Word: hopã
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Within seconds of beginning our interview by phone, Def Jux rapper Murs has interrupted my questions to ask where I’m from (I have an accent). When I tell him, he says he’s surprised I even listen to hip-hop. “Hip-hop??s not that important—it’s just entertainment.” I tell him Tupac’s face is one of the more common images on T-shirts and walls in Africa (where I’m from) and he seems to accept...
...biggest problem with the acts most often associated with “realness” in hip-hop??Jurassic 5, Common, Blackalicious and so on—is that the idea of realness itself is all they ultimately represent. Common’s Like Water For Chocolate was meant to be a paragon of “soul,” but its Soulquarian tracks were so calculatedly proper that Common’s substance got buried in their style. “The Light” is moving enough, but there’s also a smugly...
...they border on stream-of-consciousness. You’re bombarded on all sides by sounds from all times. It doesn’t hurt that Doom has the flow to match, a drunken rambling full of non-sequiturs and bizarre metaphors as jubilantly lyrical as anything from hip-hop??s early Nineties golden age. Sampladelic psychedelia at its best...
...same naively uplifting ends. (Charmingly ironic is the vocoder-led house number that bursts out of “The New Workout Plan”—work that drum machine, Kanye.) In contrast to the “faded photograph” echo in much of hip-hop??s sampled melodies, Kanye is relentlessly optimistic even when he’s down...
This sort of outward development may be at odds with hip-hop??s basis in repetition and samples, pitting raw craft against the simple irreverence of stealing music. It’s no more risky than Madlib’s swarm of loops or anything the genre has already done, but it is curiously ambitious...