Deconstructing Hip Hop music

[Pemulis]

Hip hop music can be considered, chronologically speaking, the last avant-garde musical movement to have reached widespread circulation in pop culture.

Despite the general tone of the lyrics found in many rap songs — "Poopy-di scoop / Scoop-diddy-whoop / Whoop-di-scoop-di-poop", from Lift Yourself by Kanye West — hip hop music stands in the history of music as the genre that pushed to the extreme the subversion of Western musical tradition—a process already initiated by rock music at the beginning of the last century: the dominance of rhythm over harmony.

Western musical culture, for centuries, made the study of harmony its defining stylistic trait.
To simplify this concept and connect it to your everyday experience, just ask yourself how many times you’ve found yourself unconsciously tapping your foot to the beat while listening to a symphony from the 19th century or earlier. The answer is likely close to zero.

Symphony orchestras, in fact, traditionally consist solely of instruments whose role is to play notes—in other words, pitched instruments. Even orchestral percussion instruments (such as timpani, marimba, glockenspiel, etc.) are tuned and play definable pitches that can be written on a staff.
There is, therefore, no instrument whose primary purpose is to explicitly mark rhythm; rhythm in Western classical music is present only implicitly, as an underlying structural framework.

Rock music disrupted this balance, bringing the essence of African tribal music into contact with the Western mainstream. Tribal music, as is well known, was originally composed of purely percussive, non-pitched instruments. These were not intended to play notes (a concept that didn’t even exist in traditional African cultures) but rather to mark time during religious rituals, allowing participants to dance in sync with the beat.

So, in the 19th century, the modern drum kit was invented. Jazz and rock music radically transformed the cultural landscape of Western countries, whose musical tradition was suddenly renewed through its encounter with African-American musical heritage.

But what does hip hop music have to do with all of this?

Hip hop music further radicalizes this aesthetic process through two key mechanisms: the simplification of musical structure—made deliberately repetitive and ornamental so that it serves only as a backdrop—and the transformation of the vocal line into a purely rhythmic element. The voice, traditionally the primary vehicle for melody, becomes a percussive instrument; it stops singing, and thus stops producing pitched notes (and existing within a harmonic context), becoming instead a purely rhythmic expression.

A precursor to this idea can be found in Sprechgesang, a vocal technique developed by Schönberg as a middle point between singing and speaking.

That said, the truly sad part of this whole story is that most rappers—and the people who listen to them—are completely unaware of this historical and cultural nerdiness.
They're like children using a nuclear reactor to warm up their steak.
Truly fascinating.

Poopy-di scoop / Scoop-diddy-whoop / Whoop-di-scoop-di-poop

 

 

 

[Deicide4u]

Hip-Hop music is just a perversion of rap music, which died together with Tupac Shakur.

EDIT: To clarify, rap was becoming too socio-political, especially in Tupac's lyrics. That is why the music industry decided to devalue rap and replace it with perverse, immoral and idiotic lyrics of hip-hop.

Edited 14 hours ago by Deicide4u