...and why it’s not a bad thing

Hi, I’m BRAVE, and today I wanna talk about hiphop. In 2017 it was reported that hiphop officially became the biggest genre in music - overtaking rock - and as the streaming era was truly starting, this revealed that hiphop was the public’s favorite type of music to stream.

It also led to the genre influencing other genres, and to me the most notable affect of this is the death of melody in popular music as we know it.

Hip-hop and its relationship with melody

Composer Johann Kernberger (student of Bach) said that:

”The true goal of music—its proper enterprise—is melody. All the parts of harmony have as their ultimate purpose only beautiful melody. Therefore, the question of which is the more significant, melody or harmony, is futile. Beyond doubt, the means is subordinate to the end.”

This reigns true for most music, but hiphop was always the big exception to this as the center was always rapped vocals that focused on lyrics and attitude rather than sung vocals that focused on beauty and melody.

But with melody being more normalized in hiphop in the last ten years in large part to Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak followed by Drake blurring the rap/sung style even more, the question of “what is and what isn’t rapping” is bigger than ever. Well what is the answer?

Singing and rapping is less about the presence and absence of melody, but more about delivery, and especially how race has been used to categorized genres in music for decades. Rapping has more of a “talkative” tone to it than singing, even with melody, but the use of a blaccent also denotes shorthand for rapping, even when a song is almost completely sung, with Post Malone being a notable example of this.

When a black artist makes sung pop music it is often classified as hiphop or simply r&b by the industry, which has been seen with acts such as Drake, Rihanna and The Weeknd. When a white artist makes r&b and soul it can crossover into pretty much every market and be marketed as pop.

How hiphop is challenging music

Through hiphop challenging its own ideas of what rapping can be by the incorporation of melody, it is also challenging what melody is to other pop music by influencing artists, songwriters and producers to focus more on quotable caption-worthy lyrics, attitude, and production than ever before.

“Alt-pop” artists such as Lana Del Rey, Lorde and Billie Eilish became known for bringing a darker edge to pop, with the use of hip-hop sounds in their music playing a big part in that, and the latter who uses a distinct lack of typical sung melody with her whisper-like vocals and dresses like a SoundCloud rapper.

Ariana Grande straight up rapped verses over a trap beat for one of her biggest singles to date, 7 Rings (which sparked some controversy in the form of Soulja Boy accusing her of biting his flow).

While not everyone is used to or even willing to accept these changes in hiphop and other genres, if anything it shows the boundaries that can be pushed in music by forcing us to look at how we can view things differently. And we can thank hip-hop for that right now.

Hip hop did make it so singers with lower registers wouldn't pop off. A reason as to why no one is really singing now

No more Toni Braxtons. All the singers now are tenors and high mezzos and sopranos

great thread

op with high quality thread

we need more of these threads

“When a black artist makes sung pop music it is often classified as hiphop or simply r&b by the industry, which has been seen with acts such as Drake, Rihanna and The Weeknd” - Rihanna was always seen as a pop artist, the industry just built her to be a Beyonce competitor. Her biggest album (loud) is a pop album, her first solo grammy win was for a dance category. The weeknd has been seen as a pop act ever since CFMF. R&B heads and black twitter don’t give him credit for what he’s done for r&b because of him crossing over. “Blinding lights” is shaping up to be one of the biggest songs if not the biggest song, of our times, and its a pop song by a black artist. Drake gets clowned for crossing over especially from songs like Hold On, Hotline, etc + we all seen the damage Nicki got for doing pop music.

Ariana is the biggest pop act who makes hip-hop inspired pop music because theres not other r&b acts attempting to make pure pop music. Thats why Rihanna and Abel have success with both pop and r&b because they took the risk with making pop. The r&b market is oversaturated, if more made pop music they’ll be more black acts on pop radio. Thats why they’d whether push 7 rings or Post Malone. Also black twitter don’t like when black artists make pop music and that’s their core base.

her biggest album is GGGB but that's pop too

The affect on mainstream r&b is the one negative of it cause of the biters but it looks we’re coming out of that

I wouldn't say we're coming out of it but we might be able to soon. It's just sad cuz even in other genres lower voiced singers are underrepresented. In pop it's the same. Only high singers. Even in operas the tenors and sopranos get all the lead roles.

great thread BRAVE

. - BRAVE

These are some good points but you don’t think black pop acts are still put in that box?

yeah that's true
Loud singles were just bigger but that entire era

Why do black R&B fans hate it when black singers do pop?

R&B fans always wanna claim it's dead but barely support these singers when they do R&B. Then the artists go pop and get bigger hits.

BRAVE

Crazy era crazy time

i dont see the difference between these singles and pop songs that were popping between 08 and 10

Its also the overall climate of the industry as well.
Most R&B acts would rather make trap-soul music instead of expanding but once they do experiment, they don't get the same support from their core base.

They also need to start hyping up more black acts who make pop music, they started doing it with Normani but she aint dropping music.

Lizzo also just won a pop grammy for truth hurts

”They also need to start hyping up more black acts who make pop music”

I agree. Sadly we’re not entirely behind that

Look up the term Sprechstimme it was this sort of half sung/half spoken kind of singing that was popular in the 20th century with composers like Schoenberg and those weird f***s.

Not really related to this thread lol but I like to think of it as sort of a precursor to hip hop since they both sort of have an underlying melody masked by the “talking” voice

Her best album

Yeah and I forgot the name of it but there was this technique in the 18th or 19th century (we could be talking about the same thing) where the singer would do that talk singing thing but flip a lot between chest and head voice

Idk the name but my voice teacher was talking to me about it when we were talking about how hip hop has taken over and there's not many great singers out from the new generation of artists

this is a really good point

Hip Hop is definitely a primary cause of the lack of clear genre we have today