hip-hop, where to begin?

[mms]

I like CanOx a lot but saying they're better than tribe is a bit over the edge i think!

they bought a touch of modernity, iconclassisim back to hip hop which all these types with their references to jazz men of the past killed.' Jazz thing' must be the worst hip hop record ever as it heralded some kind of respectable mature stage for hip hop that was totally meaningless, just referencing jazz records by looping them instead of the iconoclastic technological excellence of earlier hip hop.
the only thing you can say about the best of premier's records is that he had amazing taste in mcs and he created a new looping dissonance at his best .

 

[DavidD]

Thats a lil revisionist i think! At the time nothing sounded like that. Those albums don't sound like jazz, they sound like rap music with brand new sample sources after the pre- tribe pre-large pro pre-pete rock pre-DITC James Brown-aping painted everyone into a corner. Eventually the jazz sampling (which was also really jazz AND funk and soul sampling! I think its so weird how Tribe etc. get drawn as 'jazz rap' when jazz was certainly not the only thing they were working with) would become limiting too but at the time it was at the forefront. It certainly didn't sound like a throwback the way, say, Franz Ferdinand does or something. It was an opening of the production palette from its earlier, more limited sounds.

I still think the whole "space age sounds = progress, sampling = conservativeness" thing is incredibly misleading!


Anyway back on topic Kool G Rap's 4,5,6 is incredibly underrated mid-90s hard-ass rap.

 

[qwerty south]

eminem's albums are all well worth a listen. you might have heard of him

 

[mms]

Thats a lil revisionist i think! At the time nothing sounded like that. Those albums don't sound like jazz, they sound like rap music with brand new sample sources after the pre- tribe pre-large pro pre-pete rock pre-DITC James Brown-aping painted everyone into a corner. Eventually the jazz sampling (which was also really jazz AND funk and soul sampling! I think its so weird how Tribe etc. get drawn as 'jazz rap' when jazz was certainly not the only thing they were working with) would become limiting too but at the time it was at the forefront. It certainly didn't sound like a throwback the way, say, Franz Ferdinand does or something. It was an opening of the production palette from its earlier, more limited sounds.

I still think the whole "space age sounds = progress, sampling = conservativeness" thing is incredibly misleading!


Anyway back on topic Kool G Rap's 4,5,6 is incredibly underrated mid-90s hard-ass rap.

well just looping great samples of organic jazz loops and putting some weak breaks behind killed it for me a bit . i'm not being revisionist i thought that at the time. C'mon with tribe they did tracks called jazz and vibes and tracks about jazz and 'the low end theory' etc they were jazzy. I'm not totally against it - permier certainly did some fresh beats but things when downhill when the heavyweight programming synths and 808's went and his style reigned .

 

[gumdrops]

well just looping great samples of organic jazz loops and putting some weak breaks behind killed it for me a bit . i'm not being revisionist i thought that at the time. C'mon with tribe they did tracks called jazz and vibes and tracks about jazz and 'the low end theory' etc they were jazzy. I'm not totally against it - permier certainly did some fresh beats but things when downhill when the heavyweight programming synths and 808's went and his style reigned .

weak breaks? where? whats lightweight or weak about the breaks on anything on step in the arena? yes the music is jazzy, andd i even know people who dont much like the easy listening samples on midnight marauders, but both with gangstarr and tribe, even when the samples were almost meliflous, the drums and bass were huge. i mean, its not like gang starr and tribe were Us3. not sure what you mean by saying premier went downhill when the synths and 80s went. the synths and 808s went way before premier arrived. they went around 86-ish en masse (apart from in the south), really.

 

[zhao]

for y'all eager students of hiphop out there, here is the library:

http://15088.rapidforum.com/

go forth and download!

 

[mms]

weak breaks? where? whats lightweight or weak about the breaks on anything on step in the arena? yes the music is jazzy, andd i even know people who dont much like the easy listening samples on midnight marauders, but both with gangstarr and tribe, even when the samples were almost meliflous, the drums and bass were huge. i mean, its not like gang starr and tribe were Us3. not sure what you mean by saying premier went downhill when the synths and 80s went. the synths and 808s went way before premier arrived. they went around 86-ish en masse (apart from in the south), really.

thats not what i said - i didn't say premier used technology (apart from a sampler obviously)
the whole of step in the arena compared to the stuff like the bomb squad, the first 3 krs one lps etc sounds really old now in comparison to those other strong futuristic productions - just relying on a loop sample - even tho premier was an expert at it made things much duller - and the smooth loop based style that reigned in hip hop in the 90's and was due to Premier amongst other people was really a step backwards, botgh sonically and culturally for hip hop.

