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Two-Player Tuesdays: The State of Hip-hop

February 1, 2011
By Daniel Da Silva

“Everybody sound the same, commercialize the game. Reminiscin’ when it wasn’t all business.”

That had to be one of the most telling lines from the title track of Nas’ 2006 album Hip Hop is Dead.

Quality rap has always consisted of the same critical tools: lyricism, flow, and production.

The MC used to be a title held for the best rappers who created witty lyrics featuring complex rhyme schemes and changes in vocal cadence. That’s what made Rakim, Nas, Biggie and the Wu-Tang Clan famous.

Nobody does that anymore. Lil Wayne is considered the best rapper today, yet ironically he would sound better keeping his mouth shut.

“Swagger tighter than a yeast infection, fly go hard like geese erection.”

That is an actual lyric from “Dr. Carter.” Go look it up and tell me in what context that makes sense. The rest of the verse makes him sound stupid.

But Stuart will argue Weezy and his contemporaries’ contribution to rap is their inclusion of other genres to revolutionize the game, happily ignoring lyricism.

Yet back in the day, producers and DJs did the same thing for their respective MCs.

Think back to the likes of Jam Master Jay, Pete Rock and RZA. All were musically talented and capable of incorporating different genres into their work. Jazz, funk and classical music have always been staples of hip–hop.

This is not a new phenomenon — the difference is those MCs took the lyrical side of the music just as seriously. These new rappers just produce catchy club music to increase their sales.

The path hip–hop artists are on will alter it irreparably into a completely new form of music. Frankly, if hip–hop isn’t dead, it’s on life support and Dr. Carter is pulling the plug.

—Daniel Da Silva

Just like you can tear apart some rock, country or pop for being derivative rubbish, rap has its own guttersnipe polluting an otherwise fantastic time for the genre. Aside from the expected crap, there are several artists producing the best rap we’ve heard decades.

If it weren’t for his ego and PR disasters, Kanye West would get the praise he legitimately deserves for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — a rap album so full of singing and orchestration, you can question whether it should be called rap at all.

West also deserves praise for working with artists like Marco Brambilla, who directed the apocalyptic and heavy-handed video for “Power.” It’s an appeal to a higher standard for rap, obviously side-stepping tropes and endeavouring to achieve something greater.

Lil Wayne, who’s been called the best rapper alive, similarly succeeds in almost every way — even when he fails, like he did with the bizarre rap-rock album Rebirth. While it was destined for only diehard fans, the album proved that the biggest and most successful rapper of the late 2000s had the artistic gumption to recreate himself and his sound at a time when pandering and self-mimicry would have wrought praise and millions.

Wayne’s obsession with singing through a vocoder, while thoroughly dreadful, should be seen as part of something bigger. He is a modern rock star in the truest sense of the word, an artist with a pen and a mixtape, a visionary wordsmith wrongfully confused as just a rapper.

These are trajectories that haven’t been seen in the genre since its humble beginnings and it represents a move toward a more artistic and experimental approach to rap than anything we’ve seen before.

—Stuart A. Thompson

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