Hip Hop

I used to think Rap music was ridiculous. I didn’t get it. “He’s not even singing!” I used to think. Sometime in high school a missionary kid introduced me to sounds of The Beastie Boys. I was floored. I ended up buying almost all their albums, but my understanding of rap (and the broader hip-hop context it dwells in) didn’t extend much further than the work of these white New Yorker Buddhists. I bought one other old skool rap album, Naughty By Nature’s self titled debut. It was fun and their voices just cracked me up.

My exploration of Rap (which I recently heard stands for Rhythm And Poetry. not sure if that is true) continued in college and I acquired albums by Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and even a newer one by Outkast. It was around this time that I was beginning to catch on to what hip-hop was, something of an umbrella term to refer to the culture, a lifestyle. Many musical styles (R&B, rap, DJ, turntablism – even some soul and funk) can fall in the loose genre of hip-hop.

I’ve wasted a lot of time being unnecessarily disdainful and disgusted with the modern mainstream hip-hop scene, the stuff you hear on the radio. And a lot of it is lousy, but a lot of it is really good. Really, really good. We are actually at a very interesting and exciting time in the history of hip-hop (which is entering its forth decade right now).

Hip-hop is king right now. Rock had its day, and its not currently on the throne. Jay-Z headlined Glastonbury last year and Oasis had a fit. But Oasis is irrelevant, and Jay-Z is one of the best rappers alive today (it's hard to determine this, they all claim to be "the best rapper alive").

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This post is a rough draft. It's rather undeveloped. I'm only about a week into this blogathon, and I feel a little overextended. Ideally I would right posts a day or two ahead of time and then edit them. Anyway, I'll hopefully come back and fix up this one. All part of the learning process of this experiment. And I do have some serious insights about hip hop; they'll come later.