What are Veeky Forums thoughts on Hip Hop lyricism?

Death Grips - The Money Store
Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly

>80%
>nothing more
which one is it?

>Independent
Where have you been for the past decade? Hip-hop is some of the most corporatist, mainstream normie nonsense out there.
(which accurately reflects how formerly underground art forms are co-opted and mass-marketed, further underscoring hip-hop's cultural relevance.)
i.e. Kanye, i.e. Jay-Z, et al.

What makes you say that?

wh-what are you trying to get at

I think he meant it is exactly 80% production, leaving 20% actual content in the form or lyrics and vocal delivery.

Thanks. I'm more of a golden-age gentlemen, myself.
But truth be told, I never felt that Illmatic deserved all the praise it got. There are a few certified classics, no doubt, but just as much filler as there on other contemporary albums.

What's your point? There is still underground and artistic hip-hop being released quite often.

There certainly is, but hip-hop ceased to be "independent" a while ago. Don't get me wrong, hip hop is some of my favorite shit, but issue is calling it independant as a genre.

oooga booga me monkey man bitche shoes dooga unga bunga drugs nigga ooga jungle monkey shit nigga

We will not have a reading from the book of Wu:

I bomb atomically, Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses
Can't define how I be dropping these mockeries
Lyrically perform armed robbery
Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me
Battle-scarred Shogun, explosion when my pen hits tremendous
Ultraviolet shine blind forensics
I inspect you, through the future see millennium
Killer Beez sold fifty gold, sixty platinum
Shackling the masses with drastic rap tactics
Graphic displays melt the steel like blacksmiths
Black Wu jackets, Queen Bees ease the guns in
Rumble with patrolmen, tear gas laced the function
Heads by the score take flight incite a war
Chicks hit the floor, die hard fans demand more
Behold the bold soldier, control the globe slowly
Proceeds to blow, swinging swords like Shinobi
Stomp grounds and pound footprints in solid rock
Wu got it locked, performing live on your hottest block

see

I've always been partial to Keith Murray. Lyrics like this just don't happen any more.

the most beautifullest vocabulist
punches phony mc's dead in their esophogaus
my analysis is roughly calloused
you better practice if you want to challenge this
I'm symbolic to the sun moon and stars
you gettin' knocked out the box no matter who you are
the funk phat tracks lures you to listen
as my vocals send your brain up in the fetal position
learn a quick lesson of mic aggression
so when I walk down the street there'll be no second guessing
now you can walk the walk talk the talk
back burnin' all day but your still fireproof like an ashtray
I'm a scientist in the mix like Plyx
turnin' all you fly emcees back into maggots
non prop soil watch me bubble and spoil
punch you Grand Royal as you foam like boil

yeah pretty much

we can pretend like all modern poetry is shit or admit that musicians are currently doing it best

t. Nobel committee

Step aside, white boi here : I got this one.
Hip hop started out bragadoccio 'I'm the man, check my skillz' etc. (gil scott heron criticised this element of it, though he was one of the first to have spoken word poetry [check out b movie by said artist as an example. He also penned novels]).
All the ostentation included breakdance, graffiti and dj & mc battles.
My theory is that the ostentation extended to gangsta rap, as now the competition was to show how 'gutta' you is, with 'sik' 'dope' beats. Even though it's intimidating guns and killing content, it's probably mostly fantasy or telling other gangster's tales, as these guys are artistic. But real gangsters actually have become rappers. The rhythm of their rapping is also a demonstration of competency, as many know all about off-beat syncopation, complicated tempo and iambic pentameter, etc. Technique sfuff. There are only a few worth listening to who can combine the technique stuff, with good lyrical content. My recommendation would be analog brothers, which was a taunt of the wu tang, by some pretty serious gangster tier rappers (kool keith, ice t, silver synth, pimp rex, marc live, jacky jasper, odd oberheim [deceased]). They also made the music with analog instruments, like oberheims, oscillators and korgs, as opposed to bobby digital.
A lot of rappers reference shady secret society and satanic shit, as it's a race to the bottom to become the most demonic/tuff.
It's a phase you grow out of, as who wants to miss out on the beautiful treble clef sounds of classical, rock or jazz music, for constant repetitive bass/drum?
Theory 2: rap really became mainstream in the 90s via sampling popular 80's songs (phil collins, in the air, steely dan peg, toto africa, etc). Sampling was rampant and helped sell it to whites. But the music industry directors think in terms of 14d yahtzee. They never intended for rap to always be as good as it was in the 90s,and once achieving their objectives of mainstreaming it, now hawk the most depraved and degenerate noize to infect the technology warped youth of today, normalising miscegenation, promiscuity, ass worship, tattoos. The stuff you hear on the radio now is pretty much always a combo of white shiksa moaning like a horni prostitute, with variant of gutta/hipsta thug rapper.
All in all, it's probably a blight on the musical history, but there are a certain few who command some subculture respect. The off-shoot of hip hop beats, such as breakbeat and electro can be pretty cool, with talented djs who know a bit about music. (dj pogo featured on a pretty heavyweight jazz album by Courtney pine, for example)

