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

the answer to your question is because people are not generally inquisitive and yet still have opinions on subjects they know little about. it is hard to understand why anyone should care about one's opinion of hip hop if they , for instance, haven't listened to any new music since 1989 or 1979 or any other arbitrary cut off point. as a result, it shouldn't really bother anyone that these people have these opinions, because they are uninformed, so not particularly useful.

 

I’m not saying you’re crazy if you don’t like those albums. I’m saying to write off the past nearly 30 years of music, to suggest that nothing good has come along since then? Now that’s crazy

 

Uninformed? Sure. Either I like the sound of something or I don't. If you are saying that if I educated myself on Hip Hop I would acquire a taste for Hip Hop, you are wrong.

I have listened to a lot of pop/rock music from the 90's to now. I have always listened to radio stations in my car that play current pop/rock. There are many songs that I like but not many albums. It seems that what is important to the artists has changed. You always had artists that were looking to put out music based solely on what they thought people wanted to hear. But you also had artists that put out music they wanted to make. There are no artists today like Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Jethro Tull, Warren Zevon, Nick Drake, Van Morrison, Pink Floyd, The Who, or Queen. Or early Bee Gees, Gabriel Era Genesis, early Elton John, Jackson Browne, or Yes. It's all about putting out hit singles now. It's all about autotune because half the singers can't carry a tune. Everything is loud from start to finish and compressed. It's sad....and Hip Hop is just another stab to the art!

 

That's just not true. For one thing, in part your comparing apples and oranges -- there are plenty of artists like Nick Drake who are not writing chart pop music. For another thing there are plenty of chart pop superstar very much making the music they want to make and making albums. Take something like Lemonade -- that was an album made as a coherent, ambitious, multimedia whole with an emotional narrative running through it from beginning to end that was hardly designed around an attempt to pull together hit singles; and Beyonce is a heck of a singer in terms of technique, whether you prefer her aesthetic choices or not. Hell, Wu Tang Clan put out an album, One Upon a Time in Shoalin, that was release in a single copy -- one two-CD set -- with an 88-year ban on the album being released publicly. Flaming Lips put out an 6-hour long song, hardly a bid for the top of the pops. There's just as many different kinds of music and artists as there ever was. More actually, since there's more recorded music getting released now probably than ever before in the history of recorded music.

 

Not a huge Lil Baby fan, but I like what I've heard enough. He's from Atlanta, and like all the Atlanta artists in recent memory has a very strong melodic sensibility infused into his flow. Obviously the "melody" is still repetitious by nature of the genre.

I guess it's worth noting "mumble rap" is highly contentious even among genre fans. Looking back now it's pretty impressive to me how influential the early players in this scene like Future and Keef with "Love Sosa". IMO the mumble rap scene is one of the biggest seismic shifts in the sonic and lyrical style of hip-hop. I get the repulsion and often face it myself with the worst offenders like Lil Xan. I would say the best hip-hop tracks keep a song interesting despite the looping beat thanks to the bars and flow the the MC. In mumble rap, the lyrics themselves are often sidelined entirely to better serve the flow. A boring practitioner like Lil Pump will drive me absolutely nuts in a few seconds, but I can enjoy all of Migos Culture. Really comes down to the performance and the beat more than ever.

Honestly when all is said and done I like boom-bap east coast 90s style rap more, but I think the melodic wave is obviously here to stay despite what the old school people think. Plenty of great artists are working with melody and rap now that are pushing it beyond the Migos style. You've got artists that are even more melodic like A Boogie wit da Hoodie and Lil Tjay from the Brox, and artists that are doing a great job combining pop melody and rap like Tierra Whack. And obviously the Atlanta scene itself continues to be tight. Excited to see where it all goes.

These threads always save to work up the exact same folks here. No surprise that close-minded, and often bigoted opinions are being thrown around. People who take artists like the Monkees seriously really have no business looking down their nose at contemporary pop IMO.

 

No. Hip-hop IS the current pop music. It's probably not made for you, so go on and listen to something you do like.

It always has been for some people.

This is the second or third thread just this week that people keep trying to talk about why they don't like hip-hop or bemoan the decline of rock music.

Doesn't matter. The gorts will inevitably lock this thread too.

 

If the definition of melody = "you can hum it" than there's a lot of hip hop with melodies then.

 

Well, at least it's not 1979 for you.

 

It has a lot to do with things we may not discuss here.

 

Actually I think it's the opposite.

Not for those who just have a general dislike or apathy for a certain genre btw...I mean the ones who truly hate it. So much so that they want any thread about the topic to be derailed and eventually gorted. As I'm sure this one will be headed soon.

It's one thing if someone says "it's just not my cup of tea" and just move on. But to harp on it, and with some posters it's just constant, makes one wonder why they expend the energy.

 

i am merely saying that in order to have an informed opinion on something one needs to have investigated the subject at hand in a more than cursory fashion. people who make statements about subjects they have little knowledge of are providing little that is useful in the exchange of ideas.

 

You can come up with an example or two or three that counters my point but my point is that what I am talking about used to be the norm, not the exception like it is now and has been for 30 years. Sure there are more “artists” now than ever before but there are fewer impactful artists now than ever before. Can you really compare Flaming Lips to The Moody Blues or Yes? No way.

