Rey Flemings

The chorus of Dude N Nem’s Watch My Feet is a speedy 150 BPM track (that’s beats per minute) breaking down to a traditional hip-hop tempo of 75 BPM during the verse. The verdict is still out on whether it will be a huge hit, but the song symbolizes something significant. A ghetto feel, no bling, no violence, no girls in bikinis – Watch My Feet is a clarion example of where hip-hop is headed — Faster and more fun.

We talked about the Soulja Boy phenomena a few weeks ago in the weeked RAP up — I mentioned that Soulja Boy danced more than any #1 selling rapper has since MC Hammer. For everything that Soulja Boy is not, he made a #1 hit out of the underground jookin, buckin, clown and battle dance resurgence in hip hop.

Four years ago, at the street level, hip-hop was driven by intensly violent and misogynistic lyrics with the likes of Lil Jon and the Ying Yang Twins leading the pack form a sales perspetive. I wondered, as did many, what the end game would be from this ‘race to bottom’ from a lyrical and content perspective.

I developed a little social theory that no matter the socio-econoimic condition, people will seek to do ‘better’ or ‘good’ in general. That left to their own devices, underprivileged kids will figure out their own solution to the rap content problem. It looks like the kids have found a solution to rap content problem– they stopped buying it.

Like anything else in pop culture, do one thing for long enough and it gets boring. How many times can you say bitch before its meaningless? How many times can you rap about bling before no one cares? The shock value and uniqueness is diminished with every subsequent song.

Violence and mysogony have been a constant theme in rap for 25 years. There’s no need to protest rap music, the genre is boring — so it protests itself. Radio station program directors and label heads wonder why rap music doesn’t sell these days. They blame it on the file sharers, or torrents causing the drop in sales and XM radio and the internet taking away listeners. But that’s disingenuous and most of my peers in the industry know it. The kids think the genre is boring and the adults have heard the same themes for nearing three decades (and they’ve seen plenty of girls in bikinis in the past 30 years they don’t want to watch the videos either).

Al Kapone Buckin & Jookin

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Several years ago two interesting things started happening, at the street level, kids stopped fighting in the clubs, stopped buying cheap knock-off jewelry to look like the rap superstars and simply started battle dancing. Look at the number of rap videos today that don’t have any scantily clad women in them. All of Al Sharpton’s protests don’t really matter, the free market has a funny way of solving even complex social issues.

At the same time, many of the most influential DJ’s in the world (largely influenced by Diplo and Lowbudget’s seminal Hollertronix project Never Scared) took an interest in Baltimore (the genre, not the city) and mashing genres on top of heavily hip-hop influenced tracks.

Hollertronix - Never Scared

So Many Shrimp

The kids pushed pure dance (not fighting) up from the streets while the taste-makers pushed fast, dance-oriented rap down to the hipsters, scensters and influencers in major markets like NY, LA, SF and Vegas.

Two years ago, a hip-hop song couldn’t be successful if the beat was any faster than 110 BPM. Today, nearly every rapper has a song in the 125 - 130 BPM range. That’s the speed or tempo of electronic dance music, particularly house. Several of the biggest hip-hop songs today are in the 135 - 140 BPM, the speed of the much dreaded “Techno!” (the label unknowledgable hip-hop kids put on any music that’s fast and electronic).

Cupid - Cupid Shuffle (144 BPM)

Funny thing is Soulja Boy and Dude N Nem may have never heard of the likes of Diplo, Lowbudget and Justice. Diplo and other hipster DJ’s may have never heard of jookin. Yet, the two of them have re-shaped the direction of modern hip-hop and modern music.

No surprises here really, gospel, blues, R&B, Country, Rock — the story of modern music has always been the story of poverty.

Share This