Your post, while well-intentioned, was poorly constructed, difficult to discern, and wrought with vagaries and inaccuracies. I will address several details for the benefit of our audience.

>it's probably mostly fantasy or telling other gangster's tales,
This is a very valid point. Many people don't understand the line between fantasy and reality in rap, which is first a story telling medium, and a reflection on reality second. Some rappers really do try to blur that line, and "street cred" is highly valued, but there are legions of rappers who have never claimed to have literally shot anyone or dealt drugs. Meanwhile, rappers with no actual street background (Rick Ross, Drake.) make outlandish claims in the gangster rap tradition, but are unquestioned.

>It's a phase you grow out of, as who wants to miss out on the beautiful treble clef sounds of classical, rock or jazz music, for constant repetitive bass/drum?

Claiming these genres have not also stagnated and become reliant upon their constraints is fallacious, and you know it. Rock and jazz can easily include synthesizers and sequencers, and hip-hop can sample any of the aforementioned genres. Claiming any genre is a phase to be grown out of only reveals the vapidity of the listener.

cont.

Hip hop isn't even music.

Veeky Forums is on the same level as /mu/ when it comes to music.
Meaningless wordplay isn't good literature.
'classical' isn't a genre, you idiot.

Hollow showboating, just awful

>Sampling was rampant and helped sell it to whites.
Sampling was always inherent to rap. The earliest party jams (sugar hill gang, etc.) lifted disco beats and rapped over them.

The 90s saw the emergence of dance-rap and cross-over artists who were enticed by big label model to make something specifically to be non-threatening to mainstream america (Vanilla Ice, McHammer, etc.), which caused gangsta rap to become even more extreme (Geto Boys, etc.)

>normalising miscegenation, promiscuity, ass worship, tattoos.

These are hardly new, nor are they normalized. "Baby Got Back" is older than most posters here, and was a super hit. If anything it reflects a shift in aesthetic, which can just as easily shift as new bodyparts will be fetishized. We have already reached "peak booty," and there is no where else to go but to have a return to some other trend. Are you truly unaware of the era of the bustle in Victorian times?

>The off-shoot of hip hop beats, such as breakbeat and electro can be pretty cool,

This completely ignores the parallel evolution of these musical movements. Traphouse might be accurately described as an offshoot (as well as it's UK predecessor, jungle), but the rise of electro is concurrent with 80s hip hop (Mann Parrish, Egyptian Lover, even early Dr. Dre World Class Wreckin' Crew, etc.)

That is all.

If an adult enjoyed reading 'Baby's First Book' or watched Teletubbies every day, you would tell them to grow up. Rap is closer to that than say, crappy crime novels.

>Hip hop isn't even music.
Enlighten us, monsignor, as to what "is" music, then.

Post something better, homie.

>Veeky Forums is on the same level as /mu/ when it comes to music.
This thread proved otherwise.
Stop bating.

>'classical' isn't a genre, you idiot.
It is of a certain era. (1750-1860, if wikipedia is to be believed). It is narrowly defined, which was my point, subtard.

Music lyricism will never reach the heights of poetry.
Granted rap isn't entirely awful but the culture it breeds is certainly not sophisticated. I can't tell you how many middle-class white wannabe 420 thugs I've encountered since middle school.

>Hip hop isn't even music.
kek
>Meaningless wordplay isn't good literature.
No, but it's great pop.
wew lad

Not hip hop or any other nonmusics. I bet you support Bob Dylan winning the prize.
No, this is just like /mu/.
Eras aren't genres, you idiot.

Because, you know, eras end when they end and don't mean jack all about general form or anything. A sonnet in the 20th century is still a sonnet like a sonnet from the 16th century is still a sonnet.
It's not music, so it cannot be pop.

