I started to call this article "From 'They Don't Dance No Mo' to 'All They Wanna Do is Dance", but that was too long. Plus, ya'll don't know about dat Don Henley. Nevertheless, that's exactly what Hip Hop fans in the South bring to mind. At least for me. Lemme tell you a story.
Anybody that knows me knows I'm big on OutKast, big on the Dungeon Family as a whole. One of the greatest moments in the DF catalog was when OutKast collabed with Raekwon from the Wu Tang Clan on Skew It On the Bar B. The mixture of Dirty South and East Coast flavor really spoke to me because, from a young age I've always wanted to see cross-regional unification in Hip Hop (so did Tupac, btw, but that's another days' Freaknik...)
Now, at the time--- 1998--- Aquemini was the hottest album on the planet, second only (for some) to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Being in the South, I heard a lot of buzz about various tracks from Aquemini, but I always found it strange that Skew It On the Bar B didn't take off the way Rosa Parks and Spottieottiedopalicious did.
Fast forward bout a decade or so. OutKast releases the street single Royal Flush featuring Raekwon. Grammy-nominated instrumental, Grammy-winning MCs on the track, Dirty South-meets-East Coast once again. Couldn't lose, right? Until I started talking with some of the local heads. This is what I started hearing:
"Man, it's a good song... but Raekwon messed up the flow."
"Raekwon was off. He need to rap on beat."
"Why they put him on that song?"
...(((O_o))) What in the ENTIRE F---?!
Now, I've tolerated a lot of foolishness from the South. Krunk music... I let it ride, even when I saw a brotha try to tie krunk music to slavery while attempting to justify it. Snap music... I mean, I hated it, but it was jammin sometimes, and people gotta have fun, blah blah... and Fabo was hilarious. Like a Dirty South ODB. Which brings me back to my point: WHO SAYS RAEKWON THE CHEF OF THE LEGENDARY WU TANG CAN'T RAP ON BEAT?!?
Now don't get me wrong--- yeah, when he spits, it's not succinct. It's not 1-2-3-4, it's not crisp. But do you really think that he raps like that because he can't keep the beat? PLEASE! Sad to say, that just shows how much the younger generation has gotten away from improvisational jazz--- guess what? In music, you are allowed to deviate from the established rhythm. It is allowed. It is okay.
Now, nobody down here would be fool enough to say Raekwon doesn't have #BARS, so I knew that people weren't hating on him because of his lyricism (granted many folks probably don't understand his lyrics because... nevermind; we got Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary, all will be revealed soon...). So then I had to ask myself, "What's everybody down here got against a little off-rhythm spit?"
I pondered... and pondered. "What is rhythm? ...It's what you dance to. Hip Hop fans in the South wanna DANCE. Off-rhythm rhyme styles make these Southern listeners get clumsy on the dance floor." This line of thought fit right in with a discussion I had a few years ago about DJing. When people think about Hip Hop and DJing, they think about guys from NY like DJ Premier and DJ Kay Slay. But the South has always had DJs too--- it's just that they were making DANCE music. DJ Uncle Al, DJ Kizzy Rock, DJ Smurf, DJ Taz, Lil Jon, Emeperor Searcy--- you hear these names, and you don't think about rap battles or jazz samples, you think about Spring Breaks, beaches, booty music and dance crazes. And I htink that's what has cultivated Southern listeners' listening preferences... the need for music to dance to.
So somebody like me who's about #BARS and #LYRICISM, I hear Raekwon on an OutKast track, and I'm thinking, "Look how he eases up on the track outta the shadows and sways into his verse, half-gangsta, half-gentleman." But somebody who's about keeping the party going and keeping the grooves intact and keeping the women entertained is thinking, "Why is this dude interrupting the two-step! Why can't he find the kick and snare and just stick to 'em!"
...Easy-listening. And I say that because somewhere, in a place far away from here, somebody's bumping a Wu Tang album full of grimy, irregular-rhythm flows and dancing off them RZA beats just fine.
OOH!! Before I forget, lemme telll you what pissed me off the other day!
So Joey Bada$$'s song Waves... never heard it spun a single time in the City of Augusta. I talked to the local heads about it, they gave me the same rah-rah--- "He dope, but he don't be on beat." Fast forward to just a few weeks ago, I think I hear Waves coming on the radio, but it ain't Waves... it's J.Cole's new single False Prophets, where he spits over the exact same instrumental as Waves. ...And cats are swearing that J.Cole got busier on False Prophets than Joey Bada$$ got on Waves!!
...WHAT?!? BOY, that regional favoritism is the STRONGEST!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment