Damn I made @op

20, 15 years ago young people just turned on the TV or radio and the good music would be playing. My point is that the mainstream was super strong. In the 80s, 90s and 00s. Not just rap, look at the rock and pop music coming out of those eras too. Now a days the best songs played on the radio are throw backs and MTV doesnt even play videos anymore. A hit is made by becoming viral for a 15+ second clip on tik Tok or w.e Then we move on to the next with quickness. The album creating process is basically gone, its just about how many songs you can pack into the album for streams or how many big songs previously released can fit. Creativity as a whole has just decreased in many ways, not just music. The hip hop "big 3" is 3 dudes from the 09 class lol and with all due respect to those that passed away recently, I don't think any of those guys was changing anything major either. But agree to disagree

You guys know there are genres that have never and will never be mainstream right?

Like what

Gamelan

See, we discussing the state of a 50 year old American genre of music in the country of America, and your example of a genre that has never been mainstream is a traditional Indonesian style of music that was created in the 8th century

Good point. Hip hop isn't even a genre yet. Give it 13 centuries

thread over. not sure why bro repackaged his old post into a whole new thread

the SAME threads

explains it

i like how he just ignored this lol

Soundtracks were guaranteed to sell like hotcakes in the 90s. They usually sold more than artists albums. But that was because you got a variety of artists on them (Various Artists)

So this is kind of the same thing

It's because 1992 was GOATed

F*** em

Once upon a time, hip-hop had good acts in the mainstream AND the underground. Now they only seem to be underground. Whether you care about the mainstream or not, that makes for a net decrease in quality, and reflects negatively on the state of hip-hop as a whole.

But people just refuse to engage with this argument and start sprouting the usual "THERE IS STILL GOOD HIP-HOP OUT THERE" and "WHY DO YOU CARE ABOUT THE MAINSTREAM" which doesn't address the point at all. First stage of grief is denial

Boomer asses

@op I was making a post replying to you in the Bobby thread almost exactly like the title of this thread before seeing this. So I’m glad you made this thread. However, You won’t convince a bunch of stubborn hipsters of this truth. The health of mainstream hip hop is absolutely pivotal to the health of the genre as a whole. There will always be leaders that push everything forward. Ktt ironically isn’t the place to discuss that

Edit: the only critique I have of your point is that it should be directed at hip hop specifically

They got Nozuka out of here for the exact same s*** but nobody does anything about this weirdo Lmaoo

Sorry I dont spend too much time on here didnt know we hated him now

lmao ey get a load of gabapetty over here! 💅

well it's not that at all, since in my point of view a majority of the users in this section are, and have always been, amongst the most unpleasant, closed-minded and knee-jerk hater philistines that I've ever discussed music with

it's simply that I think when the biggest hip-hop songs are really good and have everyone, including normies or whatever, rocking to the same beat, that it creates the groundwork for a collective cultural understanding that brings people closer together

its not about the people who don't give a f*** about hip hop. it's about the set of people who have ever cared about hip-hop or even have the potential to care about hip-hop. i think hip-hop has the most salutary impact on society when good music proliferates amongst this set of people.

yes, if there are only a handful of real heads, then as long as they keep the flame alive, they are benefiting from the fire underground music that they bump. if a genre never gets past this level then it's asinine to criticize it because nobody's charting on the billboard.

but hip-hop has had an incredibly large impact on society for several decades, and it has touched a lot of people's lives in what are often very profound ways. i like hearing hip-hop when i walk into a store. i like having mutual reference points with people that I don't even know be hip-hop centric. i like that the morning radio show they talk about hip-hop gossip, even if it's really stupid. but there's a limit to how popular stupid things can be before they can be harmful. i like it better when hip-hop is not one of those stupid things. so yeah i guess we can cut bait and end up like monks preserving the classical works of greece and rome in monasteries for hundreds of years in the dark ages. but i'd rather hear good songs coming out of people's windows during the summertime

Of course it’s good when the biggest songs are good I just don’t think that defines the genre/culture within it

I think at some point we started talking about different things I’m sure in some ways we agree

when i say it defines the genre, that doesn't mean that i think that solely by virtue of being popular something is "more hip-hop" than something that has relatively few listeners. i admit i spoke imprecisely when implying this, and apologize

what i mean is more that something which touches more people is going to set the narrative which people who want to participate in the collective endeavor of "hip-hop" are going to try to speak to

for instance, the hook of the Black Star song "Definition," where Mos goes

"I said one, two, three
It's kinda dangerous to be a MC (C'mon!)
They shot 2Pac and Biggie
Too much violence in hip-hop"

Obviously the genre was smaller then, but it was just true that the people at the epicenter of the genre (in this case Biggie and Pac) provided the content with which others engaged in the same collective endeavor reacted to.

To whoever said that my point should have been limited to hip-hop to be more accurate, I agree- there's always been a sense that hip-hop is the expression of a specific culture. more precisely, Black culture (if not necessarily "the expression of all Black people").

It's trite to say "hip-hop is dead," but there's a reason Nas named his album that. it's something that's, at its best, been more than just a musical style. it's bigger than that. this is why being a wack rapper making millions is offensive to a real hip-hop head in a way that probably outpaces how much it should objectively matter. because we want hip-hop to be a vehicle for disseminating messages that we agree with and find salutary.

idk. i don't think that popularity is the metric by which hip-hop should be measured so much that i think hip-hop should be the metric by which popularity should be measured.

Idk man things come and go.

Blues and Jazz were the s*** until rock came along and rock is the baby of those things. Imagine if they just kept calling it Blues or something and the rock term was never invented.

Maybe at this point rap and R&B have created this new thing and we just still call it rap. And there still is old types of rap being created today just as there’s still blues and jazz, it didn’t go away. But the new thing is what’s popular.

So to some people it feels like we’ve strayed so far from the light. But I mean what is music supposed to be to you. Is rap supposed to be lyrical and serious? No it doesn’t have to be anything. Right now it’s generally either fun and lighthearted/funny, or serious/sad/angry. And that’s just a generalization of course. You can find a lyrical artist here or there but we’re not in a lyrical era.

If there is so much discourse on how the rap game is boring and got complacent, then how is it that no one has stepped up and changed it yet? It’s just not time for that. Let this era happen. It’s fun. Just enjoy it. Feel the music