Throughout middle school and most of high school, all I listened to was mainstream “alternative rock.” For me, this meant Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Stone Temple Pilots, followed by Green Day, The Offspring, and Blink-182. Everything changed, however, when I decided to buy Wu-Tang’s classic debut, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).
I rushed home to rip the plastic wrapping off the CD case and hit play, but wasn’t prepared for the kung fu movie skit or RZA’s hypnotizing snare to seep into my brain. After Ghostface finished spitting the first bars of the record, I was hooked. Wu-Tang’s tag-team verses and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s unique flow sealed the deal before I even finished “Shame On A N*gga.” From then, it was on. I pushed alternative rock aside for what seemed like a never-ending stream of groundbreaking mainstream hip-hop records.
Whether it was East Coast, West Coast, or Southern hip-hop, it didn’t matter. I wanted to hear it all. I devoured Biggie, 2Pac, Nas, Big Pun, Jay-Z, DMX, Snoop, Dr. Dre, Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang solo records, Outkast, and Eminem. And when I needed more, I could go back in history and fill my eardrums with the words of N.W.A., Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, Gang Starr, Run DMC, Eric B. & Rakim, and Boogie Down Productions.
Moving to New York for college opened hip-hop to me even more. Instead of just reading about Rawkus Records and Def Jux artists in The Source and HipHopSite.com (R.I.P.), I could actually see them live. This era saw the rise and fall of both ill-fated labels, while Def Jam and Interscope Records seemed to hit their peak, the latter on the back of the G-Unit/Shady/Aftermath goliath.
Sometime after this, however, my love for hip-hop began to wane. Jay-Z dropped The Black Album and retired (temporarily, of course), Eminem released subpar records like Encore, and artists like Young Jeezy, T.I., Fabolous, and Juelz Santana weren’t quite on the same level as their forebears in my mind (Dipset forever, though!). Kanye and Weezy were putting out high-quality material, but it wasn’t enough for me.
Since then, I’ve been mostly down on hip-hop. And recently, hip-hop has gone in directions which have made me feel more left behind than ever. It’s simple: Those new directions are getting further and further removed from the traditional sound that appealed to me in the first place.
Take Future, for example. His popularity is owed to a combination of the sing/rap style recently popularized by Drake (who’s featured on the remix of “Tony Montana,” naturally) and the spaced-out flow of more recent Lil Wayne. While I get the appeal of songs like “You Deserve It” and “I Won,” there’s only so much auto-tune and ringtone production I can take over an entire album. The combination is too fatiguing for my ears to take, but perhaps that’s the problem; I’m still stuck on listening to full records, while the world has moved on to singles. As BuzzFeed’s Reggie Ugwu recently pointed out, even Billboard has retooled the Billboard 200 to give singles more heft compared to the album format.
And then there’s Migos, another artist to receive the Drake co-sign. The trio became well-known from the popularity of “Versace” and its Drizzy-assisted remix, both of which showcased the so-called “Migos flow.” This led to Complex Music naming Quavo the most influential rapper of 2014. For a short time, every big rapper from Drake to Kanye West to Rick Ross mimicked their flow, amplifying the trio’s popularity, but I simply couldn’t buy in. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Three 6 Mafia, and even Public Enemy rapped in eighth-note triplets long before anybody even heard of Migos. Even Complex admitted as much later on, but I don’t want to get too caught up in who created what; hip-hop was built on artists putting their own twist on someone else’s work, whether it’s flipping a sample or paying homage to those who came before them.
And here’s the thing I’ve grown to accept: Just because I haven’t embraced some of today’s rappers doesn’t mean hip-hop is dead (to me). It just means mainstream hip-hop has moved in a direction that doesn’t strike a chord with me. Simply bemoaning the state of hip-hop, the way so many do, just because of my own personal feelings about it is selfish and myopic. The important thing is that the genre is evolving through disparate styles. And it’s doing it in a way that’s making the predominant sound of the mainstream. Hip-hop is thriving, and I love the genre as a whole so much that I’m happy it’s thriving, even if that means that my own personal relationship with it has changed. I may not like where hip-hop is going as a whole, but plenty of people do. And some of those people will be inspired to form a new subgenre of hip-hop all their own. Rich Homie Quan, Fetty Wap, Makonnen, etc. are all examples of younger artists who’ve taken hip-hop to bold new places and experienced success. When that happens, I may not listen, but I’ll be happy for hip-hop from afar.
And every once in a while, I encounter the best of both worlds… artists who are doing new things within the genre in a way that does hit me.
For example, there’s Donnie Trumpet and The Social Experiment’s Surf. When I first heard it, the album reminded me why I fell in love with music in the first place. Blurring the lines between hip-hop, jazz, and neo soul, it sounds like a bunch of friends decided to make some music and have fun in the process. Of course, that’s basically what happened, and it produced an album with enough buzz to result in 618,000 full album downloads in the first week.
Similarly, former Company Flow member and Def Jux co-founder El-P and Dungeon Family member Killer Mike found instant chemistry, while the former was brought in to work on some tracks for the latter’s 2012 solo album, R.A.P. Music. El-P ended up producing the record in its entirety, which eventually led to the duo forming the highly acclaimed and popular Run the Jewels. At 40, both artists are finding more popularity at this point in their careers because El-P’s signature futuristic, Bomb Squad-inspired production, and rapid-fire flow somehow meshes with Killer Mike’s powerful, bombastic rhymes. They’re hip-hop’s Odd Couple, and the perfect example of why I will never fall completely out of love with the genre; there will always be a hip-hop artist somewhere making music I love.
But even if there isn’t, I can’t be mad. Hip-hop has given me some of the biggest thrills and best memories of my life. As Chance the Rapper ultimately concludes at the end of his verse on Action Bronson’s “Baby Blue,” even if hip-hop and I break up for good, I’ll always hope for its happiness.
