“Where’s the drums?”
>not understanding that the current trend in underground rap toward minimal or nonexistent drums is the natural evolution of lyrically-oriented rap, since strong drum beats create a “double rhythm relationship” that forces the MC to construct (and constrict) their flow around the external rhythm of the percussion, thereby constraining the MC’s ability to employ whatever vocal rhythm serves them best through the careful exploitation of natural syllabic accents and the artist’s preferred artistic distortions of the natural patterns of speech, resulting in highly sophisticated linguistic art that exists in a liminal space between demotic speech and aesthetic artifice, and that the suppression of such imposed rhythms affords the artist the liberty to have their poetry in itself be the ultimate sovereign that dictates their flow, finally allowing the rapper to be first and foremost a linguistic artist, and bursting open the potential for them to reach the sublime levels of meaning-through-rhythm achieved by such masters as Tennyson, Shakespeare, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, Hilda Doolittle, Swinburne, Hopkins, Jay Wright, etc.
“Where’s the drums?”
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maybe but having two rhythms at once sounds cooler
>thread actually offers an interesting topic for thoughtful musical discussion
>one reply
There's nothing interesting about a person speaking over abstract sound. That's slam poetry, not hip hop.
In theory this is true but instead we get the Earl's of the world rapping that boring shit that does nothing of the sort. Speaking of, the instrumentals with said minimal or no drums tend to be mindbogglingly boring. Once they get some decent production it'll be a different story, but for now it's audio nyquil.
What are some Hip Hop like that?
This is a recent development; it hasn't had time to come to full fruition. So long as this kind of stuff keeps having any sort of community, I predict that future artists will advance this style well beyond where it currently sits.
You can still have melodic instrumentals; also someone flowing over pure ambient would be dope.
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It's standard for rappers to write their lyrics to the beat; this style might get to the point where MCs write their lyrics first and then find or build a beat that matches the lyrics atmospherically/thematically. I'm probably thinking way ahead of where things are right now, but it's an interesting theoretical possibility.
bump
good rappers write their raps in their head when the beat starts
Music isn't limited by form, music is form. Music is competing and concentric structures.
Your point that the modern style in rap beats don't police the flow of the lyricist has some merit, after all, there are such things as free-form music and even many conventional pop songs employ solos of various types.
However often the most satisfying things to be had in music are the interplay between various "voices" in the song. If we think of a rap beat and the rapper as two voices and they don't inform what each other are doing, there's no synchronicity to be had, and without synchronicity there's no repetition and without repetition there can't be variation.
My final bit is that since most all rap beats are loops, the free-form vocalization is locked behind a short loop with no progression. Beyond that, a lot of rappers are singing--but not well. And worse yet they aren't rapping well by any conventional measure and the arrival of at least two rappers who don't seem to understand meter at all leads me to believe that rap music is in a state right now where it's designed exclusively to be social music.
>not creating the beat around the verse
that roc marciano album is great
Rap is still CRAP.
I'm not talking advocating any kind of formless; my point is that the suppression or elimination of the beat allows the MC a much greater degree of autonomy over the form, as they have a profoundly reduced duty to serve a rhythmic beat imposed by a DJ/producer. However, there are still other forms of instrumentation, and they can serve perfectly as voices in the song without dictating how the MC must move like prominent drums do.
Also, I'm talking specifically about a trend/"movement" of aesthetically-linked underground rappers, not the state or future of the mainstream or rap music as a whole.
who actually does this though
fuck yes it is
The real question is, why doesn't anyone do it?
Mike Will did it for DNA
which is why whitearmors drums are so simplistic and muted
supposedly it's because it's easier adjust your raps to the beat than it is to adjust a beat to the raps