By the 2010s, as the first generation of trap artists became rap elders, a second wave emerged. Artists like Jeezy, Gucci Mane and others picked up the city as crunk faded and pushed the sound of Atlanta forward, cementing it's place as center of rap's orbit in the new millennium. The latter rap star especially popularized slick-but-street Bankhead street rap, and trap music suddenly became the sound of the decade. In the 1990s, ATL products like Jermaine Dupri and the Dungeon Family put Georgia's capital city squarely on the national map it set the stage for a commercial takeover post-Y2K that was led by chart-toppers like Ludacris and T.I. In the early 2000s, Atlanta became a Hip-Hop hotbed. Trap music is like gangsta rap's flashy younger brother. turned "gangsta rap" into a household term, and as Public Enemy became icons for politicized Hip-Hop these were the acts who seemed "safe" for middle America.Īnd as a result, many of them wound up being unfairly branded inauthentic. The first real "wave" of pop-rappers arrived around the late 80s dawn of Yo! MTV Raps and Rap City as artists like Heavy D & The Boyz, Salt-N-Pepa, MC Hammer, Kid 'n Play, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, Tone Loc and Young MC enjoyed major chart success with a style of Hip-Hop built around infectious hooks, slick production and dance-friendly beats. That conversation would linger for decades, but at the time, it manifest as some criticism of certain rap acts with major crossover audiences. But with that commercial success came some handwringing about where the genre was headed and whether or not it could survive mainstreaming. and the Def Jam acts like LL COOL J and the Beastie Boys had kicked down the commercial door, and rap was now selling big. In the late 80s, Hip-Hop was crashing the mainstream. But what about "pop" as in "infectious and accessible?" It's typically not that cool to be thought of as the "pop" version of anything, let alone a genre and culture born of an outsider's spirit. In a lot of ways, "pop" often means white-or, at the very least, created for the interests of white audiences. "Pop" means manufactured and inauthentic, soulless and by-the-numbers. For some music fans, "pop" is treated like a dirty word. "Pop rap" is another term that sits uneasily in Hip-Hop's oeuvre. CD at the same Sam Goody where you purchased Mariah Carey’s last album, and both projects are selling in the multi-millions, just how “alternative” is it, really? That distinction has always been more or less superficial, if you were buying that R.E.M. Since the early 1990s wave of rock bands that flew in the face of then-standard commercial trappings, the music industry has tried to find a way to effectively market the branches of popular music that seem more devoted to the eclectic than the commercial. Just lumping it all together as “Hip-Hop” may be doing it a disservice, especially after almost 50 years. But Hip-Hop is a commercial genre inasmuch as it’s a culture and as a genre of music, there is no denying that rap has a plethora of stylistic and sonic distinctions. It’s not that no one recognizes rap’s subcategories it’s that so often there’s a tendency to view categorization as an attempt to divvy up and further commodify the genre. The idea of subgenres is somewhat controversial in Hip-Hop. As we get close to Hip-Hop's 50th anniversary, is it okay to acknowledge and celebrate the fact that rap music has it's own stylistic, regional and perhaps even philosophical subgenres? How many people are as immersed in the sounds of West Coast G-Funk as they are those loose disco-fied grooves of Sugar Hill and Enjoy Records? That's not to say there absolutely aren't heads who travel through all of the various corners of this vast rap landscape but it's okay if there aren't. There's rarely a fan who appreciates 90s East Coast boom bap with the same fervor as the zoned-out trap stylings of many post-2010 hits. Rap conversations can be so combative when one attempts to cross certain stylistic waters.
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