| sebastian_dangerfield |
10-23-2008 10:20 AM |
Re: Madonna is 50. Five-oh.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall
(Post 368342)
Some think of it as the death of real hip hop.
Straight Outta Compton was a great album. Very entertaining. But look at what it did. Rap had gone from block parties/I can rock a party better than you to my neighborhood is better than yours to creative sampling and social consciousness to fake ass gang bangers on wax. And aside from some lyrical oriented rappers here and there from that point until now, that's almost all it's been about. Once the country (read: suburban white kids) could classify it as gang music and consume that stereotype in neat little packages, that is all the labels were interested in. Hell, if an artist wants to escape that mold, he better have his own fuckin' label.
So, it's a great album, but giving birth to modern rap isn't exactly something to be proud of.
TM
eta: I'm not overlooking the fact that Straight Outta Compton was actually a social commentary too. Fuck tha Police was a powerful song and it spoke to the hopelessness and futility of growing up poor, black and under the thumb of the police before hand held cameras became affordable. But rappers are still hiding behind that, "I write what I see/know" explanation. And for most of them, it's pure bullshit.
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I just love the sound, and the fact that, fake gangstas or not, they just said what they felt like saying. Nobody since the Pistols had so openly said "Fuck it" and did their own thing.
The music, though, was the thing. The opening cut has one of the greatest hooks I've ever heard. Sure, it's a simple loop (I think a sped-up version of a piece of "Funky Drummer"), but that heavy horn/guitar effect locked with that faster-than-most-rap-at-the-time beat made it almost sound like a standard rock song. One of the things I recall having an issue with early on in listening to rap is that most rappers sounded like they weren't fully connected to the music behind them. I don't know it was cheap mastering or bad mixing or whatever, but on SAC, it sounded like these guys were in the room with the people making the music. They sounded like a rock band. Hell "I Ain't Tha One" and "Express Yourself" could have been sung just as well as they were rapped. Of course, the Eazy-dominated tunes like "Dopeman" and "8 Ball" were old school and the connection between the rapper and the music was lacking, but the rest of the record... Hell, a punk band could cover most of it.
Of course, all this is offered by a man who's going to get in his truck and listen for the 40th time to the new AC/DC record so, in matters of music, YMMV, considerably. |
