• …I can’t. You can find them on various features, with among others De La Soul, but the point is they left. You’d have to amass the amount of hip-hop music that I have and draw a timeline where you can see them being phased out.

    It’s around the time LL Cool J turned into a sex symbol and when De La had to “add some badass to perlong their life over the drum.”

    One of these days I want to do the whole research route, but just so I can juxtapose it to country - which also suffered the same fate, only a half a century earlier.

    Capitalism is a slow crawl to mediocrity and exploitation. No culture can really survive it.

      • The sad thing? Country used to be rebellious… I mean actually rebellious, none of this Trojan horse nationalism and fascism disguised as “traditionalism”.

        We’re talking Johnny Paycheck, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and the queen her self, Dolly Parton.

        But, as of late, I’ve said this:

        Shout outs to the women of country, for bringing back the tradition - of writing songs about shooting your spouse in the face.

        Keep the dream alive.

      • When it comes to hip-hop? There was an enlightenment period where my heart still lies, before the stigma of being a “conscious rapper”, “underground” - or even “backpacker”.

        I call this record industry psy-ops, because the music media tried to use it against anyone that didn’t fit the bill. How do I know that?

        THEY TRIED TO CALL JAY DILLA A BACKPACKER

        Philistines, troglodytes, absolute cretins, scum of the earth. Dear god I hate the record industry.

        Incidentally, if you want to go back into the past, I can recommend Quannum Records, the indie label of Blackalicious, Lifesavas, Latyrix and Lyrics Born.

        Other than that, Def Jux, Rhymesayers (the mixtapes, get the friggin mixtapes), Stones Throw - ofc. Back when you needed an indie label.

        Today we can happily say that bedroom productions will be the saving grace, mostly because it is seperate from the industry, so we do get a lot of great music.

        But it also proves the industry is a homogeneous bottleneck.