But that’s exactly what you -appear- to be doing with hip-hop. One obvious way these examples are bound together is they have jazz “sounds” in them. In your writing, you also seem to like hip-hop that implicitly apologizes for the materialism and violence of gangsta rap. To argue that when hip-hop artists distance themselves from it, they are more sophisticated, is painfully reductionist. You set up a continuum between materialism/violence and its /absence/; this distance between the two becomes hip-hop’s only possible salvation. So it ceases to be heard on any other dimension but in relation to its superficially transgressive reputation. This very common error (among both insiders and outsiders) has the effect of polarizing and obfuscating an otherwise extraordinary and diverse repertoire of music.

Those concerned with “cultural mores” thought Cab Calloway’s music was significantly associated with teen criminality. They weren’t even technically wrong…the problem is not with the association, or even with the hint of causality, but with the reduction of the critical lens, such that swing bands in general always had to answer to it. To be clear: I never said my concern with rhythm and rhyme was the /primary/ concern. But everyone knows hip-hop is multidimensional…it simply doesn’t succeed or fail on its conformity to your moral standard.

I cited early rappers because that’s my generation. You yourself try to tell us how “mainstream rap” has lost its touch, forgetting, perhaps, that you’re cherry-picking the best 1% of an older generation and comparing it to the *whole* of what we have today. So why fault me for a little nostalgia? At least I was avowedly offering particular examples, rather than making a timeless generalization about the good old days and the morally suspect present.

Thanks for the response. I find it fascinating that the examples you gave of hip-hop sophistication are all musicians with 20+ years already in the game, and I’m not even including the Treacherous Three which is really old school as we’re going back to the 70s there. Suffice to say, they aren’t new school artists, and are all from previous generations. When all your examples of sophistication are as old as that, doesn’t that in of itself say something?

It’s the same thing people do when they name drop artists like Talib Kwali, Mos Def, The Roots, Dead Prez, Common, The Coup etc, like they are new musicians. Of course, this doesn’t mean there aren’t great musicians now, there are, but whenever people give examples, they always go back decades, in your case, even over 3 decades like in the case of the Treacherous Three.

Also, you’re conflating and perhaps missing the point entirely by asking me if I would consider jazz sophisticated because it made use of instruments used by Stravinsky and Brahms. That’s doesn’t make it sophisticated. Jazz musicians are innovative and sophisticated in spite of people like Stravinsky and Brahms. Some of the greatest composers are jazz musicians. Look no further than Wayne Shorter and Bobby Timmons for excellence.

Likewise, just because you don’t hear the innovation or creativity in the video examples I put forth doesn’t mean it isn’t there. When your barometer is chiefly “unique rhyme and meter in speech that works in beautiful or non-obvious ways in conjunction with an underlying accompaniment.”, then I don’t expect you to fully grasp or understand the cultural mores of something that you are perhaps addressing as an outsider looking in.

Cheers,
Atane