Really, did Hip Hop ever die? I know that Nas had an album titled Hip Hop Is Dead (2006); he had the whole campaign going at the time, and i agreed with him at the time. But, now that i look at it more objectively, i don't think Hip Hop ever died. Hip Hop has always been evovling and regions have been switching dominance, but I don't think it ever died. The state it was at in the mid 00s when Nas made that statement was far from what people that had been following it for the last two decades were used to, and they concluded that it was dieing or dead.
What is Hip Hop by the way? Hip Hop is a genre of music that was started in the 70s by a bunch of Afrcan American's that wanted to express themselves musically and artiscally without going with what was already in existance. So, they formed their own style/genre of music, and music as an art form always reflects the lives of the artists involved. So, Hip Hop consisted of the elements of Graffiti Writing, Beat-Boxing, Rapping/Emceeing and Break-dancing. Although most of this elements have been shedded since the inception of the genre in the 70s, the rapping/emceeing element remianed the core part of it.
Whether the rapper is making a politically conscious song, or a song for the ladies, or telling stories of gang banging in the hood, or showing off his wordplay skills, or just having fun on the mic, he did it in the conventional rap pattern- 3 verses of 16 bars seperated with a hook or as the case may be. But, when in the mid 00s, the southern part of U.S had major dorminance of the hip hop market, and they hit the world with their "Snap Music", a lot of hip hop pioneers weren't down with it. All the snapping of fingers, mumbling, howling and shouting and wissling on tracks; that wasn't what people saw as hip hop all the years before, so it was only normal that they would speak against it. But, can we say it wasn't hip hop?
It definitely was and is hip hop, because that was how the rappers pertuating that style chose to express themselves. It was the hip hop style of a certain region that got popular at the time. Either Nas's campaign got rid of it, or just like any other trend, people got tired of it after a while; but what is sure is that today's hip hop is back on track with what the pioneer started out with. Of cos the sound is different, but the pattern and techinques are still quite similar. In the late 80s and early 90s, the west had it on lock with their gangsta rap music; the mid and late 90s saw east coast take the batton (more of bragadocious rap than gangsta rap; the early 00s were the years of experimenting (you had eminem, nelly, ja rule at their peaks, and with very different styles from what hip hop listeners were used to), i guess this opened the gates for the south in the mid 00s. Of cos not all southern rappers were into the snap music thing; you had rappers from the south that did the trap-rap thing, but at that time, there were really more of those feel good music rappers out there.
Right now, if you ask me, no region has majority of the listening ear of hip hop music audience; You just have different diverse rappers from different parts of America, and some not even from the country, doing their thing. Of cos, some parts are a bit more prominent than the others, and you can say that the south still embrace their own people and give them all the support they can get, but no region holds dorminance right now. But what i can say is hip hop is in a good place. I think, regardless of what people might say of a Waka Flocka or a Chief Keef type of music, the Lupe Fiasco's and the J.Cole's are out there to balance things out. That is what i call Diversity, and it is needed in any system. Not everyone has the same taste; not everyone grew up the same way; not everyone likes the same things, so, with this, i say- Hip Hop Never Died.
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