ALT Title; Why is the Blog Called RAP & Nonsense?
There are many artists and legends in the industry that have proclaimed that "Hip-Hop" is dead (Hip-Hop now referred to as HH). What does that mean though? Does it mean that the music that once held gave a voice to those who the public refused to acknowledge is now a thing of the past? Does that mean that it has changed so much that it can barely be connected to its roots? Or does it simply mean that they don't make music like they used to? In my self-proclaimed expert opinion, it means all of the above. That leaves a very pressing question in the back of my mind though – is there a difference between rap and hip-hop? Are rap artists and HH artists completely different? Is there any artist that can be considered both?
Now if you want to get technical, HH is defined as a culture and rap is just a genre of music. Both predominately embraced by members of the black community. (Hip-hop is also the name of the 76ers mascot so maybe he is the one who died that people were referring to, I won't be the one to research that but you're more than welcome to.) Now if we carry on from this point using those definitions that would mean rap may not be necessarily the same thing as HH, but in order for HH to be dead rap would have to be dead as well. This also means that while rap is alive, HH cannot be dead. So I think we can all agree while rap may not be in the same state it was in during past years, it is far from dead.
Now let's talk about the difference between a HH artist/song and a rap one. One again for consistency here are the definitions of rap and HH as it pertains to their genres:
Rap: A genre of African-American music of the 1980s and 1990s in which rhyming lyrics are chanted to a musical accompaniment; several forms of rap have emerged
Hip-Hop: A musical genre which developed alongside the hip hop culture, defined by key stylistic elements such as rapping, DJing, sampling, scratching and beatboxing.
Now obviously both these definitions are flawed. Rap is not just for "African-Americans" and of course has lasted longer than 20years, just to point out the obvious. Now if we ignore those parts of the definition and accept the rest, we once again see that rap is once again just one part of HH. Rap focuses more on lyrical ability with some music accompanying it while HH has an emphasis on multiple elements, rapping just being one of them. Now I'm not going to go into breakdowns of every aspect of HH because that's not what this is about.
The thing that stands out the most to me though, is how it is pointed out how there are several forms of rap that have emerged. This statement states a fact that could possibly the most overlooked aspect of rap. Many critics of the genre fail to look at all aspects of rap, just what they see on TV. The Wayne, Gucci, Flocka, Ross, etc. They rarely get a good look at the deeper minded side of the art. The Lupe, Common, Mos Def, etc. Next time you run into someone who obviously suffers from this fatal flaw of thinking, encourage them to do their research or stop their judgements all together. People are assholes though so don't be surprised when they don't take you up on that.
What about the difference between a rap artist and a HH artist? How would we classify these? That line seems extremely blurry to me, but I think a good way to do that is basing it off of the music the artist predominately makes. If its words thrown together with a catchy beat/chorus that the artists mostly makes, we can call them a rapper. If they often make tracks that have deeper meanings to them and require you to actually pay attention to them in order to understand them, then lets call them a HH artist. That's not to say a rapper can have a HH song and vise-versa, but just one out of every 10 doesn't quite cut it.
Now what all this comes down to me is that Rap and Hip-Hop are NOT the same thing. Rap is more like a subdivision under the umbrella of Hip-Hop. So why is this blog called Rap & Nonsense and not Hip-Hop & Nonsense? To put it simple…R.a.N. looks better than H.H.a.N. no me…
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