Talk:Hip hop music/Comments

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The wiki for hip hop is completely the I have read on the wiki pages. There are no references to any of the classic hip hop stars. Basically every music reference on the page can be replaced with something alot better. I see no Sugar Hill, Grand Master Flash, Tribe Called Quest, Pharside, .... the list just goes on and on. Grouping "gansta rap" inside the same page as hip hop is defeating the point entirely. Mostly in my opinion this is an article about MTVs greatest hits.

Hip hop isn't music or a person. It is a culture. It is a way of dress, of life, and living.

Hip-hop and Rap are entirely different things. It is an absolute travesty that one can say that that one is another name for the other.

Hip-hop is a type of groove based around swung semiquavers and emphasis on beats 2 and 4 of the bar. Rap is a vocal technique applying rhythm to spoken words.

Rap can appear in any type of music, hip-hop is just one of them. RnB also has rap. So does Garage, Drum'n'Bass, Hard House and Techno and it would be foolish to rule out anything else one may care to name.

Hip-hop doesn't have to have any rapping in it to be hip-hop. If it's got a hip-hop groove, clever manipulation of samples, jazzy vibes, scratches, it's hip-hop. Hip-hop evolved from jazz, so don't be surprised to hear hip-hop with horns playing the main melody, or having a sung vocal line for that matter.

Most of the gangster rap music heard today is about as far removed from hip-hop as it is from smooth jazz. It contains very few of the same elements - the beats are minimal, there is very little rhythmic drive, there is rarely more than one sample used and it's not used very creatively and the rapping is often in front of the beat and the rhythmic feel straight. It's more like poetry with sound-effects than rapping in front of an upbeat driving bouncing groove, which is what hip-hop is all about.

Please can someone choose to write one article about hip-hop while another chooses to write about rap? It's true that rap came from hip-hop long before it expanded into other genres but in the context of the present you can't talk about both as if they're the same thing because rap has moved in all sorts of different directions while hip-hop is and always will be hip-hop, with or without rap.