From its earliest origins in the early 1970s through to today’s hottest young stars, hip hop has always been a genre that has pushed the limits of what popular music could sound like.
Foundations and Influences
In its early years, hip hop drew from the more organic sounds of funk and reggae, as early founders like DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash reacted to the growing fad of breakdancing by placing a special emphasis on the instrumental breaks in disco, funk, pop, and soul tracks, and crossfading between two or more tracks. This was hip hop at its most analog and its most purely joyous.
As the years went on and the ’70s became the ’80s, old school hip hop slowly gave way to a new school where artists like NWA, Run DMC and LL Cool J brought an edge and a social consciousness to hip hop that was most clear in an increasingly aggressive form of rapping. Gangsta rap, based heavily on the rapper’s experiences as usually poor, urban black kids, often caught in gang wars, started to become especially popular, but at the same time other genres of hip hop started to form.
Mainstream Success
It was also during this period that the rise of electronic recording devices was reflected in the use of electronic samples to create new songs. Hip hop from this period still used more conventional live instrumentation but between sampling and the ’80s love affair with drum machines, hip hop was moving in an increasingly digital direction, where songs would be built of various elements, creating a sort of pre-programmed beat for rappers to rap over.
This period, which went from the mid ’80s through the mid ’90s, is now widely considered to be the golden age of hip hop. The genre moved from being a relatively niche genre built around breakdancing culture into the mainstream, even as its subject matter became more serious and more transgressive. It would also be the period when hip hop had many of the trappings of 21st century hip hop, while still drawing heavily on its roots in the more organic musicianship of the ’70s.
Modern Hip Hop
As the 21st century beckoned, hip hop would again transform with the so-called “bling era” moving the genre away from social realism towards something that would revel in materialism and corpulent success. But as hip-hop continued to gain steam to the point that it would soon overtake rock as the pre-eminent form of popular music, it continued to splinter into more and more sub-genres, though most of these drew more heavily from digital sampling than ever before.
In the current streaming era when there is no real prominent form of popular music and music itself has lost much of its cultural cache, hip hop follows less of a formula than ever, but even as major talents like Kendrick Lamar or even, heaven help us, Kanye push the genre forward, it has increasingly also become background noise for TikTok videos.
The Best Way to Listen to Hip Hop
Considering how hip hop has changed over the years, the question becomes what sort of playback equipment would best capture the various sounds and attitudes of its ever evolving sound. Does modern hip hop, for example, sound as good on vinyl as your average classic rock album still does? Do standalone speakers capture the sound of classic hip hop in the way that boom boxes and home stereos once did? What kind of headphones should you be looking at?
Truthfully, modern hip hop, as brilliantly produced as it may be, is designed for the average music system of the average listener, and that means it’s meant to work perfectly well off streaming services, on Bluetooth speakers and through either Beats headphones or simple Apple AirPods.
Golden Age hip hop, though, to say nothing of ’70s old school hip hop, on the other hand, were meant for the warmth of vinyl and old fashioned boom boxes. They could be more lo-fi as a result too, and can sound wrong with the digital manipulation of Beats headphones and the thinness of Bluetooth speakers.
With that in mind, to make the best of your hip-hop collection, especially if you’re someone who loves the genre across its many permutations, it makes sense to work with headphones that have a more adaptable sound signature than Beats and to invest in a proper record player setup — VinylPickup has a complete guide covering every budget from $370 to $1,100.
Where to Next for Hip Hop
Hip hop is now 50 years old, which is the same age, give or take, that rock music started to fade in prominence, but unlike rock it doesn’t have an obvious successor to take its place. This may give the genre the leeway to further evolve but even as there are many exciting things still happening within the genre, there is reason to be concerned that it will simply never be able to recapture the highs of either the Golden Age or the early 21st century. It’s far from dead but hip hop is at a critical juncture in its existence. Long may it live.