What's with the idea that contemporary hip hop and pop lack melody?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by lc1995, May 12, 2019.

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  1. Gaslight

    Gaslight ⎧⚍⎫⚑

    Location:
    Northeast USA
    There is a a lot of Hip Hop like this and it's usually my favorite, of the genre. What's behind the vocals are just as important as the vocals themselves.

    Czarface, for example, has made instrumentals of his last two collaborations. I believe Ghostface Killah has done that as well.
     
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  2. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Yup. I kind of bailed out on hip hop in the early '90s personally. Every now and then there's something I hear that I'm interested in, but especially after the turn of the millennium, the whole "in the club," drinking lean, women as whores and bitches, prison culture; the only thing that matters is getting paid set of themes really took over a lot of the most popular stuff.....I'm turned off by it. And especially the misogyny (which is NOT on display in this tune). I'm out when I hear that. And I'm always shocked by how many young, committed feminist women I know actually listen to that stuff.

    What a song is about is pretty much the first hoop for me as a listener, regardless of style. I'm pretty style agnostic. Like I said, I've tried and failed with bossa nova, but I like baroque dance music, I like country, I like Bollywood film music, I like hip hop. I don't get instantly turned off by the style of the song. I think for a lot of listeners that's the first hoop -- they like rock or they like country or they like hip hop and if the song sounds like that style they can enter it, if it sounds like something else, they can't. For me that first hoop is what is the song about -- and if the song is about getting paid and taking my private plane and taking drugs to stay up all night on stage at the club, I'm out, doesn't matter what the music is like, the song doesn't interest me.
     
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  3. lc1995

    lc1995 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    New York
    To be fair, I would say the negative subject matter in hip hop peaked a long time ago (early to mid 90s perhaps). Gangster rap is not the dominant style anymore.And I even think that rapping about doing lean or pills is becoming old hat.

    This came out in 1991, this would cause outrage if it came out today.



    (extremely NSFW, listen at your own risk)
     
  4. lc1995

    lc1995 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    New York
    As far as Latin pop goes:

    the drum patterns can be very repetitive (reggaeton in particular), but I actually think the recent stuff can be very melodic, which is why it's doing really well as a genre.



    She's primarily a Flamenco singer, for what it's worth.
     
  5. winders

    winders Music Lover

    Location:
    San Martin, CA
    Maybe this is our disconnect. To me, the magic of music is the music, not the lyrics. No, I am not saying that lyrics are not important or can’t make or ruin a song. But, a great tune with so so lyrics is much more likely to resonate with me than a song with a so so tune and great lyrics. Basically, if I like a song, you could remove the vocals and I would still love listening to it. In other words, the catch is the music. Great lyrics just make the song better...they don’t make the song. This probably why Hip Hop does not work for me. Get rid of the vocals and what do you have?

    In regards to “Lemonade”, no where did I say I thought it was Hip Hop. It is modern R&B. It does have an overly strong bass line though. Beyonce's experiences and the way she communicates are hard for me to identify with. Her lifestyle is nothing like mine. I don’t communicate with my spouse using expletives and finger gestures. Even when angry or when we fight. I don’t go to clubs or generate self esteem based on how I am perceived by the public. The way the album presents her life it all seems so superficial. It seems to be all about her and not about them. Where is the romance and love? It seems there is nothing but status and demanding respect. Where is the self sacrifice? The music is dark, generic, and nothing really special. Without great music and with lyrics that don’t pull me in, the album didn’t stand a chance.
     
  6. lc1995

    lc1995 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    New York
    If it doesn't click with you that's fine. But personally, I like A LOT of music that I can't really relate to. The lyrics of a song like "She's Leaving Home" don't really pertain to my life at all, but it's still one of my favorite songs.
     
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  7. winders

    winders Music Lover

    Location:
    San Martin, CA
    Wow. Did you read a word I wrote? There are a bazillion songs that I absolutely love that have lyrics that don’t pertain to my life. These songs all have music that I love.
     
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  8. lc1995

    lc1995 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    New York
    I missed some important tidbits in the first paragraph, my apologies. But as for the "take away the words and what do you have" with hip hop, can't you say the same thing about rock? Most rock songs would be pretty boring without the vocals in my opinion.
     
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  9. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Yeah, I don't want to go too far down this road. I don't want to paint with a broad brush, there's lots of different creative people doing different things. I was just more talking about "Drip Too Hard," and the fact that it seems only to be about a celebration of the high life and conspicuous consumption. And my personal lack of interest in that subject matter.
     
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  10. lc1995

    lc1995 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    New York
    Do you feel the same way about glam metal?
     
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  11. winders

    winders Music Lover

    Location:
    San Martin, CA
    No, you can’t!!, There are a lot of rock songs with no vocals at all and many more with just a few lines.
     
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  12. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    Seems the opposite of superficial to me. That record feels deep and personal and emotional and potent and painful at a profoundly human level. The acceptance and the possibility of love going forward despite the betrayal is in "All Night" (as is the sex). But the album is a post-romance album. It's a mid marriage album that catched two people in the middle of one having an affair and the relationship poisoned and two people trying to come out on the other side. Staying is a self sacrifice. Accepting and even nursing the cheater's flaws, "Trade your broken wings for mine/I've seen your scars and kissed your crime" is a self sacrifice.

    And I think the music is wildly rangy from hard indie rock to bouncy almost Zydeco tinged country soul to bouncy contemporary dance music, to hard 70s style funky R&B. I don't hear anything generic about it at all. Not only does it sound really distinctive, within the context of the album itself it sound really rangy.