This is like, a valid dissertation topic for a B-grade liberal arts college. Cultural appropriation of minority artforms in e-media' or something

>Music lyricism will never reach the heights of poetry.
>What's Miles Davis???

Define music. Why isn't hiphop music?

>he LITERALLY thinks hip hop isn't music
I bet you think that hip hop is "just talking over a beat"

Miles Davis does not reach the heights of great poetry.

Jazz isn't music either.
If rap is music then Bob Dylan is literature.

>It's not music, so it cannot be pop.
Hmmm... So I'm looking at the POP chart top 10, and what do I see, but this:

Would you look at ALL These rappers? Fancy that.

>It's a "Veeky Forums pretends to understand other art besides their literature" episode

>Jazz isn't music either
get a load of this guy

>This dick isn't free
Shakespeare BTFO'd in a single line

>mass media charts are valid
Popular music isn't art.

What IS music, then? Stop being such a fucking shitposter

Masturbation cannot be musical.
I've explained what it isn't; what music is is what notmusic isn't.

>le only music is classical
psued

Its shit.

Sometimes you get something good when they talk about their personal lives, but you can only hear so many "I grew up in the ghetto"/ black ancestry stories before it starts to get really old. The socially conscious stuff is really self-centered, naive, and often flat out wrong.

Classical doesn't mean anything, please stop being intentionally stupid.

that's some weak shit m8, apply yourself

Honestly I wish more white people would come in and make unique hip hop. Blacks are content with muh ghetto muh oppression and are very racist against white rappers.

>he calls it "art music"

stop replying to the baiter.

>anything i dont like is le b8

You don't know what you're talking about

>are very racist against white rappers.
What are you talking about?
Some of the top black hip hop artist praise white hip hop artist like Eminem and Beastie Boys all the time.

>THREE-HUNDRED LIKE THE ROMANS

It's Veeky Forums. Everybody is a try hard here.

That's what it is called in English, yes.
>anyone i dont like is le baitman

I'm knowledgeable enough on the subject to have favorites but I have no problem with it.

you forgot the most Veeky Forums rapper there is

Holy shit yes

>They pray four times a day, they pray five
>Who ways is strange when it's time to survive
>Some will go of they own free will to die
>Others take them with you when they blow sky high

>What's the difference? All you get is lost children
>While the bosses sit up behind the desks
>It cost billions to blast humans in half, into calves and arms
>Only one side is allowed to have bombs

>It's like making a soldier drop his weapon
>Shooting him, and telling him to get to stepping
>Obviously, they came to portion up his fortune
>Sounds to me like that old robbery/extortion.

People who say rap is all 'Ghettos, hoes, and bling' don't know what they're talking about.

idk how he spells it but con carne and con queso are so good

This garbage isn't much better, you realize.

Music is supposed to be entertaining, trying to make you feel something or put you in some kind of mood.

Hip hop at its core doesn't work, because it's trying to get some message across without actually explaining the message or why its good. Its like trying to fit an essay into one page. Putting a beat behind some words that say 'Hey man murdering blacks is bad' doesn't make anybody want to murder less blacks.

Most Veeky Forums hip-hop album coming through.
youtube.com/watch?v=hhSPR_pFnxo

MF DOOM is the shit. Especially Vaudeville Villain.

Keith Murray is good but not Veeky Forums

How?
Of course you wouldn't explain because it would take effort you don't have.

>dae terrorism bad!?!?!!?!?!?!!?
>dae teh US gubment jus terrorists xddDDD1?!!?!!?!?

> 'Hey man murdering blacks is bad' doesn't make anybody want to murder less blacks.

Just because you want to murder blacks doesn't mean that some people dont' find hip hop entertaining.

>Music is supposed to be entertaining
ye and what you find entertaining about one thing will be different for someone else, but wtf do i know it's not like hip-hop is wildly popular or anything.

That's a lot of memes.

I enjoy it as a spoken word or musical art form, but I don't think I could judge it from a literature standpoint. The lyrics would have to be exceptional. I think how a rapper uses his voice is cooler than what he is rapping about.

