When is hip hop going to die?

[Spurminator]

Yep. By far the most interesting and innovative of the major genres of music right now.

I miss new and interesting rock, but we're at the point where the most viable versions of that genre are karaoke-style covers by 40 year olds and a band whose popularity is a direct result of their ability to sound like Led Zeppelin. Even a lot of the good new indie rock stuff sounds like a nostalgia exercise.

[spurraider21]

Yep. By far the most interesting and innovative of the major genres of music right now.

I miss new and interesting rock, but we're at the point where the most viable versions of that genre are karaoke-style covers by 40 year olds and a band whose popularity is a direct result of their ability to sound like Led Zeppelin. Even a lot of the good new indie rock stuff sounds like a nostalgia exercise.

mhm. i still maintain that the best rock album that's come out in the last 25 years is Wolfmother by Wolfmother... but as you said, they were basically really good at sounding like led zep with a singer that sounds like ozzy

then the band had a major lineup change and their follow up album was trash

[Spurminator]

mhm. i still maintain that the best rock album that's come out in the last 25 years is Wolfmother by Wolfmother... but as you said, they were basically really good at sounding like led zep with a singer that sounds like ozzy

then the band had a major lineup change and their follow up album was trash

And that was like 2005 wasn't it?

I was talking about Greta Van Fleet, for the record.

[Bynumite]

Rock listeners always go back to the classics and look down upon most modern acts for not being as great.

Hip Hop is the complete opposite. The 14 year old kid listening to lil uzi or whatever has no idea who the Nas is

Don't really see the genre going away anytime soon, as long as they keep replacing the old with the new, regardless of quality.

[spurraider21]

And that was like 2005 wasn't it?

I was talking about Greta Van Fleet, for the record.

holy i didnt realize it was that long ago

and yeah there are some others too, i didnt think you were necessarily talking about wolfmother, but i agree with your overall assessment. muse is another band that showed a lot of promise... but they've just tried to emulate queen. and i mean they do a pretty good job, and they're fantastic live, but like you said, they are liked because they tap into nostalgia. united states of eurasia is such a shameless/egregious re-imagining of bohemian rhapsody that it goes beyond "influence"

[Spurminator]

holy i didnt realize it was that long ago

and yeah there are some others too, i didnt think you were necessarily talking about wolfmother, but i agree with your overall assessment. muse is another band that showed a lot of promise... but they've just tried to emulate queen. and i mean they do a pretty good job, and they're fantastic live, but like you said, they are liked because they tap into nostalgia. united states of eurasia is such a shameless/egregious re-imagining of bohemian rhapsody that it goes beyond "influence"

Yeah I preferred Muse when they sounded like early Radiohead.

[spurraider21]

Rock listeners always go back to the classics and look down upon most modern acts for not being as great.

Hip Hop is the complete opposite. The 14 year old kid listening to lil uzi or whatever has no idea who the Nas is

Don't really see the genre going away anytime soon, as long as they keep replacing the old with the new, regardless of quality.

it just feels like everything has been done in rock. hip hop has a lot of room to grow and evolve tbh. rock did too, and it changed a lot through the decades. but there hasn't been good innovation for some time.

hip hop has been in the mainstream for about 30 years or so. wouldn't be surprised if its staying power continues.

[FrostKing]

"Modern hip hop" = talking over a sampled European techno beat. Innovative lol. How do you change talking?
Faster, slower, deeper, higher.

Rock is played in every corner of the globe, there is no escaping it from restaurants, to films, to even churches. Hip hop is only centralized in specific areas, mostly Western. Unless I'm watching Western television, I barely even know it exists. This is a NBA forum so the demographic on this subject is apparent.

Hip hop is too speech dependent. How many of you listen to non-English hip hop? Rock because of instruments is not constraint by this. This is why Hip Hop is also star dominated. It is mostly an image and backed by the industry. A quality rock song doesn't need all that. I'm guessing your artist collection of rock is far more diverse

[midnightpulp]

it just feels like everything has been done in rock. hip hop has a lot of room to grow and evolve tbh. rock did too, and it changed a lot through the decades. but there hasn't been good innovation for some time.

hip hop has been in the mainstream for about 30 years or so. wouldn't be surprised if its staying power continues.

