Exactly. Those dull ass motherfuckers. Mozart was funkier than they are.

Egyptian Lover was one of THE baddest. At least he could make original songs from scratch and he sure as hell knew how to get past midtempo and throwdown. That dull ass Borepac Shakur and Notorious P.I.G. were dead asses long before they were killed. As for "thug life", I don't feel sorry for that trash whatsoever. You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

vainandy said:

I agree -- Six-Pack Shakur's record sales grew with every incident that landed him on the police blotter/court docket. About a year ago, I posted a timeline of his legal issues and every album released around the time of the incident sold dramatically more than the previous one. If anything, death has been the best thing to happen to Six-Pack's career.

As for The Notorious P.I.G., his style was basically P. Diddy's wholesale swipe of an 80s record style -- which meant he likely would have played out by the start of this decade any way.
[Edited 9/9/07 7:28am]

namepeace said:

The Egyptian Lover was a hybrid artist who used the electro-funk sound of the early 1980s and mixed it with the hip-hop rhyming style. Like VA said, the musical concepts he used were original and he actually played several instruments. And at least The Egyptian Lover wasn't banking on vulgarity and violence to enhance his career.
[Edited 9/9/07 11:19am]

namepeace said:

Co-sign.

Najee said:

Najee, I respect your opinion greatly on music, but you have not a clue about Biggie's skills. That is the most ignorant statement you've ever written in this forum.

bboy87 said:

Hahahahahahhahahahaha. Sorry, that's all I'm gonna say before I start calling you names and calling you things that you deserve to be called. Carry on.

FuNkeNsteiN said:

Shuddup.

namepeace said:

I'm sorry, but it wasn't a question of The Notorious P.I.G's rhyming skills, but the fact his music was standard-fare, P. Diddy, wholesale-swiping 1980s music. I'm sorry, but his prominent "jams" were songs laced with samples from ballads.

I'm also not sympathetic to former drug dealers who used to peddle their wares across the street from a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, like Chris Wallace did before he became a rapper.

Najee said:

Pardon me again, but style is a component of an MC's skills. And again, you talk about his music in general, but then you speak of his "promininent `jams'." True hip-hop heads would wonder what you were talking about, or whether you'd even heard bangers like "What's Beef?" "Ten Crack Commandments," "Kick In The Door," "My Downfall," "Unbelieveable," cuts with the quintessential East Coast boom-bip style. He is beloved in the hip-hop community for a reason. He displayed a greater range, from the standpoint of lyricism and "flow," than those who emphasize his most well-known songs might admit.

In any event, it's Biggie who makes those sample-laden songs go. He took a standard instrumental sample and made into a great hip-hop cut. Just like the Sugar Hill Gang and Run-DMC and many others before him and a few after him. Any lesser MC wouldn't have been beloved by popular audiences and hardcore hip-hop fans alike.

As for sympathy, well, what can I say? Najee, as extremely well versed as you are, you know, or should know, that many of the musicians whose works sit on your shelf or in your hard drive have had dirt or blood on their hands.

Biggie is no different. He sold rocks, the bane of black America for 20 years. He did a little time for it. Biggie wasn't a saint or a martyr. He was a great MC. I'll leave his moral fitness to his maker. Which is not an academic issue, because he lost his life to "the life" a decade ago.

"Notorious P.I.G."? I'd expect that kind of cheap shot comment from a mouth-breather. Not you. You're better than that, friend.

Najee said:

Again, he said the Egyptian Lover was a great rapper. Which he was not. I'm familiar with EL, as I bought his records as a teenager just getting into hip-hop, and wore them out. But as a lyricist, he was limited. Nothing you said above changes (or for that matter, disputes) that.

And I find it more than a little amusing that you talk about "banking on vulgarity to enhance a career" on Prince.com.
[Edited 9/10/07 8:23am]

He was way over rated with his speech impedament.

There are a lot of rappers that would have been elevated had they died early like Big and Pac. Ice Cube would have been the best ever had he died after Death Certificate. He didn't tho and created sub-par albums afterwards which probably would have happened with Big and Pac had they lived. To me, Nas is the greatest rapper ever, best lyrically and flow, has the best rap album ever in Illmatic and continually makes good albums now nearly 15 years into his career.

blumer said:

I think Biggies rhyme prowess was a level above Ice Cube despite Cube's pioneering place in hip hop and longevity in the music scene. Biggie has a slick wit about him. Having a career cut short to 2 albums is both a blessing and a curse in the sense of his place in musical history. On the one hand his 2 outstanding albums can be dismissed as a fluke but on the other hand they can be seen as an indication of the great catalogue that was to come, which is how I see his talent.

I agree that Nas is a great artist. Both him and Biggie along with very few others I see as being on that next level of talent combined with universal appeal amongst hip hop fans.

IMHO "ready to die" is as good as "illmatic". I lovem both!

