We Will, We Will Hip Hop You OR Rap On
Remember the 1980’s. The clothes were neon, the skateboarders did ballet and the music was as literal as could be. Rock and roll had long shed it’s youthful Elvis glow, had gone through the profound changes of The Beatles adolescence, and was now fully middle aged in a genre hilariously called Heavy Metal.
It was heavy, but not in the mass per volume kind of way, more in a difficult to listen to kind of way. Any young band looking to get to the top of the charts had only to tease up their hair, wear a leather vest and incorporate some anthemic chorus such as “We will rock you” or “And I said ‘Rock on!'” or “Born to rock.” Were I able to go back in time I would surely make a smash hit new record with the title track from my album: You weren’t really born to rock unless you died from roll.
Yeah, I think that’ll do.
Luckily, Pearl Jam and Nirvana single-handedly destroyed the cool behind names like Poison and Whitesnake and finally made lead guitar solos cool again.
Now, rock and roll has been around for decades, a lot of them. So many, in fact, that the guys who first started doing it are really old and gross, like Mic Jagger, but still find the time to show their navels off. It is rare, however, for any band of the modern era, as sucktacular as they can often be, to utter the words “rock n’ roll” in their music.
But hip hop has not come out of that phase yet. They still love to tout how Micky D This is the Master of Hip Hop or Goochee Goo is the Rapanator. This has not been going on for a mere decade, however, but has been prevalent since the very 1980’s themselves.
Is there any hope for the Old Dirty Hip Hop Scotch or HIJ-Z, master of the microphone sounds without the microphone?