes about flashiness that are fueled by the post-virality notion that if it pisses people off its good and pokes fun at mores in a way that deflates the machismo of rap.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6d3lBL1PFhQ" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This gets ugly because as the scene is dominated the older generation just blatantly copies it because the few who are commercially viable and still making music (because few if anyone are mature adults and have survived both the Crunk Wave ('02-'04) and the snap wave ('05-'07). So you have teens being brats and adults playing at being teens in a sense. There's a lot of ideas from younger kids starting trends being ripped off; specifically you often see Travis Porter, one of the largest phenomenon groups, watching as their collaborators such as Yung LA go off into the commercial sphere while they remain a grassroots phenomenon. I've got friends who talk of their crowds causing literal riot cops being called on them at SXSW in 07 but it took forever for them to finally have a retail album and by that time a lot of the buzz had deflated and we were in the trap boom by that point.
I'm jumping across timelines back and forth here but the 2nd generation I indicated is where both Thug and a lot of his most immediate peers (Skooly, Rich Homie Quan, Cash Out, Migos) and acts in cities that are utterly disconnected to Atlanta but would tangentially mine similar territories and also both be influenced by and/or influence the parallel scenes (The post-hyphy scene with Lil' B who begat the jerk scene with YG and Chief Keef in Chicago to a less explored degree). In this generation the primary understanding of rap is how to use the voice as an irritant, almost in a blues-like tradition (as opposed to the Older "Bluesman" recognized Country Rappers such as Boosie). A lot of these rappers, you go back to their earliest available material and so much of it is STRAIGHT OUT of the futuristic playbook with both its autotune usage, the cadences, the whining voices (which Thug has still kept in pretty much earnest). You look at Young Thug's earliest 'hit' in Atlanta:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sosAMnL8fc4" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
And you easily can slot it next to material such as
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q-DK2x07Qg8" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zmmNq1Ividg" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Luka and Barty are not wrong to argue that Thug has taken these sort of understandings of rap to a further level of technique and actual skillset along with good traditional rapping. But its emerged from this scene and understanding how to harness comprehending rap on this level via autotune, via appreciation of melody over lyrics, via this higher-voiced effervescence. But as a person I once saw on twitter say "If you're the kind of person who used to listen to the F.L.Y. album on your iPod, you know there's nothing that 'weird' about Young Thug" and it was by far the most succinct statement to how far the narrative on him had been spun poorly.
There's a lot of stuff here I'm failing to mention such as you know, why this scene eventually got recodified into masculine presentation after the trap boom and of course Future who's both a over and under emphasized figure in this scene in particular but I think this is enough for a base argument.
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
it's a bit like craner and luka got their pokemon to fight