"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

[zenith.livejournal.com]

1. Pretty much every website on which I've ever discussed music, with the exception of actual hip-hop boards, has had a significant number of people on it (often the majority) who didn't "get" contemporary (mainstream) hip-hop... By which I mean not only that they weren't fans, but that they had some kind of additional aversion or resistance to it, sometimes couched in moral or pseudo-political terms. The obvious major exception to this would be ILM (at its peak, but still to an extent today), where I've often been made to realise how relative these things are and how little I know myself. So yes, I think it is a gap for poptimism, and it's a gap for me too.

2. I have been very out of touch this year, I feel... Yet at the same time the year feels so divided up into different chunks that it is hard to assess what stuff I heard is better than others. In spring I was all about the El-P album, I'll Sleep When You're Dead (astonishing that I could ever like a song featuring the Mars Volta, but I do). In the summer it was all about catching up with mainstream stuff - 'Pussy' by Clipse, 'Go DJ' by Lil Wayne... More recently: the tracks I've heard from the new Jay-Z album are all great and I'll be getting that on Monday; ditto 'Celebrate' by Ghostface and a bunch of tracks that won't be on his album, including 'The Odd Couple' with Cappadonna and 'Crambodia' with Plastic Little, Spank Rock and Amanda Blank (getting Ghost on this track was obviously a massive coup). Oh, and I literally just heard for the first time 'Drop & Give Me 50' by Mike Jones and Hurricane Chris, which is fantastic and seems to feature a Fox N Wolf reference? Maybe?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

It's interesting you say that about ILM - my main memory of hip-hop discussion on ILM was the near-perpetual one-upmanship between people keen to demonstrate that they "got" it more than others.

This produced an atmosphere in which only the very foolhardy (or long-ensconced and pre-screened regulars) would generalise about the moral woes of hip-hop, but it also meant that actual conversation about it was pretty fun-free.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

Hip-hop on ILM was interesting because you had the poles apart righteous crusader St.Trife AND the AntiChrist Hongro in the same war room. Actually maybe it was more interesting before Geir became a regular.

[zenith.livejournal.com]

I think this all true. A weird jump to the opposite end of the spectrum. I think a good rule in discussing any form of pop, even more so than when writing about it more formally, is to acknowledge the limits of your own knowledge, and not be afraid of that.

It was all worth it for 'Attention rappers et al', though.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

this is either shameful or irrelevant but i did not realise El-P was white until this year.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

What, Emerson, Lake & Palmer?