A Year In Pop: 32

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The UK's Number! One! Pop! Stars! Kleerup (and some Swedish mate of theirs) did quite well last week. This week there's the return of Kanye West with his Daft Punk sample, and some other stuff including the first top 40 hit for sophisticindie croonster Richard Hawley. Why not spend your elevenses ticking?

[Poll #1038904]

(All year in pop polls are open until the end of the year. Your investments may go down as well as up.)

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Yeah that could be right. Apart from the turn-of-the-century period it seems like all the really popular 'urban' stuff succeeds despite its 'urban'ness rather than because of it.

Also, contra the US where hip-hop and r&b is the default language of pop music, ie the music you hear in everyday life, that somehow never happened here: I find that people are either steeped in 'urban' music, ie have grown up with it, or are various degrees of suspicious, ranging from liking a few songs but not really liking the genres, to outright racist dislike.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I suspect it may be a secret racist impulse of mine that I feel I'm not quite allowed to like urban music because I'm white and middle class. My fear of acting like Joss Stone is profound. I tried to address this in a shit thing I wrote about Lethal Bizzle a few weeks ago and suspect I accidentally came across as a massive racist. *headdesk*

Then again, it's never stopped me liking it ever since got massively excited about Notorious BIG years and years ago so not sure what the rest of the UK's excuse is.

50 Cent made a lot of people I know who used to quite like rap start vehemently tirading against it. I don't know whether this is possible to be projected onto the rest of the country, though.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Both those points really ring a bell...I think a lot of white middle-class British people just don't know how to 'deal' with the language of hip-hop, they know how stupid they could look if they copy it or appear to take it seriously...so they take the piss out of it instead. There's some sort of power thing there, middle-class Britons are simply not on hip-hop's radar - what they think doesn't matter at all - and mocking it is a way of trying to deflate its importance? Also, there is no shortage of wankers in the UK, descendants of Bernard Manning no doubt, who are v ready to mock the most 'black' aspects of hip-hop.

Anyway yeah, def a perception that it's not 'ours' and therefore 'we' can't like it - this is so lazy though, people are hearing language they don't use and projecting that out over hip-hop's wider themes, which are actually rather universal.

Tom always says crunk was the tipping point for a lot of people but I think 50 Cent may have been - I have yet to understand why. OK he's dumb and stuff but he is not the first dumb rapper in the world!

Also weird post-Eminem stuff...I think Eminem's massive success may have worked against hip-hop over here, shifted expectations of the genre a bit too much.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I think with 50 Cent, it's the fact that he absolutely and totally personified the stereotype of bad hip hop: sex, violence, guns, bitches, bling, etc. and absolutely nothing else. I mean, I think he's dire and he makes me cringe with all the porn speak but he started cutting off the genre for a lot of people who'd previously liked it, since he was so embarassing to them because if they mentioned they liked a rap artist, this was what they at least thought people would think they liked. Maybe. I don't know... I feel it's that he embarassed them, anyway. Partly also of course because he is so very open about being in it to make money; lots and lots and lots more money than he could ever need and this is the sort of thing middle class Britain thinks is terribly rude, traditonally.

Oh, oh, oh. I know. 50 Cent caused the problem by being shit: there can be a general consensus that he is quite shit. This created an issue for white middle class people who liked rap, cus they'd defended it, often along totally and utterly the wrong (and indeed quite racist) lines. They'd denied that this sort of glamourisation of violence occurred in it, that there was this sort of misogyny and that rap was capable of something so stupid and offensive. Then here comes 50, becoming the biggest rapper in the world evarz or whatever and they don't know how to denounce him without having to make their ideas about hip hop more complex and less patronising: rather than being good by virtue of being black music, (which has a hefty wallop of orientalism about it, of course) it has to be good by virtue of being good black music and the fear of being called racist by denouncing 50 Cent drives them into the much worse racism of calling 50 Cent the epitomy of black male musician.

Err. I have no idea whether that makes sense, since it's basically just stream-of-consciousness. I think I probably ought to go to bed now.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I love 50 Cent! Get Rich Or Die Trying is a wicked album, I never did pick up the second one but I love the singles off it. I wouldn't say the problem was that Fiddy is shit per se, more like...resolutely generic. He reduces hip-hop right down to the basics, thematically, and strips out all the things others might find mitigating factors...I mean, no one has ever been in the game to make money more than Jay-Z, but somehow when Jay-Z did it it was more acceptable than Fiddy.

Fiddy's flow is kinda crap technically I think but on his best songs has this lazy charm about it. His beats tend to be brilliant in a v generic way.

Odd thing is I remember everyone, and I mean everyone, absolutely loving 'In Da Club'.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Everyone loving 'In Da Club' was what made it all the worse when he rolled out 'P.I.M.P.' though, cus this was not only someone everyone had raved about but now was creating something they felt profoundly uncomfortable with; he was very much a sort of fanciable poster boy for ten minutes, before that song appeared and most girls went off him pretty fast, cus whether it's a joke or not (and given Mr Cent's generally evidenced brain power, I assume it's now) it's incredibly uncomfortable listening.

