It's actually a joke that fans of rap have to stay quiet for fear of being ridiculed - people are so condescending of rap music ("oh it's all about guns, what a joke) but it's actually probably the best genre of music available, both lyrically and instrumentally.
Like, lyrically - just basic numbers, your average rap song will have more words than songs of other genres. It would be easy to pick on pop i.e., Katy Perry/T Swizzle with repetitive hooks, but even outside of Top 40, in a general sense, rap will have more words. Like, the entire genre is based on being lyrically strong, whereas pop music might be based on 'sounding catchy' and so on, the value of rap music is pretty heavily intertwined with the skill imbued within its lyrics.
As the GOAT, Eminem is a great example of this. FOR EXAMPLE - the entirety of
The Way I Am is written in
anapestic tetrameter, which basically means the entire song is written in a pattern where every third syllable is stressed heavily, and the remaining syllable are unstressed. In terms of pure skill, rap has to be dominant - with infinitely more options available to the song structure and writing of the lyrics. From playing around with the metre, to utilising end rhymes, internal rhymes, slant rhymes, and so on - rap is the most lyrically flexible genre, and therefore the lyrically strongest. This often yields overly strong content - consider Kendrick Lamar dealing with race relations and societal power imbalances in
To Pimp a Butterfly, or Eminem's discussion of mental health, poverty, politics, and anything in between.
But even beyond the lyrics, rap has a huge diversity of instrumental sound. Because rap is defined by the style of lyrics - i.e., rhyming - the instrumentation is extremely flexible. Whereas something like country or rock is almost always defined by the instrumentation first - i.e., type of instrument, BPM, and so on. The distinct sounds that define other genres come form the instrumentation. The sound that defines rap music is not the instrumentation, but the sound of rhyming. That leaves the instrumentation a lot of flexibility.
I.e.,
Til I Collapse by Eminem has a piano based intro than transitions into guitar, then the song is instrumentally based on rock, featuring the "boom-boom-CLAP" made famous by
We Will Rock You.
The Nosebleed Section completely relies on the flute instrumentally. There's no broader range of instruments used in a genre of music in rap - from obvious instruments like bass/electric guitar, drums, piano, to less obvious instruments like clarinet, flute, violin. Rap utilises all instrument types - percussion, wind, stringed, and electronic. Instrumentally, rap can feel like jazz, feel classical, feel like rock.
Musically, you can't get better. The only two factors when we talk about good music - we talk about the song/music lyrically and instrumentally. Rap is dominant in both so, lay off the hatred???
Home
Help
Search
Login
