"paying your dues" is something we say to make a point. technically, you need a series of fortunate incidents and coincidents to make it. if you're a nice person, if you say the right things to people, and if you put in your share of good old manual labor, all these things are going to be pro's for you. you can do all of that and still not make it or you can do none of that and still make it.
i don't think hiphop is in a transition. if you look at society and how it's progressed in various fields, you can see a wavy figure suggesting everything is spiralling. trends change and people change with them, and a lot of people probably think that hiphop is going to go into a pause and then it's gonna come back re-invented by the underground to once more take over. i don't think this is what we are witnessing right now. i think the reason why hiphop has changed, and still is changing, is that due to how the evolution of our society has unfolded, and due to the choices the western civilization as a whole have taken.i could go on for four more pages before making my point - i won't do that. my point is that today, the term "good quality" does not equal what it meant ten years ago. as far as music is concerned, least of all. look at the online remixing scene, not just tupac but all artists, and what happened to it after people learnt how to make cpu acapellas. now you have people who make layered remixes with cpu acapellas. the dynamic range of the sound appears as if overwhelmed by a swarm of bugs. it's audio chaos. yet people still download it, listen to it and consider it decent. another thing is the way drums are being mastered these days. loud, compressed kick drums with lots of reverb, a very simplistic snare sound that no longer sounds like an actual snare. lot of drum machine sounds, less real recorded sounds.
i thought the new bishop lamont was wack. the beat sucks so badly. the kick drum is sort of cool, although it sounds too digital for me. it doesn't sound like something you would expect a real live drum to make. i can't explain it, but it doesn't sound completely right. the melody is very, very simple, and very very repetative. i mean, it doesn't sound real. it sounds very, very digital. i thought "lean back" was using real samples. when i saw stortch playing it on a keyboard i was like "wtf?". it SOUNDED real, however. with the new bishop lamont, it's like he didn't even give it a shot. this new bishop lamont song man, the beat sucks ass in my honest opinion. compare it to any decent-at-the-least beat from a few years back and you see how simple and digital it sounds. when scott storch first started out he did a lot of fiery shit. his stuff sounded real, it was banging, it was nice. now it sounds more and more like lil jon's shit, in terms of mixing and mastering of course.
basically, the human race is breaking down barriers, bending rules, hitting new records, basically stretching all aspects of our lives in every and any way possible. this is the general mentality of the world. take the whole chicks-need-pleasure thing, for instance. it's not so long since society started to openly debate around female sexuality. i remember the time when all gynochologists and other sex-related specialists almost made an inside joke out of saying that all women should use a hand mirror to take a good and proper look at their vagina. by today, it's expected that a guy does so and so to keep a girl satisfied, and if he doesn't, he's a bad man. soon as we put this entire taboo on trial and beat it, we moved on to the next one. i don't really know what taboos are being tested right now, but my point is that we're trying to stretch everything as much as we can and i believe it's gonna get to the point where we throw away our morals and let the beast inside get the best of us. it's gonna happen gradually, but today it's okay to smoke cigs and it's frowned upon to gather a crew together and kick somebody's ass. more and more violence occurs though. compare the state of today to that of ten years ago and imagine what's gonna happen if shit keeps developing by the same proportion.
all of this applies to hiphop too. they're stretching it in each end to try and make it fit. there's no saying where mainstream hiphop will go. i just thank god for teh internet.
