Quote:
Originally Posted by Dream Machine
TST, I exclusively come to 2+2 to do one thing: read the MF'ing odyssey that is "The Story of the Home Game." I'm pumped to see how your home game ends up doing.
On a side note, I know you're a big Hip Hop fan from recent posts I've seen you make in the past. What do you think of the current state of rap? Which rappers do you normally listen to these days?
I honestly couldn't tell you who was #1 on the hip hop Billboard charts right now - I think I might have capped my range of hip hop from 1985-2005. One of the harder classes I took at University of South Florida was African-American History, and I did a 20 page essay on the evolution of hip-hop, so for a white guy from the suburbs, I actually know more than one would think.
Growing up in the Northeast, mainly Long Island and Westchester, I am a die hard Nas, Biggie and Big Pun fan. I also listen to a lot of "word specialists" like Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Big L, and Wordsworth. I still like West Coast rap like NWA, Ice Cube, and I have respect Tupac as a lyricist, but I'm just not a big fan. Old Jay-Z is good but anything after Vol.3 is too mainstream IMO. I remember driving through Brooklyn in my old diesel Mercedes on my way to Virginia back in 1999, listening to Funkmaster Flex and Angie Martinez on Hot 97 mentioning Big Pun's death and feeling very depressed.
As far as newer stuff, I actually like T.I. and more gritty, raw material. I think autotuning destroyed the essence of what hip hop is - a poem spoken with a beat, not sung with a tune like rock and roll.
This is probably a longer answer than you were looking for, but I tend to overdo things. I am just as critical of rock and roll and other forms of music. One thing I never mentioned in any of these stories is I used to DJ on Technics 1200 tables back in college and in 2013 I started messing around with pure digital with a Pioneer DDJ-SX. I worked with a lot of trap and progressive house but I didn't have an audience for the music where I lived. I might still have a video of that somewhere of me in my apartment messing around, its definitely not good because I wasn't used to digital at the time!