Sunday Tunes: Hip hop edition

Even though I'm a Gen-Xer, I have a pretty curmudgeonly view of music videos, which is the reason the bulk of the Sunday Tunes are so far and will continue to be live music clips. But I also love the hip hop and I'm afraid I have to make an exception for hip hop because the live performances one can find on the Web are perhaps interesting for those already familiar with the particular piece but have sound quality that sucks so bad it's difficult for the unfamiliar to get a real sense of the music being performed.

The following clip by Mr. Lif, of Live From the Plantation, demonstrates some of what annoys me about the genre. Here Lif has constructed a great story rap in the tradition of Slick Rick, for which the sounds and the lyrics create all the imagery necessary and, I find, that the video imagery detracts from the mental picture painted by the song.



Not that I'm posting that as an exemplar, I'm just saying. The following serves as nice counterpoint, however. If you do have to make a video, this is how I think you should do it. Mr Lif again, with Because They Made it That Way. Here the imagery is a bit more subtle and, yet, more concrete. It's a case where pictorial imagery, if it has to be there, adds rather than detracts. (As a side note, I should mention that Lif has forced me to readjust my NY-oriented snobbery towards Boston hip hop, if not Boston itself)



I think you probably get my gist. I won't comment on the particular visual characteristics of the rest.

Blackalicious, Deception, another great story rap.



While looking for that, I found this great example of the freestyle skills of Blackalicious's Gift of Gab. Having seen him live a few times, I'll tell you that, as amazing as it is, this is par for the course for him.



The album Illmatic by Nas is one of my favorites (Don't tell anyone that I presented Boston and Cali tunes before I got to the NYers!). This is The World is Yours off that album.



Let's finish this edition of Sunday tunes with a few of the tunes that got me so excited about hip hop in the first place:

I remember being about 12 years old or so and sitting in the very middle class living room of my tenured professor parents (lest anyone think I'm try to construct a false NY urban gritty past for myself in any of the above commentary) watching 60 Minutes, as seemed to be the weekly ritual of "concerned liberals" in my world. I can't recall a single detail of what the report was attending to but I can still see clearly in my mind's eye two girls from one of the over-bridge boroughs (i.e. Queens, Brooklyn, or the Bronx), a year or two younger than me, sitting on a park picnic table rapping, "Don't push me/cause I'm close to the edge/I'm trying not to lose my head/a-huh-huh a-huh-huh/it's a jungle sometimes/it makes me wonder how I keep from going under." It stuck in my head, but it would be at least a year or so before I would first hear the original: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message (1982).



The following are two of my favorites from the era that I began to get an inkling of the full glories and promise of hip hop.

Eric B. and Rakim: Follow the Leader (1988)



Finally, here's the very first Public Enemy tune, appropriately titled, Public Enemy #1, from Yo, Bum Rush the Show (1987). (no video, just listen to the music, dammit!)