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It always seems a tad silly to try and condense history - music or otherwise - into neat building blocks that start at 10 and end with zero but doubtless our need to list, categorise, compare and contrast means it was probably ever thus.
Likewise, we are always going to lean more to the end of the decade than the start and while one always thinks they live through interesting/turbulent times the changes in consumption of music over the last 10 years are surely the most radical since the invention of the phonograph. Moving from physical to digital; from active consumption via a purchase to a more passive participation by the sheer omnipresence of music - it’s difficult not to be overwhelmed!
Genres have started to mean less and morph more - why would a DJ stay on one beat for the night?
Inboxes that bulge daily with mixes, podcasts, mp3s and mailouts; and the transition from gradual (mid-decade) to rapid (the present) digitisation of the last 25 to 30 years of music means our memory and capacity to reference the past has increased rapidly. Once the preserve of the collector/archivist, a library of music is freely available for all – nostalgia and classics now belong to everyone rather than just those who witnessed it first time around. Genres have started to mean less and morph more - why would a DJ stay on one beat for the night? Those iPods have got us all used to jutting frequencies and tempos.
Hip-hop fast veers towards irrelevance partly through lack of effort (it’s always been about the hustle and if there’s not much to hustle for, why bother?) but also through over-familiarity. It’s ‘old’ music now – moving into its fourth decade, and looking rather flabby and out of sorts. Regional music, usually based around a silly dance and a drug of choice (crunk/hyphy/jerk) are of interest mostly to hipsters and bloggers running out of ideas fairly quickly.
Hip-hop seems to be reaching its “disco moment” of over-saturation
Indie rap fell off some time ago – it is almost wholly self referential. The major label stuff – think Kanye West, Jay Z – is, for me at any rate, almost impossible to listen to. Hip-hop was always about escapism and while we don’t necessarily need shared experience to enjoy it (40-year-old multi millionaires who babble on about their business acumen, count Bono amongst their best mates and probably haven’t unearthed any new music to listen to in years) we could be talking about any number of 60s/70s rock dinosaurs.
Hip-hop seems to be reaching its “disco moment” of over-saturation. Hopefully some exciting newness will come via the crashing of all these new beat styles. When that happens can someone twitter me?
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Tom_B @ 7 Dec 2009 20:11yeah, really enjoyed reading & reflecting on this.....
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Sledgehammer255 @ 7 Dec 2009 23:51
Madvillan all the way. Dangerdoom was a dapier album too :)
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Dan (Guest User) @ 9 Dec 2009 2:30
Nice to see the Jaylib record there, tis mighty.
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great read. found the last section on Louie Walsh particularly humorous ;)