5th Letter;7819307 said:
5 Grand;7818851 said:
Rap was better in the 80s
In terms of what?
It was underground. The major corporations weren't involved so the music was more pure. People weren't trying to make a hit single, they were just trying to make dope music.
Also, it was an inside thing, people used slang when they talked and you could identify certain slang from rap songs. Nowadays everybody is hip to the slang so you see people like Jimmy Fallon or whoever using Hip Hop slang on national TV.
Back in the 80s we wanted rap to be on the radio. But you know that expression 'be careful what you wish for because it might come true'? Well that's what happened. Now rap is commercialized, its been commercialized since the 90s. There's still some good stuff out there but you have to really dig for it.
Back when I was a teenager you could tune into a college radio station. They usually had a show once a week that played rap. In Boston there's hella colleges so there were a handful of college radio shows that played rap (WZBC, WERS, WRBB, WHRB). They usually came on the weekends. I'd have my cassette tape ready and I'd have my finger on the pause button. Then when a song came on I'd let my finger off the pause button and catch the very beginning of the song. Then I'd listen for the first 30 seconds or so and if I liked it I'd tape the whole song. If I didn't like it I'd press stop and rewind the tape and cue it up for the next song. Needless to say this was before the internet.
So after listening to a 2 hour rap show, I'd have about half of a tape filled up. It would take about two weeks of taping college radio shows to fill up a 90 minute tape. Then I'd rock to that tape for about a month while filling up the next tape. Pretty soon I'd have 4 or 5 tapes filled up with stuff I taped off the radio.
Obviously now with the internet its easier to just log on to allhiphop.com and check for links or got to datpiff, youtube, or whatever torrents to d/l entire mixtapes or albums but there was something about those days sitting in front of my radio with my finger on the pause button ready to tape the next song that came on. I wouldn't trade those memories for a new computer with a terabyte of memory.
Also I can remember seeing Run DMC at the Providence Civic Center. It was packed. 20,000 people. This was the summer of 1988. We arrived late so we missed Public Enemy and EPMD but we got to see Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince and Run DMC. That was the first arena concert I ever attended. I was 14 and went with my brother and his friends. I remember people pulling up in limousines bumping It Takes Two, You Gots To Chill and all the hot songs that summer.
The summer of 88 was crazy, that was when EVERYBODY had an album. EPMD, Big Daddy Kane, Eric B and Rakim, Public Enemy, Stetsasonic, Salt N Pepa, Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5, The Jungle Brothers, Boogie Down Productions, Marley Marl. And all of the albums had at least a few good songs and some of them were 5 mics (Public Enemy's album was definitely a 5 mic classic).
Another thing, if there was a song you really liked or an album you wanted to cop, you couldn't just go to the store and buy it. If the rapper/rap group was on a major label you could just go to the store, but if they were an independent label most stores didn't even carry it. They didn't even know what you were talking about. You had to make a pilgrimage to the hood to buy indie stuff like The Jungle Brothers, Stetsasonic, EPMD. I lived in the suburbs so that meant an hour of catching trains and busses to get to Dudley Square in Roxbury. They had two stores that carried stuff that stores in the suburbs didn't have. One store was called Nubian Notion, the other was Spin City Records.