What Is Your View On Rap/Hip-Hop?

[Funk$tar]

Always thought Arrested Development was one of the better bands of the 90's , today I like the Roots.
Rap started out right but took a horrible wrong turn at some point but then so has most rock and pop now days.

I hope everyone can read this comment and really listen to what this man has to say! haha
This is the point I've been trying to make!

 

[Real Soon]

Oh, I forgot to mention that I'm currently playing with an emcee.

No samples, no loops. Bass, guitar, keys, drums, mic. And yep, it's a hip-hop group.


Most music in the genre is nothing like what Sean P. Puff Puffy Diddy Daddy Combs was doing, jacking entire songs for easy profit value. He was an outlier and is morally bankrupt across the board. Equating all of it to him is unfair and dismissive.


It's clear by these responses that it's not the music that some TBers object to, it's the entire concept of hip-hop. And it looks like there's a lot of grossly uninformed opinions about it as well, which I guess is to be expected. Still disappointing to read.

 

[Justbleazy]

If it wasn't for Hip Hop music, I probably would not be playing bass.
I loved punk rock rock and hip hop music in when I first picked up a bass in 1991. I loved the R&B, disco and soul samples from all the rap music I listened to and loved to play along with the records.
I was once listening to Boogie Down Productions in my room while doing my homework and my father came in the room and asked "What are you listening to?"
I said "This is BDP"
He said, "No it's Stanley Turrentine"
Then brought me downstairs and played me "Sister Sanctified" and I was floored.
I used to "borrow" his records all the time and so many of them contained the original material from most of the rap I listened to at the time.
Every Saturday morning he would drive me to my bass lesson and we would listen to WBGO (jazz radio in New York) there is a show that is still on today called the "Rhythm Revue" with Felix Hernandez that plays all the R&B and soul hits that all my favorite rappers sampled, and the bass lines just jumped out at me and I wanted to learn everyone of them.
I can't speak about rap of now since I find it horrible, with some exceptions from so pretty creative underground guys.
One of the bands I play with is a 10 piece Hip hop/jazz group that is trying to recapture the sound of the hip hop I grew up with while instead of sampling, we write and play our own backing tracks for the MC's and have a wonderful female vocalist everyone writes the music together there is no samples or computer instruments.

Exactly! The song that made me want to play the bass was Maybach Music ft. Jay-Z. The production blew me away but the bass line really caught my attention. Unfortunately, I grew up on rap and now that I look back it was really destructive to the African American culture but that's a different topic for a different day. Rap songs that have really nice bass playing are:

Maybach Music - Rick Ross
Maybach Music II - Rick Ross
Maybach Music III - Rick Ross
Prototype - Andre 3000

I think some of the reasons why rap gets a bad rap (no pun intended) are because of the lack of live instrumentation and how simplified the actual "song" making process is. I can make an entire album on my iPhone using Garage Band and a mic and that would be perfectly acceptable in the rap/ hip hop community. Trying to do that in any other genre that requires actual musicianship, not so much.

 

[Gaolee]

You can go back further to the beat poets in the 1950s. I'm sure there was somebody else before that.

 

[pacojas]

there's enough Rap genres out there for all of us to love. find your niche and support it. to me though, good Rap is hard to find. OTOH,.. i'll listen to dumb lyrics if the bassline is slammin'!

 

[lfmn16]

I know a lot of you bass players on here are older and may not understand the art form at all,

I'm not sure what there is to understand. If you like music/art, you like it; if you don't, you don't.

To your original question, I don't like most rap, I do like hip-hop. I don't like the shenanigans of the people performing it. I'm old school - let your music speak for you. If you have to act like a jackass to get attention for your music, you are doing something wrong. And this thing where they act all badass is a real turn off. I believe most of those guys would run crying home to mommy if you said boo to their face. As for lyrics, I don't really listen to lyrics, for the most part I hear vocals as another instrument rather than the words.

 

[Robroy]

I consider forms of music that I really hate to still be music. But I don't really consider rap and hip-hop to be music. I think elements of both can be incorporated into real music, kinda like Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon used elements of African music in much of their music, but that's about it.

