REVIEW: Various Artists, Beats & Rhymes Hip-Hop Music of
the '90s
- Lang Whitaker
Even though I love rap music, I often find myself switching it off these days. Nothing against Puffy or Master P, but there is a definite lack of creativity today in the Hip-Hop Nation. I get tired of hearing every song from the 80's being re-done with some monotone soliloquoy spoken on top of it in which the phrase "around the world" is rhymed with "pearls". Even more discouraging than the lack of creativity is the lack of of subject matter out there. It's almost a shame that N.W.A. and The Geto Boys ever hit it big, because everyone else has been busy trying to "keep it real" ever since, even if they were never real to begin with (witness Hammer, Vanilla Ice, Kris Kross).
Beats and Rhymes: Hip-Hop Music of the '90s , is a new three record collection from Rhino Records that recalls the earlier days of rap music, back when weekends meant two-turntables and a microphone, not two glocks and a 40. A well planned compilation effort, on the whole it is an extremely upliting and satisfying listen, despite the reality of the topics that are often confronted.
There are many highlights between the three discs, which makes it hard to single out only a few. On the first disc, A Tribe Called Quest shows their visionary genius on "Bonita Applebum", a ghetto love song that features not one, but two samples the Fugees eventually stole and turned into millions of greenbacks. KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions warn of the controlling power of money on "Love's Gonna Get 'Cha (Material Love)". A young but funk-filled Teddy Riley produces a fading star in Big Daddy Kane on "I Get the Job Done".
On Disc Two, Brand Nubian, featuring Grand Puba and Sadat X, slows down Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians' "What I Am" on the track "Slow Down", an amazing tale of a life lost to substance abuse. The Leaders Of The New School, with a pre-Whoo-ha! Busta Rhymes, contribute the comical "Case of the PTA". DJ Quik describes in accurate detail a night in California on "Tonite".
The final disc is full of jams; from Del, the Funkee Homosapien's biting social critique of the hip-hop style biters on "Mistadobalina", to "Ya Mama", The Pharcyde's recreation of lunchroom snaps. Also worth checking out is the amazing Chip-Fu of Fu Schnickens, who dances all over the track on "La Schmoove".
As I listened to the discs, several things stood out at me. One of the primary things I noticed was the lost art of scratching. Nowadays scratching appears in every genre on the radio (Hanson's "HmmBop!"), and even then it only gets a cursory shot. On the discs of this collection, scratching is often one of the key elements, if not the main ingredient, in the songs. For example, on Heavy D. & The Boyz's "Who's The Man (Jeep Bass)", a version of Steve Miller's "Fly Like an Eagle" is scratched in throughout the songs.
Another seemingly lost art form is the proper use of samples. In the songs of this collection, samples are used sparingly, usually arriving in two and three beat loops. There are usually seperate bass lines running underneath them, so that when the samples play over the bass parts they add to the song, not totally comprise it. Even the samples that are longer in length (Brickell on "Slow Down") are sped up or slowed down enough to be almost unrecognizable. This is a sharp contrast to the "sample" of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" in Janet Jackson's "Got 'Til It's Gone", or Diana Ross' "I'm Coming Out", which essentially is the entire song "More Money, More Problems".
As the violent content of rap music has increased through the 90's, the mainsteam popularity and financial lucrativity have also ballooned. However, with the growing fame and fortune that find rap artists, there eventually comes a point where the music loses its connection to the man on the street, and as a result, the credibility goes out the window too. Many artists nowadays are doing cover tunes of old rap songs (Eric Sermon's "Rapper's Delight"; Snoop Doggy Dogg's "The Vapors"). Until rap music returns to its roots, thank God for compilation albums like this.
