Instrumental hip-hop should be banned. It's the banal, meandering stepchild of hip-hop. It's a front-runner for the dubious honor of being the world's most snooze-inducing form of music. And, shockingly, there are still producers and fans who insist on validating it like it's anything but sample-based Chinese water-torture -- one of whom, RJD2, will be airing out his oh-so-atmospheric productions at Manor West on Wednesday, Feb.1.
Beyond playing spot-the-samples, listening to the entirety of an instrumental project from the likes of Madlib, RJD2, or J Dilla -- who now presumably spends his days pestering heaven's denizens with the unreleased off-cuts from his bizarrely worshipped Donuts ruse -- is a feat requiring the ability to numb your mind while practicing saintly levels of patience. Where is the joy and excitement in listening to three minutes of plodding drum beats overlaid with a short sample that repeats but goes nowhere? It's music without a start or end, without peaks and momentum -- it's hip-hop without a money shot. Tragically, it also forgets what makes hip-hop so invigorating in the first place.
Of course, in ye fabled Old School days, hip-hop began with the DJ as the cornerstone of the music: Armed with two turntables and a crate of vinyl, they'd spin the break-beat section of other artists' music. This was good. It was a magpie approach to curating music that honed in on only the snappiest, most infectious, and usually funkiest parts of a song. To invoke a cliche, it was like musical crack, distilling a song down to its most addictive part. Even before rappers were invited to MC over the breaks, it was a dancefloor- and block party-centric movement. The electro scene that quickly followed also made music to break and dance to.
But that quaint, nostalgia-saturated scene has nothing to do with the modern idea of instrumental hip-hop. Coming into its own off the back of the dirge of mid-'90s trip-hop, certain DJs and producers seemed to decide that they were on a pre-ordained artistic mission to conjure up -- ahem! -- "atmospheric soundscapes" instead of getting on with their jobs and making rap tracks that bang.
It's a formula that never works. Sure, hip-hop may no longer consist of a tight idealized union between the four elements, what with breakdancing and graffiti having been ostracized by modern mainstream rap. But it's the crucial dynamic of hearing someone rapping their ass off over a beat that makes the music so thrilling.
One-time Busta Rhymes cohort Roc Marciano's Marcberg was my favorite rap album of 2010. It's also available to buy in an instrumental format -- but when you take out Marcy's semi-slurred raps, the songs lose their menace and drama, and instead come off like a collection of miserable and depressing music. Likewise, Trackademicks has been providing the Honor Roll Crew with some of the freshest Bay Area hip-hop beats in years, but without Spank Pops' smart raps or Josie Stingray's enthusiastic energy, his work would downgrade into music to drift off to.
Even the world's foremost hip-hop hipster tastemaker, Diplo, couldn't inject some life into the conceit with his debut album, Florida -- an almost exclusively instrumental set whose only spark came when he crammed three fiery vocalists onto the track "Newsflash." (Bay Area stalwart DJ Shadow is exonerated from the crime of instrumental hip-hop by virtue of his music being more correctly in the lineage of Steinski's witty cut-and-paste experiments.)
Sure, some will claim that to fully understand and enjoy the experience of listening to -- shudder! -- an album-length collection of hip-hop music without words, you need to get high. (There's probably all sorts of awesome textures within the music that reveal themselves once you're enhanced, right?) But, frankly, if you're partaking in so much greenery that you can happily tolerate trawling through all 10 sets of MF Doom's Special Herbs series, don't you have bigger life issues to deal with than suspect taste in wordless rap music?
"tim dog! i hope he's scamming bitches in heaven.." - EichTurner
Some kid just emailed this to me. I was about to retire but this thread talked me off the ledge.
The writer is the deepest and most sincere kind of shithead.
ardamus wrote:(Bay Area stalwart DJ Shadow is exonerated from the crime of instrumental hip-hop by virtue of his music being more correctly in the lineage of Steinski's witty cut-and-paste experiments.)
I was annoyed at first but then I looked at other articles he wrote for SF Weekly and saw he wrote one titled "The Top Five Keytar Moments In Music History". After seeing that, I didn't feel so bad.
