Hip Hop fans can be very fickle indeed, you just have to go back a fews ago when Jay Z dropped D.O.A. and you had more than enough people on here saying oh how Jay-Z is getting old, he needs a hair cut, how he is flogging the same horse again etc etc.

Then lo and behold when the cover art for The Blueprint 3 dropped, opinions were reversed again. Like oh Jay-Z and Kanye West, yeah they gonna do it again.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again the people who are still holding this whole thing up and bearing the torch is a certain cluster of the ‘old guard’ like Jay Z, NAS, Kanye West, Wu Tang, OutKast, Eminem etc.

Nowadays we take things for granted, it’s like we are putting a portion of our pay packet or pocket money aside to go to the record store and purchase a CD that we have been looking forward to.

Music making equipment and programmes have become much cheaper, you don’t even need a label anymore, you just upload it and boom you could potentially become the next big thing. The issue with this is that way too many people doing it, the market becomes saturated and the quality suffers.

People got their hard drives stuffed with tons of music, but have they even bothered to listening of any of that stuff properly, or they just sifted through it?

However, all this said, Hip Hop thrived back in the day courtesy of hot singles and remixes, and I think this is still the way forward, they might not cop your album, but you blow them away with a hot track, remix and video and who knows what’s next?

Also, I don’t mean to sound like a hater or nothing, but you can’t manufacture the next big hip hop phenomenon, look how they groomed Drake, all that money and industry muscle they pumped into him (no inuendo implied) yet he has barely made an impact outside of the USA.

So then with that said, do you think it’s possible that Hip Hop/Rap is the new disco? I’ve thought about that before and it scares me that it’s possible. Look at genres like Rock or R&B, they’ve managed to re-invent their genre for over decades. Hip Hop/Rap has been around since ’79, and in around ’05 I would say that Hip Hop/Rap starting to stop completely with a new sound that’s quality music.

My problem with Hip Hop/Rap isn’t the record execs or even the rappers, it’s really the fans. I feel the fans are of Hip Hop/Rap are more critical than any other fan (I could be wrong). The minute a rapper decides to make a “pop” record, then forget it a good portion of people view them as fake. Then when people do the opposite and stay “underground” and have that “underground sound” then another major portion says “to hell with them, they’re not making music that I can feel.” And both sides have their respectable arguments.

The only rappers I feel are still making “new music” that is appealing to would be: Jay, Kanye, Wayne, Lupe, ‘Kast, and maybe some others. They’re the only acts I feel that can have a balance of mainstream appeal while still staying true to their fans/”the underground”.

In fact, I feel Kanye is the greatest thing that’s happen to rap in the last decade. People on the internets tend to hate on ‘Ye but I think it’s unfair/jealous hate (at least looking at him in an artist standpoint . . not him as a person). Kanye (excluding 808′s . . which i liked btw) has been one of the few mainstream acts to incorporate what some of the pioneers did and yet have his own twist on things that sounds fresh. (I chose him over Lupe just because Kanye is a rapper + producer . . don’t get wrong I love Lupe). I think Kanye has made great hits, great albums, has a great flow and has been great so far with being able to have a new sound on each album.

Hopefully this new breed of “Freshmen” can add some new flavor to the game. (I actually think B.O.B. is the best out of the freshmen as far as being creative with style/sound.) I’ve got my eye on J. Cole, B.O.B. and Gibbs to hopefully push past the dilemma that this genre is suffering.

It’s basically like this, we flipped the James Brown, Roy Ayers, Grover Washington, Motown, Barry Manilow, Roberta Flack, Issac Hayes, Jazz, Soul, Rock, Pop and whatever whatever, crates, it’s all been done.

There’s only so far you can push the envelope before an ideology becomes exhausted.

Like you can’t expect some disco group to step out now and sound as fresh Earth, Wind & Fire or The Bee Gees.

It’s like a certain timescape and mindscape, you capture it, like lightening in a bottle, but after that it can’t be replicated.

There is still some freshness out there like Jay Electronica and that dude NOVEL, but not that many.

[Dilla x Weezy x DutchMasta] http://vimeo.com/5610093