 

[Diggedy Derek]

Interesting points here from MMS, but he's wrong I reckon. Certainly Tribe are jazzy, and make a point of going on about it, but they use those jazz samples in extremely fresh ways- the samples don't quite fit, they have kinks in them. They jazz about with the jazz, that's why it's so good.

Plus, I agree that Tribe are generally not particularly "light". Low End Theory as the name suggests is just massively funky, overwhelmingly so. A track like Bugging Out uses a jazz bassline, but it's like a huge slab of woodyness vibrating at the heart of the mix. It's heavy.

Also, their use of jazzy samples shouldn't distract us from how rawkus their vocals are. The vocals on something like Scenario, full of shouts, impersonations and vocal sound effects are simply mad, as exciting as listening to a jazz solo take shape.

Plus, MMS, Tribe are enormously danceable! I like the DJ Premier backlash thing you're working on there, though. Much as I love good DJ Premier tracks, an average track by him is just appallingly boring.

 

[DavidD]

You're going to have to explain how their sound is 'culturally' a step backward for hip-hop.

And sonically I just quite simply don't agree that it was a 'step backwards,' and that kind of thinking sounds suspiciously like some dance-centric "it sounds like the future!" nonsense. The early-90s New York sound didn't sound like anything that had come before it.

And the whole Premier/Large Pro/Pete Rock thing was about chopping and filtering and generally fucking with the original samples, not just looping them up; thats what was so wild about his skull snaps flip on "Take it Personal", what was so crazy about the bassline on "Looking at the Front Door," they were opening up both a) variety of sample sources and b) ways of manipulating those samples.

 

[mms]

Interesting points here from MMS, but he's wrong I reckon. Certainly Tribe are jazzy, and make a point of going on about it, but they use those jazz samples in extremely fresh ways- the samples don't quite fit, they have kinks in them. They jazz about with the jazz, that's why it's so good.

Plus, I agree that Tribe are generally not particularly "light". Low End Theory as the name suggests is just massively funky, overwhelmingly so. A track like Bugging Out uses a jazz bassline, but it's like a huge slab of woodyness vibrating at the heart of the mix. It's heavy.

Also, their use of jazzy samples shouldn't distract us from how rawkus their vocals are. The vocals on something like Scenario, full of shouts, impersonations and vocal sound effects are simply mad, as exciting as listening to a jazz solo take shape.

Plus, MMS, Tribe are enormously danceable! I like the DJ Premier backlash thing you're working on there, though. Much as I love good DJ Premier tracks, an average track by him is just appallingly boring.

i'm not anti either premier or tribe, they've both done good things, nof course scenario benefits from a really vibrant posse of fresh mc's, it;s a classic and one of the best possee cuts, even better than in the pj's .
I'm just saying at this point it lost it's iconclassism, it's energy and the freshness of it's own sense of anger ,

It began to directly reference a past (jazz) that as an artform hip hop has very little to do with,and shouldn't have aligned itself so closley too . Sure premier were very good at abstracting samples from jazz records.
Hip hop for a time followed this path - verse (old looped jazz sample) chorus (scratched in words from older, better hip hop record, ((hip hop self referencing itself, placing it in it's own cannon).
Yawn, now listen to war at 33/3rd on fear of a black planet, get your head around that shit, fucking hell!
Hip hop also became something acceptable as well, cool, relaxing which is usually pretty boring, whilst before it was much more radical alien and synthetic.

