As a special weekend bonus for my readers, here is an article I originally posted at Dr. Pauly’s blog Coventry. I believe it has a lot of crossover appeal for my readers at DJ Ocean’s World since I give a lot of coverage to rap and hip hop.
It is called, “My Thoughts on the Battle Between Hip Hop and Rap.”
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Let me open this post by saying that to a certain extent I’m a hypocrite, because I love hip hop and I dig rap at the same time. Although I grew up predominantly listening to hip hop from artists such as A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and the Jungle Brothers, I also listened to rappers like Eazy-E and Two Live Crew. I have love for both genres these days, but if I had to make a choice, it would be hip hop, hands down.
I’m a hip hop kid through and through, but as a DJ, I am some-what forced to play songs that appeal to the demographic I am targeting. In other words, I play rap songs when I am making mixes for people that like that stuff, but when I am listening to music for myself, I listen to hip hop more often than not. I often try to put the two together in my mixes, so as to educate my listeners, but it doesn’t always work as the two styles can sound like polar opposites. My wife, who loves rap, but dislikes hip hop, because you can’t dance to it, is always quick to let me know when I’ve put too much hip hop into a mix.
In many senses, modern rap music has pretty-much killed hip hop. Sure, there are still a few hip hop artists left, such as The Roots, The Jedi Mind Tricks, Mos Def and Talib Kweli, but the majority of today’s urban music charts are dominated by rappers like 50 Cent, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and the Cash Money Millionaires.
One of the reasons for this is that you don’t hear a lot of hip hop played on radio stations these days. The reason for this is that the majority of hip hop artists don’t look to make songs that have cross-over appeal. Another reason for rap’s successful emergence into the mainstream is the fact that a hip hop lyricist often requires listeners to actually think about a song’s message, which is something that doesn’t happen in rap music. Unlike hip hop fans, rap listeners tend to love easily-memorized lyrics and they become hypnotized by a particular tune’s repetitive bass line. How else does a song like Lollipop become a success?
By staying true to their lyrics, hip hop artists spit captivating urban tales and document the struggles of modern life while still managing to engage the audience and making them a part of the story. Rappers on the other hand, are typically weak lyricists and they speak of a fictitious and violent world that promotes itself through the music’s repeated ideology and redundant beats. Unfortunately, it happens to be what sells and is what the masses demand.
This is where my hypocrisy comes into play. I will love hip hop until the day I die, but I also love a good song by Timbaland, Pharrell Williams, or Kanye West. Despite being lyrically-challenged, these artists can get to you in ways that old school hip hop can’t and I’ll be the first to admit, nine times out of ten, when you are shaking your ass, you just don’t want to hear about the world’s troubles.
This doesn’t however mean that I believe in selling out brilliant lyrics and tight rhyming for a banging beat and even though today’s rap song’s have sick rhythms that make you want to bust a move, that doesn’t mean that I forgive today’s rappers for pretty much destroying the majority of what hip hop artists built and doing it in about half the time.
