The Golden Age of Hip-Hop Is Now
Everybody
wants their own golden age. The problem is you never know it when you
see it.
Golden ages in popular music are the farthest thing from rare; in fact, they’re so common that the value of the gold has been debased and we’re left with age after age of pure lead. You can pick any year from the end of the second world war to today, and it’s bound to be in somebody’s idea of a golden age. Pop music has become so fragmented, so balkanized, so plagued with genres and micro-genres that it’s impossible to pick a period that doesn’t figure into someone’s definition of greatness. The thing about golden ages, though, is they tend to be things that you remember rather than things you experience; everyone talks about the ones they were part of, way back when, but nobody’s willing to step out on a limb and talk about the golden age that’s going on right now. History is too unpredictable; the future is too hard to anticipate. What seems like musical genius now might strike us as embarrassing ten years from now, just as sure as the bands we’re barely aware of today are going to end up as part of our personal mythology once critical consensus solidifies their status as innovators in a decade’s time.
Rap, in particular, seems astoundingly resistant to
the sort of grand pronouncements that rock has been around long enough
to invite. Fatback dropped the first rap single in 1979, but DJ Kool Herc
threw his first jam in 1973, making hip-hop music 30 years old at most
and 24 years old at least. Hip-hop’s been to college and is out on
its own, and still people treat it like it’s only a little kid. Sure,
there’s those who recall fondly the oldest of the old school, and
call the days of Bam and Flash and D.ST the first golden age. Plenty of
people will pinpoint the moment when the MC came into his own, the moment
when Run and D.M.C., L.L., Schoolly, and the Fat Boys brought the mic
to the front, as the glory days. Other pocket eras have their partisans
– the Native Tongues fans, the revolution crews of the late ‘80s,
the hydrogen bomb that got dropped on hip-hop from the unlikely environs
of Shaolin in 1993 when Enter the Wu-Tang hit. But after that, and the
embarrassment of riches that followed with so many outstanding Wu solo
efforts in ’94 and ’95, there’s a feeling that the well
runs dry for hip-hop. Did rap really take a nosedive après-Wu?
Has the well really run dry? Isn’t it safe and smart to back off
the premature notion that we are, in fact, experiencing a golden age of
rap music right now?
Hell, no.
Another
funny thing about golden ages is that, by an amazing coincidence, they
always seem to consist of the stuff you happened to like when you were
young. That this is exceedingly weak, there can be no doubt, but that
this sort of rose-colored retro is unavoidable is likewise beyond argument.
You can’t escape your raisin’ no matter how impeccable your
tastes. For some, that golden past happened when they were young; for
others, it happened years before they were born. But it’s a rare
thing for someone to look around them and say “This is it. This is
the moment. Now is the time.” Take (to pluck at random one of what
could be hundreds of examples) the mid- and late 1980s. Looking back to
those days and to the post-punk music – of Hüsker Dü, the
Replacements, R.E.M., Camper van Beethoven, Big Black, the Minutemen,
and Sonic Youth, to name a few – that now characterizes the period,
it didn’t seem, well, coherent at the time. There were a lot of great
bands, sure, but it’s only with hindsight that we give them a name,
that we recognize how important they really were, that we unify them in
a useful rubric.
But is it really just hindsight, or was something really
happening? And is that comparison really random, or is there some similarity
that might support the quixotic claim that hip-hop is experiencing an
identical renaissance right now? The circumstances are maybe a little
bit more apt than might be expected from this kind of tortured rock-critic
analogy. The post-punk explosion happened roughly 25-30 years after the
first appearance of rock ‘n’ roll, just as today’s golden
age of rap comes a good quarter-century after the foundations of hip-hop.
The mid-1980s saw the birth of independent record labels which attempted,
for the first time, to break away from the majors which had almost entirely
dominated rock; it’s not too difficult to see that happening now,
with maverick indie-rap labels like Def Jux and Rawkus challenging the
domination of the musical landscape by the bigs in the same way that SST
and IRS provided some of the earliest viable alternatives to the traditional
labels in their day.
And, perhaps most tellingly of all, the appearance of a vital, dynamic
independent/underground rap movement follows a period of relative stagnation
in the genre. Just as punk devolved into a cartoon and the airwaves were
dominated by degraded electro-pop ‘new wave’ in the early 1980s,
leaving music fans eager for something to punch through the gloss, the
Wu-Tang explosion of the mid-‘90s has faded, giving way to several
years in the wilderness, sustained by the radio preeminence of overhyped
mediocrities like the Cash Money Millionaires, fatuous party-poseurs like
Puff & the Family, and endless iterations of bling. The rap world
now is ready, as was the rock world then, for something to break out.
They got lucky. So did we.
