Hip Hop at Fifty
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #170. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Now this.
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As we close out 2023, we also close out the 50th anniversary of the founding of hip hop, and after writing about hip hop for four years straight, I would be remiss if I didn’t spend at least a little time reflecting on the genre, even though it’s no longer my primary beat. I will admit, it’s been nice not to feel forced to listen to every new album that drops just to write up a review; I spent a couple months this fall basically not listening to music at all, which felt a bit like a relief. After stepping back from the contemporary, I’ve had a chance to reflect a bit more on the different eras of hip hop, and what they mean to me.
Our current era, whatever you want to term it, is – in your narrator’s humble opinion – a bit of a wash. Of course, there is always amazing work being produced, including new releases all the time by MCs like Danny Brown, JID, Billy Woods and even more popular rappers like Kendrick and J Cole, but I find much of what I hear boring and a bit uninspired. I can’t seem to understand the appeal of folks like Lil Uzi Vert or Gunna, even as they sell out stadiums. This is likely a me problem rather than, “kids these days don’t make good music” problem. I think I’m just getting old. I read somewhere once that most people stop listening to new music by the time they are 35. I’m 37 now, so I feel like I made it a couple extra years.
I do think some of the lack of definition for this era stems from the ubiquity of personalized feeds and algorithms. It seems harder to find the consensus sound when what appears in the mainstream differs so vastly than what appears across your personalized feed. I’m not sure I’ve listened to a Drake song in over a decade, but apparently he’s at a Michael Jackson level of popularity. The lack of a definition may just be a matter of time though – we aren’t far enough out yet to quite formulate what this era actually is. We aren’t quite in the Soundcloud era anymore, so maybe the TikTok era?
Classic NYC hip-hop radio recordings on cassette.
As for my preferred era, I have to admit that I’m a bit stuck in the blog zone, something from around 2009-2014 or so. Right as I emerged from my dark hole of imagining any rap made past 2000 was terrible, folks like Lupe Fiasco, Kid Cudi, Kendrick Lamar, A$AP Rocky, ScHoolboy Q, and yes, even Kanye West, etched their music onto my brain. The blog era was also the first inkling of this individualized approach to selecting music, and I was deep in it, consuming everything I could, even making a hip hop archive to track what I was listening to. Unfortunately, it disappeared after a bad update from WordPress sometime in 2016.
The blog era was hardly the first era in hip hop, though. You could maybe call the early 2000s the bling era, and folks love to call the ‘90s the Golden Age. While I am fairly well versed in both of those spaces, I was very excited to see the new book on an era that I have known less about than most others: the mixtape era.
Evan Auerbach and Daniel Isenberg’s new book, Do Remember! The Golden Era of NYC Hip-Hop Mixtapes brings to life an era of hip hop that I never got to participate in. Of course, I know mixtapes not only as the CDs I burned in 2007, but also as the way many artists like Lil Wayne, 50 Cent and The Notorious B.I.G. broke through into the mainstream. What I didn’t know was the material history of the tapes, the people behind the scenes who, since hip hop’s inception, were making and distributing these tapes in hope of making a name for themselves and their crew.
In Fab Five Freddie’s intro, he talks about never owning a turntable, just a boombox, and making tapes was the way that the music spread across the five boroughs of NYC. Live recordings of concerts became treasures to be passed around, similar to the cult surrounding live Grateful Dead bootlegs around the same time. And then there are the tapes themselves, lavishly rendered throughout Do Remember! in full color, offering a glimpse into one of the original visual products of hip hop. It also brings an element of graffiti to the genre that often feels criminally overlooked these days. Seeing Kid Capri’s and Lovebug Starski’s tags on the tapes feels like a forgotten art form.
Collage featuring Starchild, Lovebug Starski and Brucie B mixtape art.
Outside of the amazing reproductions of the tapes, Do Remember! focuses heavily on interviews with some of the formative mixtape producers from the ‘80s and ‘90s, often somewhat forgotten figures who have truly formed much of the sound of the golden age of hip hop and beyond. Whether it’s DJ Clark Kent talking about how Kid Capri changed the mixtape game or Darryl McCrary explaining how he went from a small-time mixtape seller to owning a store that had Lil’ Kim and Erykah Badu coming through, Auerbach and Isenberg’s interviews breathe life into this bygone era. After reading even just a couple pages of the book, you can start to see just how closely connected all of these major artists from the era were through mixtapes, and you start to get a feel of the texture of NYC in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
And it’s this texture that really ties the mixtape era together, and I think that it’s this sort of defining texture that feels lacking today. It’s hard to settle on the materiality of a sonic medium in the first place, but without the physical media offering something real, material – well I just don’t know how to feel about the music. And sure, you can argue that there is a dominant sound in hip hop, something stemming from both Drake’s success and the trap aesthetic out of Atlanta. However, I could just as easily point to artists like the Griselda crew or Billy Wood’s Backwoods Studios that defy any overarching feeling about the contemporary.
Nevertheless, as we close out this 50th anniversary of hip hop, looking back on these formational eras and materials of the genre has also offered solace. Yes, we may be in a space of transition and unclarity around hip hop at the moment, but the roots are deep and long. The material is there, and as people return to purchasing physical media, maybe we will see a revival of some of that materiality, and maybe a revival of mixtapes as well.
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Noah Springer is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. You can follow him on Twitter @noahjspringer.
