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

You guys are too funny. Let's assume for a moment that I do hear the vocal line minimal melody in a rap song. Do you think that is going to all of sudden get me to like the rap song? That's just not how it works. When I hear a song on the radio for the first time and I like it, it has nothing to do with me analyzing the song and everything to do with how the song makes me feel.

 

Nobody here has ever gone "you must like this genre, here are somethings you must know to make you like it" though, at least not that I have seen, right?

Of course, everyone is free to like or dislike anything they please, that is the beauty of music is there is so many kinds for us to discover and connect with. But at the very least when someone dislikes something, it is best to avoid blanket statements that do not accurately represent the entirety of the genre, I think that was the main point if the thread being created I believe. To dispell that "melody" blanket statement


Again, some people have a hard time going "I don't like the melodic presentation in the hip-hop I have heard so I will stick to my own music" and instead go "the majority of hip-hop lack the concept of melody"

 

I grew up around metro NY when hip hop was emerging in the late '70s and early '80s and it was kind of like the music of my generation the way punk was around the same time. But I kind of drifted away from hip hop in the early '90s myself.

 

Again, no, it's not binary unless you are a dictionary. A 3 or 4 interval vocal line melody is not what the vast majority of people think of when they think of a melody in a song. So you use the strictest sense of the word melody to describe that 3 or 4 interval vocal line, but that is just being pedantic.

 

I can agree to an extent on this for the stuff I use to hear on the radio. Nowadays, have to pick wisely of which Hip Hop albums I want.

 

Don't know, don't care. What you like isn't my concern.

 

Just when it was gettin' good!

 

I listen to everything from Tibetan monks ("mindless droning" to some) to gamelan ("earthquake in a hardware store" to some.) I've found much to love across the entire arc of human musical endeavor, and literally nothing to hate. IMO, professed hatred
of any musical genre is rooted in hatred of the people who make it and/or enjoy it.

There, I've said it. Delete my comment, lock the thread, ban me . . . I don't care.

 

I don't know how many people you polled to determine "what the vast majority of people think" melody means, but "melody" is a word that has a specific, broadly understood, commonly used meaning in music, and a repeating linear progression of musical intervals as a leading voice in a composition used as a structural motif, is 100%, by all means something that meets any imaginable definition of melody, regardless of how few intervals there are in the melody or how narrow the intervals are, or how many times the melody repeats with minimal variation throughout the composition. None of those latter things make the melody not a melody.

The melody in this song isn't even one of these 20th century extended kind of ideas like tone color as melody or phonetics as melody. It's just a melody in the conventional commonly understood meaning of the word.

It might be narrow, minimal, slight in terms of the range of its musical content; it might be annoying in the way it's used as a continually repeating element with little variation. But, again, those qualitative impressions of it don't make it not a melody.

There's plenty of hip hop music that doesn't have a clear lead line melody, where the vocal part is a rhymed, cadenced, intonation of an lyric in a kind of Sprachgesang or a kind of rising and falling cadence like some sermons. Some hip hop doesn't even have that, and the lead line is just kind of speech. Kool A.D.'s vocal parts on Ambrose Akimusire's great album Origami Harvest aren't even I think Sprachgesang, they're just speech without melody. But none of that's the case with this song. This one has melody, minimal though it may be.

 

That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the bashing of entire, VERY divers genres.

I like Perry Como . . . AND Little Richard . . . and 2Pac . . . and Ernest Tubb (even though Mom said "He can't sing for sour owl") . . . and Arnold Schoenberg . . . and the Barbados Steel Band . . . and Fleetwood Mac (especially Mks. I & II) . . . and . . . and . . . and . . .

 

The phrase is not disparaging maturity, it is disparaging close-mindedness.

 

This is the only song by, for or about a rapper that I can stand.

 

Depends on who and what your parents were. I loved mine dearly, but I haven't become either one of them.

 

I totally disagree with that premise it is not binary - either the elements are there or they are not. 3 or 4 intervals is more than enough to constitute melody, it is here and it was when I studied minimalistic classical pieces in my advanced harmonic concepts course my last semester for my degree.

Whether something is a *true* melody as defined by a person, is like a musical True Scottsman fallacy based around bias against an overall genre of music

 

Everyone is "permitted" to comment here, within certain universal parameters.

No one, here or anywhere else in the world, is entitled to uncritical agreement and acceptance of their statements.

 

I'm a silver haired boomer and when I'm not busy yelling at clouds , I'm busy not caring what music anyone else listens to. Live and let live and all that.

 

I admit I was solely team rock in the 90s, unlike a lot of my classmates, I wasn't awestruck by the gangsta rap scene, and then stuff like Puff Daddy got big who essentially just covered hits of the past by rapping over it, couldn't convince me he was talented.... nordid I like bling culture and the era of "bitches and hos", etc.... Even today I'm not a fan of mumble rappers.

Then one day I came to the realization that what MTV was playing was only a small drop of the pool of what hip hop has to offer.

 

Not that I'm much of anything for hissy fits in the first place. But it all depends on what someone said in that regard. I don't think there's much to quarrel with in a statement that, for example, "in the grand sweep of rock music, the vast majority of the musical output has relied on an electric guitar in the arrangement." Like my statement about drum loops, it's just an objective fact. And the existence of exceptions doesn't refute it.

Someone could also conceivably go on to say that they detest the sound of the electric guitar, so therefore they don't find much to like about it. And I could ask "all electric guitars"? And they might conceivably say yes. And that would be that.

 

No, that's defining melody in the broader sense of the word, not the strictest sense.

I can think of a lot of one and two-chord songs- and even one-chord songs- where the melody is carried by singing, or instrumental solos. Some people may not find them melodic enough for their tastes- for that matter, some people think three and four-chord melodies are too bonehead simple to hold much interest for them. But there is a melody present.

 

If there is even one exception, it is no longer an irrefutable fact.

 

"Taken in the grand sweep of hip-hop, live bands play an insignificant role."

"In the grand sweep of rock music, the vast majority of the musical output has relied on an electric guitar in the arrangement."

No matter which statement of mine you're referring to, in neither case did I make the assertion without qualification. The qualifications implicitly make allowance for exceptions. That wording was intentional.

I don't like machine loops in music. I find them predictable and impersonal. To my ears, neither of those qualities adds musical value. Why aren't you willing to let this go?

 

You are so hell-bent on making sweeping statements about a whole genre of music that i'll bet you haven't even paid much attention to.

 

It has a melody. It has chords. Plus it is modal to boot. F sharp dorian. Jazz derived.

 

The Roots? Common? Kendrick Lamar? The days of beat boxing over a turntable are pretty far behind us.