I always dislike when the "innovation" buzzword is applied to any form of art and/or is somehow used as a value descriptor of art. How can art "innovate" anything, really? Applying the innovative tag to art attempts to define it in terms of technological progress where innovation means something that does the job of the thing it replaced cheaper and more efficiently (i.e. horse carriages to cars). Artistic value is obviously subjective, and the primary elements of artistic value are a person's emotional and intellectual responses. A horse carriage will never get you to a destination as quickly as a car all things being equal, therefore the horse carriage is obviously "antiquated" as a mode of transport, but a 1920s Blues song can produce the same level of emotional and intellectual engagement as anything modern. On a related note, this is why calling a piece of art "dated" or "aged" is also nonsensical.

Someone might try to describe innovation in art as a change to a preceding artistic trend (i.e. the Rockabilly of Elvis, Buddy Holly to the British Invasion to Psychedelic), but the ensuing development doesn't make the preceding trend "obsolete" in the technological sense. Buddy Holly is Buddy Holly, and his music produces a different experience than the music of the Velvet Underground. The two artists don't "compete with each other" for technological viability. Change doesn't equate to superiority in this case. It's just that. Change.

Saying "everything's been done in a genre" falls into the trap of, again, placing art within that obsolescence/innovative technological paradigm. "Well, we've exhausted all the possibilities of the internal combustion engine. Nowhere to go." Art is first and foremost a "formalized expression of experience." As long as there exists people with "something to say," art can't be exhausted of its possibilities (Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen sound superficially alike, but are actually nothing alike). This is even true mathematically, as there are a limitless number of ways to construct a melody. Then add on top of that the limitless amount of tonal, rhythmic, and temporal variations.

[midnightpulp]

Also, a form of music doesn't "die" just because it's no longer relevant in the popular culture, nor does it "die" because it has run its course creatively (which is impossible). If you want to evaluate music on purely objective terms (a tough task), modern Jazz, a genre that has been totally irrelevant for 40 years, is musically more interesting than anything coming from popular music culture. Now, I just got done writing about music being subjective and how it's wrong to attempt to evaluate it on objective terms, so I don't think modern Jazz is subjectively superior to popular music, since they have different aims, but people have the misbelief that music popular with youth culture is what is currently "musically cutting edge."

[FrostKing]

In rock or jazz, no one cares what you look like, where your from, what you did or whom you sleep with

In Hip Hop these are critical factors to gain "street cred". That is why the genre is heavily image based and thus processed.

[MultiTroll]

In rock or jazz, no one cares what you look like, where your from, what you did or whom you sleep with

In Hip Hop these are critical factors to gain "street cred". That is why the genre is heavily image based and thus processed.

"Young Dolph"
Re shows up at a Club with all kinds of puffed out chest *posse*. Just itching to get into an altercation, real or staged. (See Sopranos episode )

Sure enough there was some beef earlier at a Club he started the night *performing* at. The beef seems to have made it's way up to this club he transferred to. Now bear in mind, one of Young Dolphs songs he brags about how "Dere bee a shootins at 1z o my showz." -paraphrase.

Bravo. So next (real or staged) the beef spills out into the street and shots are fired. The shots are wayyy off the mark (thankfully) so I think this was a Sopranos type episode to build up Young Dipsticks street kred.

FFS

[spurraider21]

I always dislike when the "innovation" buzzword is applied to any form of art and/or is somehow used as a value descriptor of art. How can art "innovate" anything, really? Applying the innovative tag to art attempts to define it in terms of technological progress where innovation means something that does the job of the thing it replaced cheaper and more efficiently (i.e. horse carriages to cars). Artistic value is obviously subjective, and the primary elements of artistic value are a person's emotional and intellectual responses. A horse carriage will never get you to a destination as quickly as a car all things being equal, therefore the horse carriage is obviously "antiquated" as a mode of transport, but a 1920s Blues song can produce the same level of emotional and intellectual engagement as anything modern. On a related note, this is why calling a piece of art "dated" or "aged" is also nonsensical.