Yeah, not to mention every artist he brings up isn't on my good instrumental music radar anyway. If he would've called out Zavala or Blockhead or Maker or Crushcon7 we might have had a homicide on our hands.
Gloss continues to funnel Kia's semen into his kike mouth.
Cleanhobo wrote:Yeah, not to mention every artist he brings up isn't on my good instrumental music radar anyway. If he would've called out Zavala or Blockhead or Maker or Crushcon7 we might have had a homicide on our hands.
Hating on Zavala and Block would be grounds for that. Never heard of Crushcon7. Got any links?
"tim dog! i hope he's scamming bitches in heaven.." - EichTurner
Cleanhobo wrote:Yeah, not to mention every artist he brings up isn't on my good instrumental music radar anyway.
RJD2 sucks now. He used to be good. Dilla is obviously good, but this guy didn't offend me too much. He's obviously a fucking worthless piece of shit. Why get up in arms about it?
Gloss continues to funnel Kia's semen into his kike mouth.
Cleanhobo wrote:Yeah, not to mention every artist he brings up isn't on my good instrumental music radar anyway. If he would've called out Zavala or Blockhead or Maker or Crushcon7 we might have had a homicide on our hands.
Hating on Zavala and Block would be grounds for that. Never heard of Crushcon7. Got any links?
Cleanhobo wrote:Yeah, not to mention every artist he brings up isn't on my good instrumental music radar anyway.
RJD2 sucks now. He used to be good. Dilla is obviously good, but this guy didn't offend me too much. He's obviously a fucking worthless piece of shit. Why get up in arms about it?
Cleanhobo wrote:Yeah, not to mention every artist he brings up isn't on my good instrumental music radar anyway.
RJD2 sucks now. He used to be good. Dilla is obviously good, but this guy didn't offend me too much. He's obviously a fucking worthless piece of shit. Why get up in arms about it?
I disagree.
And right now I am up in arms.
To be honest, Employee, I tuned out after 'Since We Last Spoke.' Go ahead, tell me what I've been missing.
Gloss continues to funnel Kia's semen into his kike mouth.
Cleanhobo wrote:Yeah, not to mention every artist he brings up isn't on my good instrumental music radar anyway.
RJD2 sucks now. He used to be good. Dilla is obviously good, but this guy didn't offend me too much. He's obviously a fucking worthless piece of shit. Why get up in arms about it?
I disagree.
And right now I am up in arms.
To be honest, Employee, I tuned out after 'Since We Last Spoke.' Go ahead, tell me what I've been missing.
I can't type. I am up in arms. I was more referring to your outright dismissal of Madlib as arrow-worthy.
I'm just pissing Employee off left, right and center today. My bad. I don't want to awake the arrow-slinging beast, I promise. I'm still drugged and delusional from my surgery. Still friends?
Gloss continues to funnel Kia's semen into his kike mouth.
it's not the fact that he dismisses certain artists, its teh fact that he dismisses an entire sub-genre that he's obviously mostly ignorant of. and the fact that he for some reason thinks that subgenre is well represented by an overload of doom beats released largely as a cash cow
Cleanhobo wrote:I'm just pissing Employee off left, right and center today. My bad. I don't want to awake the arrow-slinging beast, I promise. I'm still drugged and delusional from my surgery. Still friends?
"He got shot." Blunt but with a quiver in her voice, V-Nasty recalls the day her best friend died in her arms. The grisly incident happened on Coolidge Avenue in Oakland, when the rapper born Vanessa Reece was 15 years old. An East Oakland native, Reece says the death of her friend was the most traumatic experience of her childhood. But pressed for details on the murder, she says she doesn't want to comment, adding only that the incident threw her into a period where "there was no holding me down."
it's not the fact that he dismisses certain artists, its teh fact that he dismisses an entire sub-genre that he's obviously mostly ignorant of. and the fact that he for some reason thinks that subgenre is well represented by an overload of doom beats released largely as a cash cow
Exactly. He's worthless. That's why I refuse to acknowledge this article; and his existence for that matter.
Last edited by Rachel Hobozal on Wed Feb 08, 2012 3:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Gloss continues to funnel Kia's semen into his kike mouth.
I always found ADeeM to be original and interesting to hear. Its just that production in the group is consistently good.