Word: hip-hop
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From a critical perspective, it isn’t too surprising when artists fail to really appreciate the very things that make them great. But it can be depressing when someone like Timbaland—who pulled mainstream hip-hop out of the gutter in the late 90s and changed popular music for the better—seeks inspiration from two acts that exemplify everything traditional, comforting and safe about modern pop (Yorke et al excused). “Real” musicians wouldn’t have come up with the android beatbox hiccupping under Missy?...
...Milkshake” quadruples the effect, with Kelis confined to the role of a club diva providing the vocal riffs and the real star being the skanking analog low-end. It’s the closest I’ve heard mainstream hip-hop get to house music, where minimal “jack tracks” work more like DJ tools than as complete pieces of music, and the human presence is fully mechanized in between pulses of the drum machine. Appropriately, Kelis sounds so bored in “Milkshake” she’s practically disembodied...
...Cent, are redolent of hip-hop’s gradual ascension more than two decades in the making. They say 50 signaled the return of the hardcore thug emcee, the embodiment of the streets and the real and Tupac Shakur. But his rise reminds me more of Pac’s death, an epochal event everyone had to accept as fact. “In Da Club” defies real criticism; it simply is. As if to prove everything he said on 2001, Dre came up with the most monolithic hip-hop beat I’ve ever heard...
With his bullet-riddled slur plastered over the track, flow has never mattered less in hip-hop. 50’s skills don’t matter—indeed, they seem impossible to gauge—and the beat hardly needs to try. It’s a suitable metaphor for the idea that hip-hop, at least the way we know it now, has few places left to go. Maybe that’s why Tim says he’s tired—not just bored, but completely run down by the music...
First, consider R. Kelly the trend-setter. It is safe to say that R sets more trends than Sex and the City, and his sartorial sensibilities are unparalleled in the music world. While his hip-hop counterpart Jay-Z recently made the unreasonable claim, “I don’t wear jerseys, I’m thirty plus / Give me a crisp pair of jeans, playa, button up,” the Pied Piper is still unashamedly rocking throwbacks as a staple, as I can only hope to be doing at that age. Moreover, he has recently made...