underground hip hop top ten best lyrical rappers

The rap group Migos is a prominent recent example of a musical trend making it big when their native Atlanta trap sound catapulted into the mainstream. Savant said social media has helped labels identify hot songs to further promote them into a run of sustained success. “This multicultural experience with the internet (means) everybody lives online now.”Īnd especially in the internet era, hip-hop is a genre of trends – it only takes as much as one hit song from a particular regional sound to go viral and make it big with the general population. “A lot of those borders and boundaries that were a common thing back in (the ’90s) are taking a backseat to this more universal world we’re living in,” Savant said. Cole hail from North Carolina but don’t embody that Southern hip-hop sound due to the increasing online intermingling of both artists and music. There’s a stark contrast to these specific examples, but Savant said the internet era has heavily blurred those regional lines. Skipping hi-hats introduce a grimy, mood-setting beat that exceptionally samples Herbie Hancock’s “Jessica.” Members Prodigy and Havoc send verbal warnings to fake thugs and reaffirm their authenticity through aggressive and punchy flows, underlining tough upbringings that have ultimately hardened their shells to an industrial but chilling beat. II,” the 1995 classic and a pillar of ’90s hip-hop. 1 & 2,” a relaxing, reverb guitar-laden smooth jazz track that serves as the backdrop to Cube’s visual storytelling of a day in his life where everything just felt right.īut hop on over to the opposite coast and you’ll find Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones, Pt. Much of this is a credit to the song’s heavy sampling of The Isley Brothers’ “Footsteps in the Dark, Pts. For example, listeners can pick up on an easy-going, casual and free-flowing attitude to songs like Ice Cube’s 1992 hit “It Was A Good Day” that reflects a timeless, breezy feeling of being a native of sunny Los Angeles. This observation is highlighted when further comparing the sounds of the opposite coasts in hip-hop. “When you talk about the grittiness of the drums in East Coast hip-hop, you can hear the streets in some of that music.”

“New York has a vibe and an energy when winter kicks in,” Savant said. O’hene Savant, a rapper and multi-instrumentalist from Philadelphia, said even different types of weather play into the construction of regional sounds. Additionally, the places they frequent, the people they hang around or the slang they use are all are crucial to what eventually instructs their creative vision in the studio.

Rappers best represent their regions through the lived experiences that have informed their individual meaning of what “home” is, familial music taste being an example. “It gets codified in a way where if you want to create a classic West Coast hip hop sound, we can argue over what the ingredients are, but we’ll know it when we hear it.” Dre listens to and is inspired by the music his mother plays, and those albums are from funk groups all over the country,” Brown said. He said West Coast hip hop has a particularly tight connection with Midwestern funk through production aspects like sampling. Scot Brown, a UCLA associate professor in African American studies and history, said different regional tastes across musical genres play into the creation of such signature sounds. While these examples fall under the umbrella of hip-hop, they both carry distinct atmospheres that can be attributed to their signature West and East Coast sounds.ĭr. Those distinctions in backgrounds become obvious in the brashness and fast tempo of N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton” that contrasts with Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.,” an eerie, tingly piano-driven beat with a tone of relaxed aggression in its lyrics. That unapologetic sense of pride in a hometown or city can be self-evident through a rapper’s lyrics, or in a much broader sense, their overall sound. There’s no other genre of music where an artists’ regional background weaves itself so tightly into their identity and musical style than hip-hop. The opening lines of rapper JAY-Z’s iconic “Empire State of Mind” cut straight to the chase – he wants you to know about the city that made him who he is. “Yeah, I’m out that Brooklyn, now I’m down in Tribeca / Right next to De Niro, but I’ll be hood forever.”

Underground hip hop top ten best lyrical rappers