Journey into Hip-Hop: Mo’ Meta Playlist (3/4)

This is Part 3 of a series of posts discussing my search for a particular style of hip-hop music. It isn’t intended to exhaustively cover the genre, so if anyone is inclined to deconstruct what I don’t know from these posts about what I think I know—feel free to educate me via a comment below or tweet @Gleaming_Sword.

“I get down to what it is and if it ain't funky . . . see ya!” –Public Enemy, “Revolution Generation”

Aside from some House of Pain and Beastie Boys, I didn’t find much hip-hop music that hit the nail on the head until The Roots drummer Questlove’s memoir Mo’ Meta Blues came out in 2013, complete with sections on music crucial to his musical journey, and suddenly I had stars to help me navigate.

Here are the hip-hop albums I marked for checking out:

     Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back      (1988)

     De La Soul, 3 Feet High and Rising (1989)
     Jungle Brothers, Done By the Forces of Nature (1989)
     Ice Cube, AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990)
     De La Soul, De La Soul Is Dead (1991)
     Dr. Dre, The Chronic (1992)
     A Tribe Called Quest, Midnight Marauders (1993)
     Nas, Illmatic (1994)

In approaching this list, I was looking for some mélange of the following: a live sound with upbeat tempos, funky beats, socially conscious lyrics, gritty samples, and scratching. From that perspective, this isn’t a bad list, but some of the artists definitely hit nearer the mark, namely Public Enemy, De La Soul and Jungle Brothers.

Early on, Public Enemy didn’t so much drop albums as drop like a force majeure on the hip-hop scene. Where I grew up, rap meant Run-DMC covering Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” the Beastie Boys album Licensed to Ill, and Flavor Flav bouncing around with his clock. Many today only know the Flav from reality television, but he, Chuck D, Terminator X and others of the PE crew have dished out some fine hip-hop with hard-hitting and consciousness-expanding lyrics and sounds. It Takes a Nation is good, but Fear of a Black Planet (1990) always gets me grooving:

Public Enemy continues to put out new music worthy of attention, as does De La Soul, which is known for a brighter, more positive sound. In the past couple years, De La Soul has released almost its entire catalog for free as digital downloads, but one need look no further than “The Magic Number” off their debut album 3 Feet High and Rising for the magic sound: 

 

After the death of hip-hop, this raw sound is rare, and when it does exist, it comes off contrived. Back in the Golden Era of hip-hop, however, it was a natural part of the culture, of the movement of hip-hop and the zeitgeist in the music. It sounds like the streets, like a house party, like the rhythms of America, and you want to dance to it. Listen to most hip-hop today and the tempos are too slow. There’s no up-and-jump, no verve. It's rap, it's "R&B," it's pop, but is it hip-hop? 

Once upon a time, that wasn’t a problem: Consider “Because I Got It Like That” (1988) by the Jungle Brothers. Some remixes from 1998 I ran across recently on a 12” single remind me of Arrested Development for the way they start slow, then take off. It’s music that winks and grins at you before tearing out of the driveway:

 

Other posts in this series:

Arrested Development (1/4)
Hip-Hop Was Dead (2/4)
Expanding Horizons (4/4)