WHAT WILL REPLACE RAP AND HIP-HOP?

One of the many things I have been anticipating is the evolution of the current Rap/Hip-Hop culture into some new and refreshing musical genre.  I have desperately been awaiting a fresh sound that is not heavily derivative of the past 40-50 years of music which, quite honestly, I have heard before!  Not a revival such as "Neo-Soul", not a hybrid such as what was formerly known as "Hip-House", and not the heavily repetitive Club Mixes that, (for those of us who were in the clubs during the Club/House era from the late 1970's to the mid 1990's), have been stripped of all the essential elements of R&B, specifically a blues lyric-storyline and a soulful vocal that is not an unintelligible and/or irrelevant vocal sample dubbed in for texture.  Such musical trends as trance and what is now collectively deemed to be club, while sometimes interesting because they hearken back to another era of pure sound experimentation are all the same... unoriginal unless you are newly hatched from the shell...

There are two elements I feel every great piece of music requires and that is lyrics that actually tell a story and quality musicianship, preferably composed and executed by real musicians showing off their craft with real instruments.  Of course, I love instrumental compositions as well and my intention is not to imply that instrumentals are any less amenable than vocals with instrumentals, but I must admit that I much appreciate the human touch a voice gives to a song and the human hand or mouth give to a musical instrument... 



I remember in the 1980's there was a great buzz concerning, "The Death of Jazz".  I propounded this heavily and thought, no, Jazz has not died, especially since it has lived on in the Latin traditions of Salsa, Samba, Meringue, etc.  The days when a man could get together with some musicians, call themselves a band, a quartet, a sextet etc. and even hop on a train and find work as a musician filling in for another player or some other arrangement in another city are probably long gone.  Is Jazz dead? Well it is not dead in my opinion but it's following in North America and the number of quality Jazz musicians produced and able to make a living being a full time jazz musician has tremendously dwindled, it is a rarity now and many of the icons of Jazz have now passed on.  What do you think?

I respectively calculate the Jazz Era to have lasted roughly 70 years, the Soul Era at 10 -20 years depending on when you estimate it to have begun and ended.  Disco, which is one of my favorite mediums lasted only about 10 years and House, and I mean real House, lasted about 20-25 years as the record spins... Well what will replace Rap and Hip-Hop?

I find myself scratching my head at this point... and that is why I have posed the question to my audience, an audience that is immediately more varied and exposed than I.  My audience is the world of readers and listeners who have widely experienced a multitude of what may be fresh, new music.  Somewhere there are artists desperately trying to unlearn the classics and start afresh.  Somewhere somebody has made a small breakthrough, perhaps creating their own instruments in order to break free...

One of the most compelling questions is what variables would have to be in place to precipitate a wholly new music?  Typically great musical trends such as classical, jazz, rock and roll and soul have come about through dynamic social upheavals or evolutions in the very structure of human culture and socialization... Perhaps by attempting to predict upcoming social change it may be possible to conjecture at what new music might sound and look like...  Will it take the advent of mankind's colonization of outer space with an all new physics to learn and understand? 

FIN

Originally written by D. Vollin on 1-14-11 and newly revised by David Vollin on 7-27-12