 

1. It's been forty years, hip hop is not a fad that's going away. It's a major part of our culture and you just have to deal.

2. If you blanketly bash hip hop music, you have no right to bemoan that the younger generation doesn't love your idols when you've done nothing but bash the music they love. You people killed rock's coolness and relevance more than hip hop or pop ever did.

3. I am not the #1 hip hop fan on this forum. I personally loathed what the gangsta rap genre glorified and to me the bling rap trend was no less shallow than glam metal, but there's a lot of talented artists in the genre. You guys need to accept that the music has evolved from the days of rappers talking over samples. Many of today's acts use actual musicians and are extremely creative and artists like Childish Gambino (whose last album was a funk rock masterpiece that could've been recorded in 1974), Anderson Paak, Kendrick Lamar, Chance The Rapper and others won over me, someone who once hated hip hop when I only associated the genre with gangsta, bling, sexism/homophobia and artists like Puff Daddy who were basically doing nothing but rapping over established hits by other artists.

4. Time marches on, and so does music. If hip hop was good enough for David Bowie, it's good enough for you

 

I was about to post something like this. There is definitely stuff on this forum that's not my cup of tea, I just keep it going.

 

In that we agree. Everyone's tastes are different and it's ultimately subjective.

I also agree that there are no artists like the ones you mentioned above. Because they are who they are, and no one has replaced them as they are unique unto themselves. Plus why would I want a "New Queen" anyway? That would just be redundant.

There's also just one Run The Jewels or Kendrick Lamar or Kanye West or Ghostface Killah. I don't see how this is particularly relevant to anything.

 

Umm probably because it is a true statement.

This song is not the least bit catchy.

Boring and annoying yes. Catchy no. I don't hear much of a melody.

 

So many of you just suck.

 

Yep. The old rock boomers bitching about hip hop in 2019 are like the silver haired ladies still complaining that rock and roll is nothing but noise

 

Your blanket statements are outrageous. Clearly you haven’t skimmed below the surface, as no one would write off 3 decades worth of music if they had. There was crap back then and crap now. Sure you and I (and a lot of people on here) like more older music more newer music but is that really the point? You sound stubbornly ignorant.

 

Personally, I really don't care at all for Flaming Lips or the Moody Blues or Yes, so I'm not really the one to offer an opinion one the music. I'd just as soon skip the lot of it. But I don't see any way in which Beyonce or Kendrick Lamar or Kanye West or Vampire Weekend or Taylor Swift or Miranda Lambert or Outkast or Radiohead or Beck or Jack White or Lil Wayne or Bjork or Conor Oberst have been any less impactful on the music of their time than all those old rock artists were on the music of their time. And certainly I'd take Red or Lemonade or Modern Vampires of the City or Cassadaga or I'm Awake It's Morning or Black Messiah or To Pimp a Butterfly etc and place 'em alongside any classic albums of any era, and it's not a matter of cherry picking. The lists making can go on and on. The difference with the old music is that it's probably in an old style that you prefer, but that doesn't make it better, just more to your personal liking; and of course a kind of confirmation bias that comes from the accumulated weight of years and years of lists and critics and other folks calling something classic. In fact, when it comes to album making, we've been in a bit of a golden age in black pop -- with Lemonade and To Pimp a Butterfly and A Seat at the Table and Coloring Book and Awaken My Love and 4:44. People will look back on this era the way people look back on the '70s albums of Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye.

 

Well said. Though the music I love best is decades in the past, there's much to enjoy in contemporary music. I do agree that things have changed, but it's more the culture (in which music no longer plays as vital a role) than any lack of talent or desire on the part of the artists.

 

Even that was probably only a real thing for 5 years tops. The blue hairs have nothing on the boomer rockers.

 

Yes. The sonic vocabulary these days is a lot different from 10-15 years ago.
There's much less demand on melody or arrangements in hip hop and rap- and some other pop genres as well.

 

True, but I'm sure in a retirement home somewhere, there's probably 90 year old Ethyl who curses The Rolling Stones and The Beatles for making Perry Como irrelevant lol

 

I think one thing that is harder for older generations to fathom (and I'm only months shy of 40, so I'm not exactly young anymore) is that we've somewhat moved into a post-genre world.

I'd never really thought about it until I saw someone posting it on a comments section about the new Vampire Weekend and how little "rock" it actually is despite being lumped into the genre. Times have changed from decades of yore where you had your kids who liked rock, your kids who liked hip hop, etc...., today genres have cross-pollinated each other so much that its a much different world, and I think that is something older rock fans hate, because its not the dominant force it once was. Even hip hop has arguably crossed into other genres to keep fresh, when you look at Kendrick Lamar employing freestyle jazz musicians on his album, or Childish Gambino doing a funk album with more guitars than a lot of so-called "rock" today uses, or even an artist like Lizzo who can flow from a hip hop track like Tempo to a 90s neosoul track (Jerome) to a blues rock track that sounds a lot like Alabama Shakes (Cuz I Love You) to a full on pop/r&b track like Juice on the same album.