Thursday, October 8, 2009
I remember a simpler time when listening to hip-hop was more of a deliberate experience than it is today. One would embark on an excursion to the store, buy a rapper’s CD — or cassette tape for the veterans out there — return home and listen to the album the whole way through, track by track.
You may be saying to yourself that buying CDs from the store is still perfectly possible, and indeed this does still happen daily. Even so, the concept of the tangible hip-hop album has been discarded for the most part in today’s world where music is demanded instantaneously and quantity is valued over quality.
The Internet now rules the hip-hop world, equipping fans with a seemingly infinite stream of original and remixed material. Because of the emergence of online file sharing, mixtapes have dominated the hip-hop landscape in recent years since they are free and easy to download. A mixtape is a sort of mini album that may involve the artist rhyming over pre-existing beats, rhyming over exclusively original production or a combination of the two.
Mixtapes have been blowing up for years now, with every rapper from Lil Wayne to that guy at your local barbershop releasing tapes in an attempt to maximize the exposure to their music.
The unfortunate result of the mixtape invasion has been a steady dilution of talent and truly good music in the hip-hop pool. Many artists seem to be so concerned with the amount of material they release that they have forgotten about taking the necessary time to craft an actual album, one that’s original in content and consistent in quality.
Though there have been plenty of respectable mixtapes released over the Internet, many consist of a few good songs padded with about 18 tracks of filler material. It often seems that artists get lazy and are so eager to release the one or two good tracks they have that they crank out a dozen mediocre songs in an effort to get the tape out as soon as possible. More and more artists seem unwilling to dedicate the time and effort to compose and perfect a marquee album these days. As a result the production of genuine hip-hop albums has tragically become somewhat of a lost art.
The Internet is clearly here to stay. This is a good thing for hip-hop as its music and culture will only spread with its help. What we have lost with the rise of the Internet is the ritual of actually buying an album and experiencing it independently as its own unique brand of hip-hop rather than just a bunch more songs on our iTunes.
That, my fellow hip-hop heads, is our loss.
Mallot and Haworth Halls, two of the larger ...
1 comment
Lawrence Settles Lawrence graduate student “I like T-Pain ...
1 comment
Mallot and Haworth Halls, already two of the ...
1 comment
It was the symmetry of this sidewalk that ...
1 comment
Texting while driving is the cause of many ...
1 comment
Comments
Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.