Someone might try to describe innovation in art as a change to a preceding artistic trend (i.e. the Rockabilly of Elvis, Buddy Holly to the British Invasion to Psychedelic), but the ensuing development doesn't make the preceding trend "obsolete" in the technological sense. Buddy Holly is Buddy Holly, and his music produces a different experience than the music of the Velvet Underground. The two artists don't "compete with each other" for technological viability. Change doesn't equate to superiority in this case. It's just that. Change.

Saying "everything's been done in a genre" falls into the trap of, again, placing art within that obsolescence/innovative technological paradigm. "Well, we've exhausted all the possibilities of the internal combustion engine. Nowhere to go." Art is first and foremost a "formalized expression of experience." As long as there exists people with "something to say," art can't be exhausted of its possibilities (Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen sound superficially alike, but are actually nothing alike). This is even true mathematically, as there are a limitless number of ways to construct a melody. Then add on top of that the limitless amount of tonal, rhythmic, and temporal variations.

Also, a form of music doesn't "die" just because it's no longer relevant in the popular culture, nor does it "die" because it has run its course creatively (which is impossible). If you want to evaluate music on purely objective terms (a tough task), modern Jazz, a genre that has been totally irrelevant for 40 years, is musically more interesting than anything coming from popular music culture. Now, I just got done writing about music being subjective and how it's wrong to attempt to evaluate it on objective terms, so I don't think modern Jazz is subjectively superior to popular music, since they have different aims, but people have the misbelief that music popular with youth culture is what is currently "musically cutting edge."

Mid I’m sure garage bands are still going to be around and engage in muh artistic expression. I think it’s pretty clear that in this context we are talking about commercial viability. The whole shtick about unlimited melodies is complete in practice. You can put a toddler in front of a piano and have them mash 1000’s or melodies and call all of them artistic expression. But this is what we see in the industry.

[leemajors]

In rock or jazz, no one cares what you look like, where your from, what you did or whom you sleep with

In Hip Hop these are critical factors to gain "street cred". That is why the genre is heavily image based and thus processed.

you have no idea what you are talking about.

[midnightpulp]

Mid I’m sure garage bands are still going to be around and engage in muh artistic expression. I think it’s pretty clear that in this context we are talking about commercial viability. The whole shtick about unlimited melodies is complete in practice. You can put a toddler in front of a piano and have them mash 1000’s or melodies and call all of them artistic expression. But this is what we see in the industry.

Well, if you expect the rock genre to find a way to be as commercially viable as it was during its golden age, I don't think that's possible. Hip-Hop and Pop are much more compatible with the social media age than rock, since the two genres are naturally more extroverted and image-centric. Musically, the catchy, singles oriented nature of hip-hop and pop are also more compatible with how music is primarily listened to today, on the go or as background noise on headphones or small Bluetooth speakers. Both are relatively ty reproduction methods (even the best "audiophile" headphones are in' terrible at imaging, soundstage, and tonal accuracy). I believe we talked about that fact before in a hi-fi thread, and you made a good point that since no one listens to music on a proper stereo anymore, modern music production doesn't benefit from taking the time to create a layered, 3 dimensional soundstage.

Further complicating matters for rock is how easy it is for the industry to out new hip-hop and pop stars. Even an industry planted rock band have to be competent musicians, singers, and learn to play together. Something that takes a great deal more time and money than finding a tattooed face idiot on the streets and hiring a nerd with a DAW to make his beats. It's why soundcloud is an avalanche of bedroom produced mediocrity.

My gripe is when people claim that the rock (or any) genre has nowhere else to go "creatively" since it's been around for so long and "everything's been done." Agreed about your point how musical construction has become more genous over the years (see here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com...etting-louder/). That doesn't disprove that there are limitless number of ways you can build a song, though. The Axis of Awesome vid actually proves my point. With or Without You and Forever Young might have the same four chord foundation, but sound nothing alike (aside from some similar vocal phrasing) since the tempos, timbre, pitch, and rhythms are different. Axis of Awesome cheats by playing all the songs in the same key, with the same instruments and with similar tempo. They also completely eliminate the rhythm section (no drums, bass guitar, etc).