youtube.com/watch?v=qDKrJhNOygA

>Vapidity of the listener
Shit dawg, don't be hatin' on a nigga.
I appreciate your response, and will reply in turn to some of your more incredulous claims. If you seriously believe that hip hop/rap is on the same intellectual level as classical, jazz or rock, and isn't something one can grow out of, you're applying a philosophical variant of musical relativity. When looked at in the overall sense, rap operates on a peurile level, with limited intellectual input, both compositionally, as well as thematically. Thus, as a person's intellect grows, they can transition from 'muh dik' to 'the tragedy of humanity's expulsion from eden' al la Part. Of all the points to nit pick with, it's surprising you included that as a condescension point.
Referring to your 'vapid listener's' assessment on the stagnation of rock jazz and classical, firstly, it's not true, as there are plenty of composers producing works of the highest artistic merit. Secondly, in my brief, subjective synopsis, I tried to sweep the entirety of the 3 decades of rap/hip hop, paying little attention to formal academic style, and it was never implied that one has to be conscious of the 'direction' in which the genre is heading, as a testament to its historical validity. All the music in contemporary history, spanning the last 200 years is pretty much available to us, and rap is little more than a catchy, mutated footnote of that continuum.
You've certainly made some good points, but again it's difficult to see how you think I ignored parallel evolution of the musical 'movements'. The 'out of africa' theory can very definitely be applied to hip hop/rap and all its derivatives. As I understand it, a Jamaican dj was the first to experiment with cutting records, and some New York djs like kool herc and grandmasta flash started looping the drum breaks. This was the starting point which begat all the rest.

>Music is supposed to be entertaining

[citation needed]

When people start comparing rap, a pseudo-improvisational attempt to keep up with a simple 4/4 beat and impress the audience by bragging about their lives, to poetry, like capital P Poetry, I have to question whether they've actually read poetry on a serious level.

Like, could Coates read Yeats's "He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" and pick up on how Yeats deliberately contrasts his first quatrain's dactylic beat with the second quatrain's anapestic metre to emphasise his narrator's bitter humility and better contradict his fantasies? Does he understand the sheer amount of effort, skill, and intelligence it takes to consciously manipulate the rhythm not of a sentence or a phrase, but of the very way each and every syllable itself is pronounced and arranged in order to represent a complex and emotional idea? To do this while maintaining a coherent grammatical and original rhyming structure AND while delivering a series of stunning images that range from religious ecstasy to poverty and psychological turmoil? To then subtly contradict this established structure in order to draw attention to yet another complex idea?

This isn't just a spread of internal rhymes, puns, and catchy slang; this is a man loading no more than eight lines with as much content as the English language allows.

Illmatic is a good album. Nas is a talented rapper. But to say that a 16 year-old kid from the projects operates at the level of a Nobel Prize-winning poet is absolute horseshit. No he fucking does not; he wrote his lyrics according to some DJ Premier beat and his own public image. You want to judge his writing as poetry? You want to look at his words when they're neutered from the music and live audience they were written to accompany? Okay, let's look. There is no coherent metre, let alone any conscious metrical technique. His rhyme scheme is all over the fucking place, and a lot of phrases were awkwardly forced in just to hit those incredibly simple end rhymes. The narrative is sloppy and its images are repetitive; he abandons ideas halfway through simply to survive until the next line. He brags about himself constantly and fills his story with non sequiturs that serve no purpose other than to highlight his knowledge of street slang and demonstrate how violent his life is.

As poetry, it's kind of trash. It's not very creative. It's definitely not skillful. It should be performed over music and never ever separated from it.

From the inside of my corpse, 30 seconds is like a century imprisoned in necrotic flesh cognizant beyond my death paralyzed and frozen in this carnal penitentiary
Lucidly projecting hellish spectres
Ghoulish architecture, enveloped in a darkness far beyond my mind can measure suffocating violent pressure
It just goes on forever, are these electro-magnetic hallucinations?
Is this everybody's afterlife or something I've created?
Abandoned and dismissed in a flaccid impotence with the cold illumination that I no longer exist
In a grave within a grave
It was the first time I prayed, no one there to tell me that I shouldn't be afraid
Falling endlessly deeper, yet immobile and still
In this infinite aethyr washing over my filth, neither angels or reapers or ghosts were fulfilled
Just a cavity to soak up my guilt
In my depravity, the flowers up above me wilting down so they can laugh at me
To think we spend our lives
Convinced we understand agony, a familiar
Voice: "He's finally at peace"
Shrieking through the silence to remind me I'm deceased
I tried to answer but the dead can't speak, the biggest prison in the world's underground six feet

And I’m always where the
Sun don’t shine, the
Tears don’t show, won't
Hurt me now 'cause
Heart's been broke, I
Hate myself but
It won't show, I
Constantly lose all
My remorse, and it's
Ten for the wolf and
Three for the shepherd and it's
One for the sheep who
Led by a leopard, often
Gave his perception as a
Handle of weapon, took a
Bite of your apple, give me
All you can offer, now I'm
Trapped in a changing maze
Setting my soul ablaze
Couldn’t control the pace
Where is this going? Hey
Heartless is recklessness, it is
Word of a pacifist to the
Word of a masochist, I'm
Off of the map, my Lord I
Spoke to a baphomet, he
Said he would save me if I
Gave him one thing he needed
What is this thing I pleaded?
Boy, it's the key to even

what does Veeky Forums think of DG's Beware? It has some Nietzschean undertones.

