Today’s post is a continuation of what I was writing yesterday, after having completed a recap of my first 20-something days of daily posting. If it’s your first time reading a post of mine and don’t want to read the recent recap, just know I’ve been writing about music, more specifically hip-hop, and about its overall effect on our planet, whether it’s positive or negative, or whether it’s a bit of both. The same ideas apply to all forms of art, I would say, but there’s two main reasons why I chose to write about hip-hop when it came to this specific subject of art’s influence on our world and its population. One is that I myself am a rapper and hip-hop producer, so it’s a really personal topic for me, and the second reason is that hip-hop is, unfortunately, the genre of music that’s surrounded by the most negativity. The fact is that negativity seems to be almost ingrained into hip-hop culture, in a way, which is a real shame, considering how much power it potentially offers the artist who perfects it and decides to take it seriously. I mentioned that, as someone who’s been on an intense philosophical and spiritual journey for about a decade now, constantly wondering about life and questioning absolutely everything, I can’t help but feel like kind of a hypocrite for failing to leave behind a lot of music I used to listen to before I got into living a mindful life, music that I know is not spiritually edifying me in any way. Now, I’m not trying to make excuses for myself. I know there’s a lot of changes that I should have implemented into my life a long time ago, that I just haven’t, simply because I’m attached to old habits, I’m still stuck in old ways of thinking and living, and haven’t been able to grow out of them. However, I do have to say, if I had grown up listening to today’s hip-hop music, I really think I would have a much easier time letting go of it. The reason I say this is because, when I listen to old-school hip-hop, or hip-hop from the early 2000s, I just can’t deny the talent in it, regardless of the lyrical content and whether it’s spiritually positive or negative, whether it’s philosophically worth listening to or not. While it’s true that negativity has always been a problem within hip-hop, including the old-school, one could at least sense that rappers in those days were staying true to something, at least when it came to the music, to treating the genre with respect and staying true to its roots. I honestly don’t feel I can say the same about new-school rappers though. Artists are no longer true to the roots of hip-hop as an artform, to what made it great in the first place. If you know me, you know I love all kinds of genres of music, some probably even more than hip-hop. My favorite musicians are Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, and Lana Del Rey, so you know I have nothing at all against melodic music. What do melodies have to do with any of this? Well, if you listen to hip-hop classics, like Illmatic, you’ll notice that there’s very little melody in it. The only melodic parts of the album are really just the soul samples that can be heard throughout the beats, but when it came down to the actual rapping, rappers really rapped! It seems like there’ a crucial element missing from today’s rap, and that’s rapping itself! I don’t understand what the difference is between rap and pop if rap is all singing nowadays anyway. What makes rap rap if no one is actually rapping? Even if the lyrics were fucked up, rappers at least used to actually rap, and the beats were interesting, so the music can be respected by anyone who recognizes good music regardless of genre. These days everyone is trying to copy everyone else, and success depends a lot more on the image you make for yourself than on how much talent you possess. The worst of it all is that, although these so-called “rappers” of today want to sing, they actually can’t, and that leads to everyone sounding exactly the same, their voices hidden behind multiple layers of Autotune and reverb. Mainstream beats today are also very simple, and the focus is on making hard beats, not on making soulful beats that inspire you and make the listener feel something. As the bar is set lower and lower, newer “rappers” keep coming out who suck even more than those who inspired them. So, now the lyrics as well as the music are no good, to the point that I don’t even listen to any new rappers these days. It really does seem like hip-hop is dead, or at least mainstream hip-hop is.
If you have a few minutes check out my song “Everything Stay In the Past.” Your listen means a lot to me. Stay blessed.
rebel eye 