MUSIC

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CAN HIP-HOP EVOLVE? 

First of all you may think this is a strange question to ask as a lot of Hip-Hop fanatics would state Hip-Hop evolves all the time or you get backpackers Hip-Hop purists claiming commercial Hip-Hop never does.  I think it is a very relevant question and I think it is worth looking at. 

Jay-Z claimed his latest album Blueprint 3 was futurist Hip-Hop, to my ears I didn't hear anything different to what I have heard before in Hip-Hop and I listen to a lot of stuff, commercial and underground. 

So I was looking into this and thought apart from Jnerio Jarel and Sa-Ra who else is trying to push boundaries in Hip-Hop, and trying to move it forward or in a new direction and this includes away from the influence of J Dilla’s body of work. 

Anyway I had a listen to Rebirth by Lil Wayne as I acquired it over the web, now this album has been put back so many times by Def-Jam/Island and Lil Wayne’s label Cash Money, that Amazon got hold of the album and made a dreadful mistake and sent 500 copies out to people who had them on pre-order and now before it’s official release it is all over the web-so much to try and tackle internet piracy. 

According to the label it will not be the official version, I smell music industry lies. 

However Lil Wayne talked about this project on chat shows and to MTV that he played guitar on every track and bass on one track, and had been learning guitar and bass for at least a year or two.  He has collaborated with Fall Out Boy for this album, which when you hear the album that is very clear in style and stated being influenced by Lenny Kravitz and The Beastie Boys. 

Lil Wayne has to me shown great courage in releasing a rock themed Hip-Hop album.  Plus he is proving a point that if you want to play/write music why can't an MC learn instruments instead of being just gifted at MCing only or learning the MPC and sequencing on Logic (which if you own you will notice every new song out there is using the sounds from this program).   

So going back to the original question, has Hip-Hop evolved at all? 

Well it has tried to a few times.  I remember back in the late 80’s a collaboration between Anthrax ‘A Heavy Metal rock group’  and Public Enemy on a track called Bring Tha Noise which featured on Apocalypse 91...The Enemy Strikes Black. The Beastie Boys famous album Licensed to Ill was on the same theme of mixing rock with Hip-Hop. 

Most of these collaborations or albums have been forgotten in music history apart from the dreadful single Walk This Way with Aerosmith and RUN DMC, which revived both groups careers but I think as a collaboration sounds WEAK at best.

However Public Enemy and Anthrax did tour together and tried to bring both the genres of Hip-Hop and Heavy Metal closer, unfortunately it never took off but the genre of NU Metal was born from the underground scene of Los Angeles in the success of Rage Against The Machine and Korn.    

Other Hip-Hop albums trying to break new ground was The Roots-Phrenology which was radically different to Things Fall Apart, and at the same time Common came up with the psychedelic influenced Electric Circus.   Some albums unfortunately never got released officially Kamaal The Abstract Theory by Q Tip is one that I can recollect. 

Time and time again these albums were critically acclaimed but never do they achieve success in sales apart from an album released a year later. 

Outkast’s Speakerbox/The Love Below

Now this album was a huge success and went on to sell 10 million albums worldwide and broke a lot of boundaries and went on even to win the Grammy award for album of the year, the first and only Hip-Hop album to do so.  So there is proof it can be done but it remains to be seen whether this can be ever achieved again. 

Hip-Hop as a genre can develop and every year or two a new sound becomes very popular, what remains to be seen is whether it can evolve enough to maintain its influence on the bigger music climate.   


 WRITTEN BY RICHARD JAMES               MUSIC REVIEWER FOR NSP MAGAZINE