And I know soon come my time
For in mine void a pale horse burns
But I fear not the time I'm taken
Past the point of no return.
Wage war like no tomorrow
Cuz no hell there won't be one
For all who deny the struggle
The triumphant overcome

Trips to where, few have been
Out of thin air, upon high winds
Rites begin when the sun descends
Have felt what few will ever know
Have seen the truth beneath the glow,
Of the ebb and flow, where roots of all mysteries grow
I am below, so far below
The bottom line
Transmitting live, transmissions rise
From the depths out of controlled by
Suspended glance of an unblinking eyes
Imminent gaze cast 'pon the path that winds
'Pon the path I find, and claim as mine
To ride the waves, of unrest
Made to make me shine as a testament
To why the ways of the blind will never get
Shit but shanked by my disrespect
Dismiss this life, worship death
Cold blood night of serpent's breath
Exhaled like spells from the endlessness
In the bottomless wells of emptiness
Channeled to invoke what we represent

Secret order
Elitist horde of
Creeping fire
Seizing power
Riders of the lupus hour
Eye on palm
Time is gone
Moonlight drawn
Fly til dawn
Sacrifice to rise beyond
Deep inside the violent calm
Of the coming storm
In blood sworn
To glorify and for life adorn
With all that dies to become unborn

no poet touches the flow/rhythm of rap, get over it, nobody cares about poetry anymore, there are no poets, rap has replaced it

prove me otherwise, show me some good poetry that the modern man can relate to and read

Didn't call it independent as a genre. Hip hop slowly released rock and folk in the independent realm in late 2000s, you may not be old enough to have seen the change slowly happen.

Replaced. Not released

>dumb phone poster

nas rhyming is more complex, he is a storyteller and wrote from the perspective of a gun in i gave you power.

Rap BTFO!
There are probably some rap wordsmiths out there that have an appreciation of what you're delving into there, but they're certainly not household names.
Racking my brains to think of examples: there's a jazz style called M-Base, and one of its best proponents Greg Osby did a few rap albums, whose lyricists sound like they have studied poetry properly. 3D lifestyles and Black Book. Most of it is still 4/4 though, save for the instrumentals.

the fact you are intellectually masturbating over that shitty yeats poem just shows your bias

I love rap and i'm white. I have a Q for my brothas out there (black and white brothas, male and female): when I listening to hop hop in public (just earphones, but loud) I feel self-conscious about the N'word, and also about head-bobbing and grooving to the beat. Any advices on how to listen to rap and look natural as a non african-american?

It's very simple: you have to pair the lyrics to what is appropriate to your own ethnicity.
So if you're listening to a song with lyrics like 'I'm bout to str8 kill a nigga, you done stepped in the wrong hood, punk ass beeyotch', you transpose it to a country and Western style, and sing liltingly 'I'm about to shoot me a nigger, wee dowgie, you shouldn'ta come round these here parts, jigabooo'.
You've immediately taken all the radially charged tension out of the situation, and people will barely give you a passing glance.
Mind your ears with high volume music, by the way.

Haha dude if you're wearing headphones, the people around you have absolutely no idea what you're listening to. Don't feel self-conscious about groovin', 99% of people won't ever notice unless you're going fucking mental. Every time I've ever noticed somebody bumping or grooving I just sorta thought "haha, he's having a good day" or whatever. That said if your headphones are loud enough that people can hear your music you're a tool.

Ras Kass is pretty good.

Anyone here /MFDOOM/?

>92 replies

>death grips
>comprehensible lyrics
They're style over substance all the way, which is fine for music, but none of their work can really be treated as poetry.

Gotta agree that writing some lines with internal rhyme by themselves does not necessarily have literary merit lol

Yeah. I think it's a world record?

More like. MFAT DOOM.

That's beside the point.

You're mad, man.

All 10 songs on Illmatic are works of art, the only two possible outliers if your taste is sporatic being Genesis and N.Y State of mind, which sadly, are the first 2 tracks.