Greetings, Hip Hop History Month time travelers! HP back again to give space today to the 2000s. I think about this decade as the victory lap for hip-hop: over the 30ish years of its existence the music continued to push its boundaries, and maintain its remarkable relevance to popular culture.
This is also the ‘maximalist’ decade of the music and culture-think flashy videos by Hype Williams, Nike Air Force 1s, rappers with their own designer clothing lines, Sprite soft drink commercials, etc. This was also Madlib and MF DOOM taking things to new levels, Mos Def dropping some knowledge, Common getting us in our feelings, Missy wowing us constantly, Lil Wayne e’rrwhere, and all of that.
Another situation where I can think of 10 songs I’d put here, but I’m gonna be a good HP and go with one tune, and it’s this one, from 2002:
This song and album are rightfully legendary; poking around on Genius I noticed a fascinating quote by Pusha T about this record. He says:
It took nine months to break the record. People don’t understand that I did every $5,000 show with every drug dealer in the United States of America behind that record. Things start in the streets and the hustlers of the world resonated with that record so well that they were just booking us. It was an underground cult kinda thing. It was like, ‘Come to Detroit, five racks, wear a bulletproof vest’ and ‘Come to Milwaukee where you need armed security.’ And this isn’t a radio-driven thing. This is something that’s basically brewing in the streets.
https://genius.com/Clipse-grindin-lyrics
One thing that I want to point to here is the idea of perception and the bias of history vs reality. We can think of the 2000s as ‘The Bling Era’ and point to how successful the infusions of not only R&B but pop were to positioning hip hop to dominating music culture worldwide, but for many rappers, even popular rappers with songs that were HUGE hits like Grindin, they were often still ‘grindin’, and the streets were still where the good stuff came from, underground or Billboard charting stuff. Folks sometimes look back on these songs and think “wow, they’re so mainstream, but then there was the ‘real’ hip-hop” as if the mainstream stuff didn’t come up that same way, and we should think about how it’s all hip hop, like Missy says at the end of ‘Work It’ (also from 2002):
What’s the deal ya’ll? This is Missy Elliott!
https://genius.com/Missy-elliott-work-it-clean-version-lyrics
And I hope y’all enjoying what y’all hearin’ so far
I was sittin’ here thinkin’ like—
People like Big Daddy Kane, EPMD, Salt n Pepa, PE, MC Lyte, KRS-One, Rakim, Roxanne, Shontay, African [?]
All them, the whole old school
Alot of them artists used to dance back then and still get respected
Ya know, don’t be scared to Bankhead or Bogo
Yo, it’s okay though, you know?
If you wanna be hard and ice grill
And Harlem Shake at the same time, whatever
Let’s just have fun, it’s hip-hop, man, this is hip-hop!
1.) The tricky/fun thing about this 30 day ‘challenge’ is that you get one choice (see, it’s a challenge! If you’ve already mentioned a song from an album/artist you’d like to pick on a previous day, it’s cool-just pick a different song if you can.
2.) In order to keep the thread from borking, please limit yourself to one YouTube/media link per post. If someone ‘beats you to it’ and posts a song you would’ve posted, reply under their post saying why you like this song/why it was your pick as well, etc. Let’s not give Disqus a reason to make the thread hard to navigate for those of us listening to the songs! If you want to mention some others, of course that’s fine!