Adult Contemporary Rap
The_Non
5,691 Posts
From another thread:
So can old men rap to other old men? Why haven't they already? I'm not talkin Nostalgia Rapz???, I'm not talkin old man spittin young man shenanigans, I'm talkin ADULT CONTEMPO RAP. Money, women, kids, life would all be fair game. Would we listen if someone made it? I think I might, but it's gotta be GOOD, yknow?
CAN ADULT CONTEMPO RAPZ ABOUT MOWING THE LAWN AND TAKING THE KIDS TO SCHOOL BE VIABLE IN 2012?
Party Rap shouldnt be too complex.
Agreed, but they just look old and desperate
Yeah.
Like i said before. If they had some budget money they could have edited the video a little better but still keeping it dirty.
Make-up and stylists but still keep it DYI.
It looks like dudes showed up and put on a t-shirt and and hat they had at the shop.
I wish Old Rappers would get the same pass that older Rockers, Jazz Folks, and other genre's get.
Muthfuckas will go see Sonic Youth and shit, but will critique the hell out of a 45 year old "trying to stay relevant" MC.
The days of Rap killlin' off their Old is some 90's shit. The game aint the same any more. The League is gone.
Record sales, videos and 5 radio shows arent the only gauge these days.
Have you seen the vid with that LOTUG dude talking about why is there no "Adult Contemporary Rapz?" I gotta agree with him IF (if) dudes were making good GOOD songs. The song woulda been WAYYYYYYYYY better with the repeater style like Thes said.
But you dont judge Adult Contemporary ____________insert Genre like you do the new shit.
You dont expect the newest Anita Baker release to have the same steez as the newest Alicia Keys.
But in Hip Hop folks will ask the 45 year old to sound like the 18 year old? I dont get it.
And the 18 year old gets a pass for having a mediocre album with one You tube Classic.
Bill Bixby Fridays.
So can old men rap to other old men? Why haven't they already? I'm not talkin Nostalgia Rapz???, I'm not talkin old man spittin young man shenanigans, I'm talkin ADULT CONTEMPO RAP. Money, women, kids, life would all be fair game. Would we listen if someone made it? I think I might, but it's gotta be GOOD, yknow?
CAN ADULT CONTEMPO RAPZ ABOUT MOWING THE LAWN AND TAKING THE KIDS TO SCHOOL BE VIABLE IN 2012?
Comments
Hasnt this been going on for a good minute now?
Masta Ace was still workin last time i checked.....the EmC album was weak though.
The sour old man thang is still very prevalent with the A.C. Rap.
good one - yes.
Killer Mike, too.
I think he's under appreciated. Dude has such a raw style.
Jay-Z's subject matter is as adult and contemporary as you can get (for the millionaire crowd), but I'm not really that interested in it.
I hear about these things from rappers of all ages, but yea, I get your point.
For all the folks who never really had UGK on their radar and/or only heard of Bun B through guest spots in the past couple of years, maybe you could say he did.
yeah, i think most people are unware of tity boi's age. he is rapping like a 15 yr old tho.
I'm going with 35+ ....too young?
I agree w 35+.
Shit some of the real old dudes are easily over 40.
All the '83 to '89 dudes are over 40.
Im curious if the dudes that came out in the late 90s till now will evn be rockin in 20 years.
Perfect
I mean, it seems safe to say that rap owes a not-inconsiderable part of its cultural force and its market share to the fact that it has so successfully and for so long projected the idea (however shaky) that it's not really fucking with anything too old.
Shit like what you're talking about takes rap in a direction that is unattractive to pretty much everyone except old rappers and people like us.
And "Steel Wheels" has me dying.
I think the "old audience" has the tolerance for "aged for 20 years charcoal-brewed" Rap.
Why couldnt the 40 year old enjoy the old rap and the new shit( if they even do).
And kids comin up wouldnt be repelled by hearing their uncle rap at the party after they friends got on.
R&B allows that co-existance. Charlie Wilson and Ronald Isley's new joints got played on the radio.
Since the cats started reciting older classic mc rhymes (ala i cant recall right now), i think the door has been blown open for cats to be included in the overall diet. Nigga u done jacked those ingredients to help yo shit, why not eat the OG (in certain doses).
One of the obstacles is that the industry has changed where cats arent radio dependent no more. If a strict Adult Contemporary station for Hip Hip was created a long minute ago, i bet the menu would be 'locked' in by now.