 

[Richland123]

Some early beatnik rap from Herman Munster.

 

[Arthur SX]

Garbage

 

[rx jr.]

i generally hate it but I greatly enjoy Eminem because there is a lot of angry emotion in his music. It's very personal to him, and many of his tracks (earlier at least, since I don't keep up with anything past The Marshall Mathers LP) are about his identity, upbringing, personal struggles, family, domestic violence, abuse, etc. Not much materialism or misogyny going on (except toward his wife) and I enjoy his image and background as a misunderstood white boy from a poor community. No bouncing cars and things like that.

I also like Cypress Hill.

 

[Thisguy]

Grew up listening to it! Made me go out to the garage and look for my old tape cases. For you youngin's that is a briefcase looking thing that holds Cassette tapes hehe. Anyway, I had one for each type of music I listened to. I would get up in the morning grab the case that had what I felt like jamin' to that day and jump in the car. Pulled out my old case full of the hip hop/rap tapes and went through it. Here is a smattering of what was in that case. Run DMC, Snoop Dog, Beastie Boys, Easy-E, Nas, Dr. Dre, House of Pain, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, NWA, Gucci Crew.

Now I'm surrounded by tapes, I pulled out all of my cases to see what I still had, and no cassette player

 

[rx jr.]

Also, it would be pretty interesting to collect data on opinion about rap/hip-hop and political view (or party they align with) to see if there is any correlation.

 

[lfmn16]

Some early beatnik rap from Herman Munster.

The Beverly Hillbilly's - go to 9:21 and watch Granny teach the beatnics the 'tater digger!

 

[Topspin]

RATM were the gateway drug into rap for me. Since then, I've gotten into some of the older stuff, a bit of new. Big fan of Digital Underground.

 

[Rich Terry]

When Cool and the gang faded and "hip-hop" began it was novel but as the years have gone by it has turned into a black and white hood rat thing. It projects everything that's wrong with society today in a negative way. My parents my have thought the same about Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and the Beatles but were still listening to that today and saying, "they don't make music like that anymore".

Just saying, IT F"KING SUCKS

 

[SanDiegoHarry]

Never been my thing. Too repetitive, too self-referential and often too negative.

 

[ben23c]

I used to hate it, but after being forced to "bump" to it for the past 4 years on countless occasions, I've come to really love and enjoy the culture behind it. I'm particularly a fan of Kanye (as a producer), Pro Era, Madlib, Jay-z, Flying Lotus, and many others. The genre as a whole can be difficult to vibe with at first, buti believe if one looks hard enough for the slightest bit of reason to love it, they are sure to get hooked.

 

[PWRL]

For me, it entirely depends on what or who it is. "Rap" to me is a pretty broad term, just like "Rock". Some I like, some I don't. I see rap as just a delivery process more than anything else. I've heard what could be considered rap on everything from the obvious, like Public Enemy, to the not-so-obvious, like Jerry Reed.

I remember when Run DMC's version of "Walk This Way" came out. To my generation, or at least to the kids I knew, that was like a bomb dropping. It totally blew our little minds. For a while, that was everybody's favorite song.

 

[I am Soma]

80s and early 90s were mint. now its really bad.

 

[jmac]

It's more than just lifting a beat if you really gave the music a chance, but hey everyone has their own opinion which I completely respect!

I'm not sure what you mean by "it's more than just lifting a beat." Are you talking about the genre as a whole? I was talking specifically about certain songs. Take the Will Smith song "Miami." I liked the song until I realized the beat was a ripoff of The Whispers "The Beat Goes On." Now I don't like "Miami" as much. There are other examples of this, but that is the first that came to mind.

For what it's worth I don't like remakes of songs and movies either. I think it lacks creativity.

I'm also going to guess your not too much into Brian Eno either, because he sampled way before Hip Hop did, I actually would say he was one of many who invented sampling.

You're correct, not a Eno fan. But that has little to do with sampling.