Don't get me wrong though i really like some of both of what premier and tribe have done but just imagine what could have been if this sound didn't dominate the 90's, i would have bought more hip hop records for a start and less house techno and hardcore, and jungle

 

[DavidD]

OK I'm a little clearer on what it is yr getting at now. I think the reason I see it differently is that the looped-sample-early-90s style thing allowed a broad pallet of moods/concepts/ideas/messages etc; I mean, ultimately I just love a lot of this music, but there were so many *things* outside of its jazz referentialism which appealed to me. (Frankly i don't even have that much use for jazz referentialism) But what I like about Low End Theory, par example, goes past that; what I like about that whole vein of rap music was the breadth of reference points, lyrically, and the breadth of moods that they could harness with short, slightly-manipulated samples. I mean, take the difference between Black Moon and Tribe, for example, they were basically using the same sample-centric style, but they sounded so utterly different!

Sorry if I'm getting extra-defensive, I just like this stuff a lot, and I reject the notion that because it didn't have some super-spacey futuristic bent it was inherently more conservative or more of a dead end (not that it didn't become a dead end, but at this point it was unique, aesthetically, i think.)

 

[Lichen]

Plus, I agree that Tribe are generally not particularly "light". Low End Theory as the name suggests is just massively funky, overwhelmingly so. A track like Bugging Out uses a jazz bassline, but it's like a huge slab of woodyness vibrating at the heart of the mix. It's heavy.
.

The bass isn't sampled on Low End Theory. They used a real double bass player "My man Ron Carter is on the bass..."

Guess that's why it sounds as you describe.


And as for danceable....fuck yeah

 

[mms]

Sorry if I'm getting extra-defensive, I just like this stuff a lot, and I reject the notion that because it didn't have some super-spacey futuristic bent it was inherently more conservative or more of a dead end (not that it didn't become a dead end, but at this point it was unique, aesthetically, i think.)

absolutley the very opposite to super spacey!

 

[DavidD]

I dont know that this is true but even if it was why would it matter?!

 

[polystyle]

Rockin' with the Beat Bop

Where to begin ?
As the previous many replies have shown - there are many ways to go (esp. Rakim & PE for me)
Few more off the top
How about Run DMC "Sucka MC"
Rammellzee & K-Rob "Beat Bop" ( Where in Cypress Hill got the Gangster Duck' style and J M Basquiat got producer credit (more the 'executive producer' really) , Beasties picked up something there too prolly )

And as there was a wave of EL-P , Def Jux replies and at risk of blowing my horn so close to home
if you like that kind of hiphop - how about Death Comet Crew "Exterior Street" ('84) , also with The Rammellzee.
In the last year's there have piled up reviews & reviewers calling DCC a 'template for Company Flow',
and possibly large influence on EL-P's sound , and some say Doom as well , but I leave it to them.
We just make the records , and rerelease them 20 years later 'natch (not that we ever expected that ! )

Good fun to rd all the replies here, simple question with many possible answers DomT
Go easy now all

 

[baboon2004]

'B Boys Makin' With The Freak Freak'

Beasties sampling 'Beat Bop'

 

[Diggedy Derek]

It began to directly reference a past (jazz) that as an artform hip hop has very little to do with,and shouldn't have aligned itself so closley too

Interesting point MMS. However hip hop was always deeply imbued with elements of soul and disco and rare groove; wasn't referencing jazz just a natural deepening of this influence? Or did it extend beyond "natural affinity" with certain musics and start becoming "in debt" to jazz, a weight of the past theat couldn't be shrugged off?

 

[mms]

Interesting point MMS. However hip hop was always deeply imbued with elements of soul and disco and rare groove; wasn't referencing jazz just a natural deepening of this influence? Or did it extend beyond "natural affinity" with certain musics and start becoming "in debt" to jazz, a weight of the past theat couldn't be shrugged off?

jazz doesn't function or have the same attributes as soul, disco or rare groove, which are basically pop forms. it became clogged in trying to become something it wasn't or couldn't become, the leap is too much .
The performance is too different, the players and the effects. Jazz never really comes across properly in hip hop but the technology that hip hop has at it's disposal should have outweighted this, but it didn't manage to.

 

[Diggedy Derek]

I think there's something in that.

 

[mms]

jazz was pop music as well, in the fifties there were still jazz records in jukeboxes. I suppose a lot of hiphoppers heard more jazz in their youth than they heard rock music.

i know my mu used to love jazz in the 50s hopped up on amphetamines
well earlier hip hop had rock (and disco) all over it, it was dominated by the sonics of these things to a great extent , even the stuff that didn't sample rock still had the same attack.