And with that, it pains some folks to actually admit that some of it is quite good. Hip-hop’s newcomers have certainly taken a beating over the past couple of years, suggesting that it’s in to hate this new genre. “Bone Thugs-n-Harmony were a quintet of indescribability when it came to their lyrics, eliciting more cassette rewinds and scribbling words down on paper over shunning them.” “ Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard had ostensibly garbled lyrics, but his spot as hip-hop’s drunk uncle shielded him from any harsh ridicule,” she wrote for Billboard. Kathy Iandoli hit the nail on the head calling BS on hip-hop’s generational divide. Though some fear the survival of true hip-hop is at stake here, let’s all calm down and realize that lyricism is not dead. Getty Images Lyricism Is Not Dead, And Can We Just Admit Desiigner’s “Timmy Turner” Actually Goes Hard?
So if it’s acceptable for a jazz singer to use their mouth as an instrument in order to take that record to a higher plane, why can’t the same be true for rap? Scatting is by no means easy, and I refuse to even remotely suggest that Ella Fitzgerald’s scatting number on “It Don’t Mean A Thing” required the same technical skill as Lil Uzi Vert repeating “Yah Yah” on his opening verse on “Bad and Boujee.” But the point is, music’s job is to evoke a feeling and that doesn’t always involve lyrics. We can also look to other genres like jazz, where “scatting” gives vocalists the improvisational freedom through the use of wordless adlibs.
However, hip-hop isn’t alone in that regard. Ultimately, we can’t deny that made up gibberish does get thrown in for effect. A simple Genius search will decode your favorite rap song with one click, which makes arguments like, “I don’t really understand what these kids are saying” even more inexcusable. dollar to what Tommy’s job was on Martin, it’s all there. From how many British pounds equal a U.S. The answer to literally anything you’d want to know is just a Google away. In The Age Of Information, “I Just Can’t Understand Them” Is No Longer An Excuse Just because a rapper is a lyrical beast or super conscious doesn’t mean they don’t, at times, mumble. Just because a rapper isn’t as lyrical as you’d want them to be doesn’t mean they’re mumbling. When chatting with HipHopDX, Monch recalled, “As I was coming up, I remember we had cats yelling at Organized Konfusion, ‘You’re the reason sh*t is f**ked up now! Hip-hop used to be fun with the hippity hop and the ‘Ho! Wave your hands in the sky.’ Why y’all put so many words in the bars?”ĭamn, can the new guys do anything right? But then sometimes I’m not in the mood for Lil’ Yachty.”Įven well-respected emcees like Pharoahe Monch were not exempt from this kind of scrutiny, only it was for the exact opposite reason. I’m not trying to hear the triple entendres. “I don’t wanna hear multiple cadence flows if I’m just smacked in the club. “There’s a time and place for everything,” he said. His partner Desus agrees that if you can walk and chew gum at the same time, you can find a place in your playlist for both conscious and turnt styles of rap.
That’s right, the same man partly responsible for Andre 3000’s success-a rapper who is widely considered a Top Five emcee-also had a hand in Future’s come up.
The Atlanta-based collective cultivated the young autotune-loving protegee from the same studio that produced Outkast, Goodie Mob, and Organized Noize. If you’re not familiar with Rico by name, you’ll definitely recognize his crew: The Dungeon Family. So all these new age mumble rappers are doing, whether they know it or not, is borrowing from their hip-hop forefathers.Īnd honestly, can we really blame mumble rappers if the previous generation gave them the blueprint? Future has his cousin Rico Wade to thank for the fact that you even know his name. But either way, it points to the old adage that there’s nothing new under the sun. Make no mistake, rapping at this speed while staying in the pocket is no easy feat. Very few of these lyrics are recognizable in the English lexicon, yet it worked. Take the former’s popular breakout single, “True Fushnick.” They actually dedicated whole bars to lines like, “The super the cola the fraja the listic expialadope Chip/When the mic is gripped in ridobidobip bip da be bong de dang, bo!” Still not convinced? Take a closer look at their otherworldly lyrics on Genius. The boom-bap instrumentals they used are worlds apart from the synthesized and irresistibly catchy trap beats of today, but it cannot be denied that those cats were literally mumbling on their songs. Ask real hip-hop heads about the rhymes of Fu-Schnickens and Das Efx. Ironically, mumble rap’s earliest origins can be traced back to hip-hop’s golden age of the 90s. Getty Images Is Mumble Rap Really A New Phenomenon? History Would Suggest Not
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