    Music, words, it's all one thing. But in a song with a lyric, the heart and soul of the song is what the lyric has to say and how it says it, otherwise, why have a lyric, write an instrumental. FWIW, mostly I listen to instrumental jazz and classical. To me, when I listen to vocal music with lyrics, it's all about what the song has to say and how it says it. Like reading a book or watching a movie.
     
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  13. lc1995

    lc1995 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    New York


    I like the instrumentation on this song. Simple but effective, with some good rapping over it
     
  14. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    I probably would if I ever bothered to listen to glam metal! Can you give me a specific tune? I'm not against party songs or sex songs or bragging songs per se. The money and conspicuous consumption and when and if a certain kind of misogyny shows up, does turn me off. But I'm OK with these other subject matters, it's just for me at this stage in my life, without some kind of broader subtext -- like the kind of "We're all OK" misfits party song that is "Raise Your Glass" or the exploration of suicidal depression masquerading as a party song that is "Chandelier" -- I'm pretty much disinterest. Maybe it's music for younger, higher people.
     
  15. drad dog

    drad dog A Listener

    Location:
    USA
    I never hear interesting use of language in hip hop. They start out with a big handicap of "These are the subject matters of hip hop" and it hasn't gotten much smarter since the inception. Rhymes are part of the poetry arsenal. They are not poetry though.

    And for there to be a movement of "poetry" in hip hop there needs to be songs and artists who make melodies to carry that poetry. OW who remembers or cares? Of course there are divergent, novel hip hop acts, looking to get attention, but as Sammy Davis Jr sang: 'Without a song..."
     
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  16. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    I really don't think that's true at all of, say, the work of Public Enemy or Nas or De La Soul or Kendrick Lamar and Outkast and Fugees and Chance the Rapper....I think you get a range of subject matter that's pretty darn broad and often pretty nuanced from something like "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" to "Daughters" to "I'm Sorry Ms Jackson" to "The Blacker the Berry" to "Blessings." There's love and family dynamics and politics and humor religion and spirituality and pretty much the same breadth of range in the subjects and language of hip hop as there is in pop or rock or country or any other typical popular music, even if certain subjects dominate a lot of the popular hits the way love or get up and dance or take my truck out for a ride on the backroads might dominate some of the hits in other genres at other times.

    The use of language is interesting. Song lyrics are poetic, but they're not exactly poetry or at least they don't really work the same on the page or in straight recitation. They work their magic in conjunction with music, and very much at the heart and soul of hip hop is the music of the word, the rhythmic and sonic elements of the sounds of the words, the flow. And there's incredible rhythmic invention in, say, the words of Rakim or Eminem, that, apart from the content of the words, often strikes me as interesting, inventive and engaging. There's music in the words.
     
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  17. Bobby Buckshot

    Bobby Buckshot Heavy on the grease please

    Location:
    Southeastern US
    :biglaugh:

    Hoo boy. That's funny man!
     
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  18. Jmac1979

    Jmac1979 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Louisville, KY
    But it shows how diverse and vast the hip hop genre has become. So many of it's skeptics still only see the genre as some guy rhyming over scratches and samples of well known hits of the past when the genre has evolved and become complex enough that someone like Donald Glover can do a funk odyssey style album with guitars in the front and be accepted as hip hop music, and not only that, but actually rock more than much of what constitutes so-called rock today.
     
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  19. ralphb

    ralphb "First they came for..."

    Location:
    Brooklyn, New York
    There are artists right now making challenging, catchy, commercial music, it just isn't sitting at the top of the charts, and most likely it never will. For the umpteenth bloody time, there is music out there to shake your soul and move you, you just have to look for it.
    Try Deerhunter, Nilufer Yanya, Big Thief, Savages, Idles, Ex Hex, Screaming Females, Trixie Whitley, Hand Habits...
    These hate threads really suck big time.
     
    Last edited: May 14, 2019
  20. Lownote30

    Lownote30 Bass Clef Addict

    Location:
    Nashville, TN, USA
    No. The melodies of "most" modern pop (R&B and rap) consist of the same 4 or 5 interval sets and are based around a very limited set of chord progressions.
     
  21. audiomixer

    audiomixer As Bald As The Beatles

    No melody. Sorry.
     
  22. Jmac1979

    Jmac1979 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Louisville, KY
    Right. People just remember rap in its most primitive state circa the 1980s and still think that is what all the genre is, when in reality hip hop has come as far from the days of Run DMC (who were great mind you) as rock has from Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.
     
  23. Jmac1979

    Jmac1979 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Louisville, KY
    People are always going to take a crap on something newer because in their little world, it means they've conceded that their youth wasn't the only time life and music mattered. Nostalgia can be toxic at times because of the rose colored glasses that The Flaming Lips, a band whose been making music for something like 35 years at this point, can't "matter" as much as Yes or The Moody Blues did, two bands who were squarely nostalgia touring acts at the same point in their careers.
     
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  24. Diamond Dog

    Diamond Dog Cautionary Example

    And that's not also true of "much" of the Golden Era rock and pop fawned over here as being vastly superior to today's music ?

    D.D.
     
  25. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    I don't know. Eminem emerged a decade later and lots of women like this little hit by him.



    (Also very NSFW)

    Or, more to the point, they've realized their mortality so they reject anything new or different in the vain attempt to hold on to the world as they once knew it.
     
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