I used to like Hip-Hop but...

[King_For_A_Day]

{rant}...R&B, Rap, Hip-Hop music today is the biggest bunch of over-produced, stolen and sampled, over-AuoTuned, all-sounds-the-same, everyone uses the same rhymes, same-slow-tempo steaming pile of boasting egotistical worthless BS I have heard in a long, long time.

 

I know this subject comes up from time to time here, but I am forced to listen to this crap because my step-daughter listens to it and I can't make her use headphones ALL the time!

 

Yes, I am very old, but my musical taste is as eclectic as ever - maybe more so.

 

And note that I said that I did used to like hip-hop.

 

Any songwriter in the Pittsburgh Songwriters Circle can put words and music together better that these world-class copycats.

{/rant}

 

Thank you and good night.

[Stackabones]

GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

 

 

I agree completely.

[blue2blue]

I think musical paradigm burn-out can be a serious issue. Styles get explored. Every nook and cranny gets poked and prodded -- especially over the course of two or three decades...

 

We're used to the oft-expressed idea that styles and fashions change quickly these days --but I think that's more fantasy than reality in today's world of hyper fine-tuned marketing and market sector exploitation.

 

In decades past, styles really did come and go quickly. Now, they seem to stick around forever, long past the point of ongoing returns in terms of fresh creativity and vitality.

 

I think the reality of this hits home pretty hard when we look at some of the "newer" styles like rap/hip hop, punk, and electronica.

 

Anyone doing a 2009 survey of those fields will find things distressingly similar to the scene in 1999. And, in many ways, and particularly for hip hop and punk but still for electornica and dance, it's not really much different than what was going down in '89... throw in a little heavy handed Auto-Tune, change a few superficial stylistic tics, and it's pretty much there.

 

And it virtually goes without saying that the same, in spades, can be said of various forms of rock, which it seems to me, has clearly joined the classic moribund forms of country, folk, blues, bluegrass, mainstream jazz, and so on. Nothing wrong with that -- it's a natural progression. It just seems folks don't want to acknowledge that there haven't been two new ideas in any of these fields to rub together in years if not decades.

 

Maybe it's just that having seen the tail end of the big band swing era in my early years, the explosion of R&B and then R&R, the big folk revival of the early 60s, the Brit invasion, Motown, the rise of folk rock, and then the evolution of folk rock and blues rock into acid and hippie rock, the ascendance of funk and re-emergence of R&B, the first wave of early 70s disco, the rise of the singer songwriters, the emergence of whitebread disco targeted to mainstream audiences in the late 70s, the emergence of punk, no wave, and proto hip hop in the mid and late 70s -- all before I was even thirty years old -- and, I'll admit it, musical change is something that's all but worked its way into my musical DNA...

[easilyspooked]

came in to rant, B2B took most of it and did it better, but i would put forth that All radio-friendly music is terrible, rap has the same faults as modern rock, just aimed at a different demo, and that there's still plenty of great rap music being produced by underground artists, you just have to go looking. i'm very fortunate to have a friend who's wicked into the underground hip hop scene and he regularly passes me the dope {censored}, some insane, Insane beats with great rhymes being made today.

 

i listen to it when i want a song to flow faster than it might otherwise, i learned long ago to steal from the impoverished castes, recycle it, shine it up a bit, and sell it back to my own caste. i did this a lot with my visual art, taking the repetition of background patterns i saw on urban clothing and putting it behind more traditional fine art fare like naked women, people went ape for it, had never seen anything like it, simply because they had never sought out the great art being made behind the veneer of commercial culture.

[Eclepto Funk]

pretty much everything on the radio (i.e. mainstream) from country to rap is crap 90% of the time, with a few good songs per genre here and there

 

let's face it, to get airplay, you have to be "commercial" which means "likely to be liked by lots of people" which means "sound like other things people like" which means "sound like everybody else"

 

to me, all the genres out there are like that. but you do find gems every now and then.

 

i just switched where i go for music. there's literally thousands of artists out there competing for your time, so it's just a matter of taking some time to find them

[Mcfontio]

Hopefully that trend of boring similarity in hip hop will come to and end (not to mention the current fad of the pitch correction). Around this area, there's an emergence of live band hip hop groups. I would imagine this is going on everywhere. But, thanks to the current state of things, you'll probably never hear these groups unless you really dig for them.

 

I happen to be in one of these groups. We're gonna release our demo as soon as we finish it. You may still think it's a steaming pile of {censored} but, we're certainly not at all normal hip hop. (seeing how I almost never listened to hip hop before doing this) I think it's a pretty dope ass genre really. Never thought the front man in my band would be a rapper... We're certainly not cookie cutter, so we're never going to be played on air.