Current hip-hop sucks but if you go back to the roots...

[Blazer]

Let's be honest, Hip-Hop is dead, at least in what it used to be: the sound of the street, people rapping about how tough life is in poverty and most of the time while doing drugs. Nowadays, almost every rapper is rapping about how unfair the world is and how tough life is for them while wearing "Bling" and showing off their Lamborghini Supercars and big mansions. It has all become such a corporate joke.

But let's go back to where it began and we can actually find some really good grooves and very funky basslines. The original Hip-hop emerged together with breakdancing and in most of the earliest hip-hop videos they always had breakdancers. Such as THIS one.


Malcolm Mclaren - "Buffalo gals"
McLaren was an early fan of the street sounds because he saw it as a black punk rock, angry young kids spewing their bile in raps and using a DJ to provide them with a beat to do so. That DJ to McLaren also was a statement against previous musicforms, you didn't even need to play an instrument anymore, scratching and sampling removed all of that. Note also the breakdance crew in this clip, who later released one of the very first world wide hip-hop hits.


Herbie Hancock - "Rockit"
Another artist who saw the potential of Hip-hop was jazz player Hancock who released his hugely influencial album "Future shock" in which he expressed his love for the new sound. In turn, Hancock's songs on that album were sampled by countless of hip-hop acts making the circle round again.


Grandmaster Flash and the Furious five - "The message"
This song, more than any other early hip-hop release shows what attracted Malcolm McLaren to the genre. "The Message" pretty much was the Hip-hop version of the "No future" ethic of Punk rock: Bleek times, poverty, drugs and all of that told by the people themselves. Many current day hip-hopper will testify this: "the message" was the first true hardcore hip-hop song.


Rocksteady Crew - "Hey you"
This song was the first instance of breakdancers breaking (No pun intended) away from the more hardcore sound of rappers like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious five. They appeared in the Video for "Buffalo gals" I posted earlier. And they embraced a more pop sound which paid off, it became one of the best selling hip-hop songs of the time.


Break Machine - "Street dance"
Like the Rocksteady crew, Break machine also were a breakdance crew who went into music but unlike the Rocksteady, they embraced soul and funk to base their style on and as a result, their songs have a more conventional set up of Verse-chorus-verse-chorus-break-chorus-ECT but they still have that ragged sound that typifies early hip-hop releases.

[kungfusheriff]

I can't say I agree -- like all genres that achieve mass popularity, hip-hop has been shaped by the marketplace, and usually not for the good. The stuff that most people listen to is pretty awful...I caught a video the other day by that T.I. guy that just about killed me. The whole lyric was about the woman he's talking to being able to have whatever she wants, whenever she wants it. Horribly shallow stuff, and the guy's huge now.
If you look, there are plenty of artists out there that have declared war on that mentality. A friend of mine turned me on to a rapper called Immortal Technique, who he described to me as a very bright young guy with a terrible attitude and a subscription to Lexis-Nexus who's sold 135,000 CDs without major label support. Check it out:
http://immortal-technique.com/

[Blazer]

And another band that stuck true to real hip-hop are the Beastie Boys who will probably never appear wearing bling and driving hypercars in their videos.


"Three Mc's and one DJ"
The title says enough.