On the real i think Hip Hop could use a dose of more "mature" artists even if im way outta the loop in checkin the landscape.
I just really wanna know why Hip Hop fans discard they shit, specifically Black Folks who dont have the same allegiance to the mc the same way White Folk continue to back their heroes. Yes i was cool to look for that new shit bitd, but now the daily intake isnt force-fed like it was from '78+ thru the internet.
Yes these old muthafuckas have to make good art regardless, but I'm not sold on that "I only listen to that next shit" attitude. Audience/Cultural programming vs. Str8 up Ageism???
That's his problem for me. He's letting the marquee names carry his album while he comes off like a bargain basement Luda. I really wanted to like his album, but it was some just-add-water shit to me. Totally phoned-in. There are so many rappers doing his kind of thing so much better than he does. Good luck to him, but I'll pass.
Someone like Danny Brown, on the other hand, is only a few years younger than him, rhymes with about 100 times more energy, has a really distinct style (even if it's not for everyone) and doesn't sound like a clone of about a half-dozen other rappers.
the Sirius classic hip-hop station is not without its "oh shit!" moments (Mister Ctm) but a lot of the shit they program is st8 up corn.
I respect the hell out of Kurtis Blow but I will change the channel faster than fuck if "The Breaks" comes on while I'm riding out, already trying to look younger than I'm is.
But as to what I think is maybe your central point:
In many of the mostly really bad music books I read in college and which would probably make me queasy now, the official party line on this was something like
"In their relation to music, black people have primarily been leaders, innovators, and creators looking to the sweep of the future, where white people have primarily been followers, copyists, and refiners obsessing over the details of the past; this is why a million Frenchmen are hung up on the nuances of a Miles Davis solo from 1967 while Miles Davis himself is hung up on a Scritti Politti record that isn't out yet."
There's of course a whole lot of bullshit in that, but I think there's a grain of truth inasmuch as commercially-relevant black people don't yet seem to romanticize retrofixation all that much, or at least not to the extent required to sustain the kind of world you're looking for.
If you're envisioning Adult Contemporary Rap as a bustling little niche community, I'd say, cool, you've already got it; if you're envisioning it as something much larger, some sort of culturally important second stream that can hang as a parallel to the commercial shit (a la the ever-closing gap between classic rock and current rock), I think that even with the great levelling effect of the internet that shit's gonna take a couple more generations to work out.
Does anyone envision Melle Mel at 70 getting a Kennedy Award? At this point dude is like some Howlin Wolf type shit.
And LL or Jay will be on some Oprah recognized BB King shit.
Blah Blah.......Dont mean to sound bitterish.
Nah, these are all questions worth asking, even if the answers aren't as pat as we may want them to be.
Thinking about that summarising "quote" james posted, I've often thought that the reason a great deal of Black popular culture seems to concern itself with moving forward and getting to some place new is that, for obvious reasons, the past isn't necessarily a place where many black folks would want to spend too much time. I remember once reading an interview with Isaac Hayes where he said he didn't like listening to the blues when he was a young man, as it reminded him of tougher times and he was focused on leaving that part of his life behind.
Certainly, in my experience, the nostalgia industry seems to cater mainly to white folks. A few notable moments aside, there doesn't seem to be the same appetite for nostalgia amongst black audiences. Even where it exists, there's a lot more bitter in the bitter-sweet of things like Crooklyn or Everybody Hates Chris than there is in That 70s Show or The Wonder Years. My girlfriend's brother is a builder and I remember him telling me once how he's always hearing the older white guys he works with bellyaching about immigration and talking about the good old days: "They weren't the fackin' good ol' days for us, mate..."
But since Hip Hop, mining our past has been a major part of the game. Neo-Soul (within R&B) was a whole genre built on tapping into 70's Soul. The whole Retro-Soul from Amy Winehouse, OutKast (Hey Ya and all of its various spin-offs), R.Kelly, Raphael Saddiq and them are now all into the 60's. Even if Black Folk make a conscious effort to not be stuck in the past, we and all of our copycats are continuing to resurrect previous styles.
Black Dynamite, shit that terrible Taye Digs/Sanna Latham "old school" Hip Hop flick Brown Sugar, The Retro Kids, DreamGirls, Sparkle OG and remake, The Help, Madea is all about "old school" Black Folk. I think the Nostalgia thang is all up in our culture yet there still seems to be a roadblock w/ older Hip Hop artists. I just want cats to age/perform gracefully the same way other artists do in other genres.