I think his resolute genericism (if that's a word) is problematic because there are the parallels to pull in with a lot of other rappers and consequently, he tars the lot with one brush or whatever.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This conversation should really be its own post/thread!

Of course the UK public DO still buy 'urban' music - Timbaland was just at #1, Kanye is about to be, 50 Cent was big here if not as huge as in the US, the big diva names in R&B do very well.

So is the question - why don't white students like hip-hop any more? (This is a good question! There are a lot of white students around - they're a very significant part of the market, when you factor in older people whose tastes are still defined by what they liked when they were students they're possibly the MOST significant part - like Moggy suggested, they might not be the "average listener" but they might well be the "average buyer")

Actually "white students" is a bit prescriptive - a lot of them happen to be white and happen to be students but what we have here is a listening segment who like some hip-hop, who want to like more hip-hop and to feel like hip-hop has something to offer them - a lot of them happen to be white and students, is all.

ANYWAY what turned them off? I still think crunk had a lot to do with it, cos it was sonically harsher, more dance-oriented, more uncompromising in use of local slang and accents, and crucially the big hits were not promoted or distributed here at all, so there was a big gap in the flow of urban hits coming into this country.

50 Cent was a factor too, but I think in combination with Outkast, who went absolutely colossal and gave people uncomfortable w/50 Cent something to hold up against aggressively commercial hip-hop - but then Outkast vanished, so they were as much a way OUT of liking hip-hop - 'well, I'd like hip-hop if it were more like THIS but it's not so I don't' (Kanye is like this too).

One of the big things is the question - on what terms do you take hip-hop? "On its own terms" - well what if you don't like those terms? Do you not listen at all? Hip-hop seems to me much much more aggressively concerned than indie even about who's real, who isn't, and listening to it 'on its own terms' becomes more and more hoop-jumping - look at how joyless the hip-hop conversations on ILM are, everyone always so fearful of being sonned by someone else for not understanding or not listening in the right way. I think Lex made an excellent point about middle-class whites not being important to hip-hop values and content (though commercially I think they often ARE), but I think he can't expect it to be very big here without buy-in from that audience, and I also think the days when that audience would buy in masochistically (I'll love your records but be quiet and mousish in the face of yr superior authenticity) are probably gone!

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I agree entirely about crunk, although it's starting to make strange circles in the strange indie world of strange welsh town Aberystwyth. This is by no means demonstrative of The Student World, however and since it's entirely based on Girl Talk's slightly rubbish but quite endearing remix album of every crunk record of the last three years reduced into manageable, 30-second slots, it is probably an even more minor issue. The worst thing is actually the NME talking about crunk, if you've ever seen it do it- it decided it was a good thing before it knew what it was and now it doesn't even know what it's doing but it wants to talk about it for some reason, which I suppose is vaguely admirable, as the NME's ambitions generally go but you would have thought they could find someone who knew something about it to try and have a go. Then again, that would be intimidating to the reader, I suppose. Hrmm. Actually technically the NME may have given up on crunk since I haven't read it for quite some time but it did try, once and I think its success rate was similar to that of yr average white student trying to listen to it.

On the other hand, I do know a lot of white students who like UK hip hop. I have a bit of a thing for Low Life records and also wish I knew more people to talk to me about Grime-or-whatever-you-call-it, because I like the genre but I don't know where to go to look for good stuff, etc. My ex was also v. keen on rap and totally obsessed by Rhymesayers, which I suppose is US rap for middle class white people. Which brings in what you and him were saying about it simply not speaking to white students, which it doesn't. As Lex said, we [white students] don't deal with the issues or use the vocabulary in most hip hop and so it can't appeal without some funny race/class issues getting in, cus I could only ever appreciate it as something v. foreign. Part of the problem is that the currents of US rap are too hard to possibly follow instantly (I wouldn't know the difference between east coast and west coast if you smacked me with them) and so people can't *talk* about it which means no one gets any further with the genre, really because there's a paralysis of discovery. Also we do technically have degrees to do and I'm not going to sit around researching hip hop unless I've got something really meaty to procrastinate about.

Crunk ought to be the middle ground, because it's party music and students of course do a lot of that or whatever but it bores me interminably. It doesn't sound at all crazy or drunk to me, it sounds lazy and woozy which isn't necessarily a bad thing but the lyrics don't grip me enough to listen to it as that.

Kanye West has somehow become acceptably white enough to be bought by people. :( I don't like him but he has been accepted as a 'canon good' rapper

Missy Elliot and similar party rappers (sorry this is probably the wrong way to describe it but that's how I'd think of her, much as I like her) are still popular but a lot of them haven't done anything for awhile. The Timbaland School Of Good Records is also interesting, cus his presence in poppier areas has probably prevented many people wanting to go elsewhere for a slightly urban fix.

Actually, I think the problem is canon rappers. The UK is scared, post-50 Cent, of picking a rapper they aren't absolutely sure is suitable for polite company.

I should probably read all that through but instead I have to go to work so if it's incoherent bobbins I can't fix it.