Instrumental hip hop

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Instrumental hip hop is hip hop music without vocals. Hip hop as a general rule consists of two elements: an instrumental track (the "beat") and a vocal track (the "rap"). The artist who crafts the beat is the DJ or the producer, and the one who crafts the rap is the MC. In this format, the rap is almost always the primary focus of the song, providing most of the complexity and variation over a more or less repetitive beat.

Instrumental hip hop is therefore hip hop music without emcee accompaniment. This format affords the DJ or producer the flexibility to create more complex, richly detailed and varied instrumentals, with less emphasis on vocals. Songs of this genre may wander off in different musical directions without the vocal constraints of the MC.

[edit] History

In hip hop's earliest days the beat was the focus of the music: a DJ would isolate the percussion breaks from hit funk and disco songs, mixing two copies of the same song between two turntables and thus repeating the break, as these were often the most popular and danceable parts of the songs. The origin of this practice, known as cutting, is widely credited to Kool DJ Herc. As this practice of breakbeat DJing became more popular performers began to speak over the music in order to introduce the DJ and excite the crowd. This practice (which became known as rapping, and the performers as MCs) became more and more stylized and quickly became as much a part of hip hop as the beat itself. As hip hop became commercially viable the MC began to take the spotlight, but the DJ's practice of isolating a break for the MC to rap over continued and expanded into turntablism and hip hop production, incorporating techniques such as scratching, beat juggling, and sampling.

Purely instrumental hip hop tracks were not popular throughout the 1980s, but producers and DJs (such as DJ Mark the 45 King) have made and released hip hop beats without MCs since hip hop's inception. The release of DJ Shadow's debut album Endtroducing... in 1996 saw the beginnings of a rise in instrumental hip hop. Relying mainly on a combination of sampled funk, hip hop and film score, DJ Shadow chose to describe his music as "cinematic hip hop", and he has influenced countless producers and musicians from many genres ever since. In recent years, artists such as Rjd2, J Dilla, Madlib and Blockhead have garnered critical acclaim with a number of instrumental hip hop albums.

Instrumental hip hop has yet to be fully recognized as a genre unto itself, and is often lumped in with trip hop, downtempo, electronica, or industrial music. This may in part be due to the fact that it is so hard to classify, as when a hip hop beat is separated from rapping and varied enough to hold a listener's attention by itself, it can go off in many musical directions.