Trapped
I felt compelled to write about music for a change, since it's mentioned in the blog header and all, so here's some criticism to begin with.
As a DJ I had the pleasure of closely following the development of rap music ever since the 80's, and IMO the "golden age" of the 90's was truly that. From 2000 onwards I've felt rap becoming too mainstream, too dumb and lacking meaningful messages.
I guess some of the decline had something to do with commercialization and the major labels becoming increasingly greedy about sampling, as nobody without big financial backing wanted to release a song which might attract swarms of lawyers. Without clever samples, which used to be right in the core of rap music, tunes started sounding dull and often amateurish, at least from a producer's perspective.
I thought rap had already hit rock bottom and I was expecting a glorious reform of some sort, but instead we got the rise of trap. I usually like new developments in music, but not this. The definition of trap is a bit hazy, as some of it is more like electro or dubstep, but I'm mostly talking about the rap tunes here.
To me trap beats generally sound like a toddler playing with a Roland TR-808, with a few poorly chosen synth notes repeating endlessly, and most of the time the rhyming is as stylish and fluid as the slow kid trying to recite the alphabet for the first time. When there is something reminiscent of a flow, it's the one that everybody does. If that's not bad enough, they apply autotune to make rappers and singers sound like robot sheep. It feels kind of weird listening to sheep getting high and wielding Uzis.
There are exceptions, of course, but most trap sounds like the artists really need to lay off the codein or whatever mind-numbing substances are currently trending.
To make matters worse, the EDM craze has created some collaborations and crossovers sounding much like the thousands of awful eurodance rappers over 20 years ago. It's hilariously ironic that back then US artists used to ridicule the genre but are now doing it themselves.
Fortunately there's still quality rap out there, especially in the underground. I was particularly happy to hear Cut Chemist's new track, featuring Chali 2na from Jurassic 5. I usually don't like electro vibes, as they sound too 80's for my taste, but in this tune it works pretty well and shows that with some effort the 808 drums can still sound pleasing:
By the way, save your time and nerves; ranting and raving about your particular musical taste in the comments section won't change anyone else's preferences. Other comments are welcome.
0 comments:
Post a Comment