"srsly poptimists need 1x CRASH COURSE in contemporary hip-hop"

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

(That's the Lex speaking)

1. Do we? Or "Do you?" I should say, since we're a loose clumping of individuals innit.

2. GO ON THEN! What's the best hip-hop you've heard this year?

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I guess my starter for 10 on the first one wd be to push back against the (unspoken) idea that there is a "contemporary hip-hop" that's happening somewhere else, comprehensible and accessible. I don't buy into the idea that hip-hop's in aesthetic decline (commercially? I dunno) but where would the centre of it be?

It would certainly be true to say I haven't especially FOLLOWED hip-hop this year, or for a while - there's I think two hip-hop records in my top 25. Maybe my impression that there WAS once some kind of coherence to the development of hip-hop is historicising it and is too filtered through my means of finding out about it back then i.e. the Brit music press, no street bible they.

[koganbot]

Kurtis Blow says that from the get-go there was a split in hip-hop between the Manhattan guys like DJ Hollywood into disco and the Bronx ones like Bambaataa and Flash & the Furious Five into funk. But the latter two were huge Kraftwerk fans, and Bambaataa ended up helping to invent electro and ultimately had as much or more impact on club music than on hip-hop. And I think it was fairly arbitrary not to call freestyle "hip-hop," though since it generally lacked rapping I guess the exclusion wasn't that arbitrary, but it was into the same beat manipulation. And the South, which wasn't as averse to club beats as New York hip-hop turned out to be, ended up triumphing. And the NYers were always trying to claim that the non-NY competition wasn't real hip-hop.