You all heard Nas: Hip hop is dead. Back in 2006, Nas pushed the thesis that record execs stole the keys from the MC's and drove the genre off the highway of creative progress and into the ditch of commercial appeal. And it's true—nobody on major labels spits hard anymore.
But the problem is this thesis hasn't really held up, because reducing the world of hip-hop to only its monolithic lyricists discredits the genre. Take, for example, young rappers like Odd Future or Lil B, who drop rhymes about quite literally anything they want, record execs be damned. For sure, major labels are hesitant to sign on, but with a deft grip on social media, Odd Future still managed to sell out a string of dates in Australia without those jerks—or the artistic constraints that come with them.
Odd Future and Lil B are both extremely exciting in that they've gotten popular audiences genuinely interested in hip-hop again. They've done this by rapping about difficult subjects (tapping back into the roots that Nas deemed lost). But when OF's primary figure, Tyler the Creator, takes a break from talking about taking dookies or skateboarding to talk about actual music on his Twitter feed, he rarely talks about his lyrical content. When he gets starstruck or confesses a celebrity crush, he's not trying to get a guest verse rapping with someone like Pusha T—he wants to make the beat that someone like Pusha T raps on.
So while it's true that anyone can create an absurd persona, write offensive lyrics and gain an audience on shock value alone (Hollywood Undead), the thing that's propelled Odd Future past Twitter popularity to a legitimate hip hop breakthrough is their production value.
It holds logically, too: Nas was pissed because nobody was willing to rap hard, but there are plenty of people in basements and clubs whostill do, they just don't have the production value to back them up.
And that's the same kind of place where Lil B came from. Self-named the ""Based God"" for his creative influence behind the Based subgenre, Lil B's rhymes are an uninspiring garble of free associations. They hardly make sense, and they say even less—thus their booming success seems to show that Nas' MC-based theory of hip hop's demise was flawed from the get-go.
That is to say, despite Nas' assertions, it really doesn't matter what Lil B actually says in his raps, because their free-form ambiguity is just one component of the Based aesthetic. He didn't get this many fans from the pure novelty of half-assed rhymes about eating Hot Pockets; he owes most of his success to his production, which is literally tasked with supporting anything, or nothing at all.
For his best hits, Lil B has relied on a white guy from Northern New Jersey named Clams Casino who retweets just about anything anyone ever says about him—and it's no mystery why people are talking about him.
Clams' Instrumental Mixtape that hit the Internet a while ago is a beat tape, but the productions are so engrossing in their own right that it's not hard to think of it as its own entity. They pair blown-out flourishes with a strong attention to the nuances of hip-hop orchestration that tend to get lost when a voice is piled on top of them. Which bodes well for his recently announced Rainforest EP, a collection of tracks that he never intended anyone to rap over—and if its first single, ""Gorilla,"" is any indication, it's going to be stellar.
That's sort of a weird concept these days—a hip-hop producer making beats completely separate from rappers. But if you trace the roots of hip hop back a bit further than Nas' early MC reference points, it's actually pretty normal. Before people started yelling over their records, guys like DJ Kool Herc would run house parties with how well they could mix and match beats, tempos and hooks alone.
Producers like DJ Shadow and RJD2 have been operating in a similar space for years now, but the primary place we see the fusion of DJ and electronic music lately has been in corners of dub and dubstep. Soulful visionaries like How to Dress Well, James Blake and Toro y Moi are making giant strides in recreating classic R&B music with electronic means.
Electronic hip-hop might be lagging a bit behind in the popular realm, but if Clams Casino wants to be the kingpin of its resurgence, he's got some work ahead of him. Madison's Man Mantis released his Cities Without Houses LP earlier this month, and it's packed full with urgency and ambition. Its backbeats rock back and forth, and the hooks are unabashedly triumphant.
Everything about Cities Without Houses captures the beat-driven essence of hip hop, but it lacks the MC presence that most people have come to expect. It's resulted in a lot of miscategorization, and it prompted Mantis to jump on Twitter and ask: ""What happened to instrumental hip hop as its own genre?"" Turns out, it's alive and well. Someone better tell Nas.
Kyle is sure that hip-hop isn't dead, but more vibrant than before. Care to refute that point? Think you know better? Email Kyle at ktsparks@wisc.edu.