“One of the reasons it’s so hard to see a golden age when it’s happening is that the people bringing it to you don’t really seem to have that much in common.”
One
of the reasons it’s so hard to see a golden age when it’s happening
is that the people bringing it to you don’t really seem to have that
much in common. To return to my previous analog, listening to, say, Sonic
Youth, Camper van Beethoven and the Replacements didn’t sound a lot
alike. They were of different backgrounds, different social and geographical
origins; they played different music. There wasn’t even a tremendous
amount of crossover among their fans at the time. It wasn’t until
we had the perspective of distance – and the interpretive insinuation
of critic’s voices – that we could see that the things they
shared bound them together more than their differences separated them.
Their attitudes, approaches and intentions are what made them part of
a movement, not the way they sounded. By the same token, today’s
sounds of the underground are often nothing alike. If there’s a similarity
to the distorted guitar that could be said to have held the indie rock
of the mid-‘80s together, it might be überproducer El-P, but
even he’s not close to being a universal. In this golden age, the
unifier isn’t beats (the lush production of Quasimoto can’t
be mistaken for the sparse, skeletal sounds of Aesop Rock) or lyrics (Aceyalone’s
brilliant layers have nothing in common with People Under the Stairs’
old-school minimalism) or even vocals (the thick, sinister, slow rasp
of Cannibal Ox’s Vast Aire is in marked contrast to the rich, effusive
warmth of Jurassic 5’s Charlie 2Na). The unifier is a realization
that rap has grown up, that it’s matured, that it’s gotten to
the point that it can not only maintain a lively underground the way rock
could at the same point in its history, but also that said underground
demanded challenging ideas, an experimental attitude, and a willingness
to play around with the boundaries of the genre.
But there’s more to a golden age than good timing and a lot of theoretical vaporing. In the final analysis, only listening to the music can prove whether you’re really experiencing something great. So is the music of this alleged golden age of underground rap that good? You damn well better believe it. People Under the Stairs and Jurassic 5 are inventing old school all over again and making it better; the latter’s Quality Control is the record the Boogie Boys or Stetasonic might have made if they’d been a lot more talented. The poetic collage of Aesop Rock’s lyrics and the rapid-burst spitfire style of Blackalicious’ Gift of Gab can compete with the giants of the past. El-P’s production has pretty solidly established him as a legitimate peer of people like Dr. Dre and the RZA, in pure talent if not in record sales. People like Kid Koala, Q-Bert and the Avalanches have, in a few short years, redefined the role of the turntable in hip-hop. The erratic Roots and the sporadic Count Bass D are doing more to deliver on the promise of a rap/jazz fusion than their spiritual mentor, DJ Premier, was able to. Count Bass D’s cohort MF Doom (formerly Zevluv X of KMD) released an album without advertising or promotion, Operation: Doomsday, that is quite simply one of the best rap albums of the last 10 years, which became a sizable hit.
This
last factor might be one of the most important. Two of the other factors
that have to be considered when talking about a golden age of music are
how much the artists influenced future generations of musicians, and what
effect they had on what people listened to – what kind of an impact,
in other words, they made on the charts. It’s obviously too soon
to consider the former, but the latter is worth thinking about. Have any
of these artists made a big impact on the buying public? With the exception
of the Roots and, to a lesser extent, MF Doom, not really. And, seeing
as how rap is still a very commercially-oriented genre, this might be
used to argue that this so-called ‘golden age’ is a myth at
best or a failure at worst. But is it? Perhaps hip-hop is changing. Rock
music couldn’t really support much of an independent underground
until the 1980s; now it can, and it does. The days when a band is judged
a failure for not charting the top 40 are over in rock. Rap, too, may
have finally reached a point where it can sustain the existence of an
alternative. And, even if it hasn’t, the indie-rap world isn’t
without its successes; previously fringe performers like Mos Def and Del
tha Funkee Homosapien (with the Deltron 3030
album and his involvement with Gorillaz) have crossed over into mainstream
success, and Kool Keith has enjoyed a popularity that no one familiar
with his bizarre character and tendencies would ever have anticipated.
If El-P doesn’t become the rap world’s version of Steve Albini,
it will come as a surprise.
Of course, this could all be wrong. It could be a premature prediction
based on a faulty analogy leading to a grandiose and completely misguided
conclusion. History might humiliate us, and look back on the claims of
the last three years as a golden era of hip-hop as one of the more ludicrous
claims to come down the sewer pipe of music criticism. But even if that’s
the case – even if what’s happening is nothing more than the
production of a bunch of unrelated albums with no cohesive link, devoid
of any overarching unifier – you could do a lot worse than to pick
up all those albums, listen to how excellent they are, and have your own
little golden age.