_

namepeace said:

IMO, what makes these rappers, talking about Pac and Biggie, stand out the most was the so-called feud (which it wasn't) and the early deaths of these guys. Controversy is what made Pac in the first place, the arrest, the shootings, going to jail and have the #1 album in the country. He wasn't a great MC, but good in terms of passion (he was a better actor than a rapper), and the stories he told were strong, but it has been told by others before him, i.e. Melle Mel. BIG was a freestyle type of rapper with a flow, probably the best ever, listen to 'Unbelievable'. That whole "gangsta" "thug" personas were nothing but fronts, neither one of them did any dirt. The difference between the two is that Biggie always rep Brooklyn, Pac didn't rep West Coast until he got down with Deathrow. I sometimes think that G.O.A.T thing with Biggie and Pac was out of respect for the dead and nothing else, IMO.

Well, true music heads know exactly what Najee is talking about and he makes perfect sense. P.I.G.'s raps are set over music, although it's someone else's music, and meant for the purpose of being played on the radio along side of other artists making so-called music and sold to a crowd that is supposedly buying music. Then why can't he come up with anything original of his own to put behind his raps since he wanted his tracks to be considered music?

If lyrics mean so much and the music behind them means nothing, well there are a lot of poets in smokey nightclubs out there who make great rhymes and all they have behind them is a set of bongos which they beat lightly on. Why aren't they on CDs and being played all over the radio? At least they have the talent to keep in rthythm with those bongos rather than push a button on a computer and butcher up someone else's song.



Well, yeah, Sugarhill Gang used a sample on "Rapper's Delight". I don't think they used one on "Apache", I could be wrong though. I think they were capable of either coming up with something original for themselves or having the good sense to have someone else come up with something original for them.

As for Run DMC. "It's Like That", "Hard Times", "Can You Rock It Like This", "It's Not Funny", "King Of Rock", etc. aren't samples of an old song set to a rhyme over it. If they are samples, I've never heard the original songs they came from. Apparently Run DMC had the talent to come up with their own material also.

Then take Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. "The Message", "New York, New York", "Scorpio", "Survival" aren't samples of other songs. Once again, at least I don't think they are. Same goes with Whodini and "Five Minutes Of Funk", "Haunted House Of Rock", "The Freaks Come Out At Night", "We Are Whodini", "Magic's Wand", etc.

I named Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash, and Whodini since they seem to get more respect from the shit hoppers of today than the faster groups such as Egyptian Lover, Twilight 22, or Pretty Tony and Freestyle which shit hoppers like to come up with a new genre to place them in and call it "electro" so that people can't compare their talents to their no talents. Every shit hopper seems to love Run DMC and Grandmaster Flash. Well, they should. They were great groups and apparently they could come up with original music even though they did sample from time to time. However, where is the original music that Borepac and P.I.G. made? People worship the hell out of these two so called artists and I haven't heard any original music coming from them. I'll give them credit though. Yeah, they might be great to stand on a stage and read some thugged out poetry. However, they had no business whatsoever being on a record and being played on the radio.
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[Edited 9/10/07 19:18pm]

Oh really? Then what exactly was Egyptian Lover, a great singer? I didn't hear him singing over his music, he was rapping. What was so wrong with his raps? Was it the fact that they weren't full of thugged out bullshit and boring everyday subjects that a lot of people want to escape from?

Egyptian Lover could come up with original music of his own and place raps on top of it. He could take your mind on a trip to where you almost felt like you were seeing in your head, visions of his version of a fantasy version of Egypt. Kinda like Prince could take you on a trip to a fantasy world of his version of the future "1999" at the time. That's what an artist can do. They can send you to a world and let you fantasize the picture until you can almost see it in your head. They have actually painted a picture with their music, not just some boring reality that we live from day to day and would like to get away from.

Egyptian Lover could definately come up with his own songs and build them from the ground up. Yeah, he can't sing, so he rapped over his own creations. That sounds much more talented to me than someone who can't sing, so they rap over someone else's creations.




There's more to vulgarity than simply sexual lyrics. Violence is definately vulgar.
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[Edited 9/10/07 19:31pm]

namepeace said:

The fact is The Notorious P.I.G.'s most known songs were songs based entirely on the loop of a prominently known song -- "Juicy" was from Mtume's "Juicy Fruit;" "One More Chance" was taken from the DeBarge ballad "Stay with Me;" "Hypnotize" basically took the entire rhythm section from Herb Alpert's "Rise."

You keep going on about his lyrical flow, when I'm talking about the quality of his music production -- which was little more than basing his song on someone else's song. Call it what you want, but P. Diddy's whole production style essentially was adding a drum beat to a rhythm arrangement, an interpolated chorus or SOMETHING that was taken from another record. That was stale.

namepeace said:

What's considered great about The Notorious P.I.G. was his lyrical flow and his voice, similar to Rakim's. But unlike Rakim, Biggie Smalls didn't rap behind some original-sounding composition that was based on some technical innovation of his time; Ol' Chris basically rapped over a loop of an older song, which had little to no innovative quality about it.

namepeace said:

I need to listen to my Run-DMC albums again, because I recall most of their signature songs being totally original. The only thing that stands out that comes close to Biggie Smalls' "Let me rap over someone else's groove" was Run-DMC's rap version of "Walk This Way" -- which is what it was, featuring the group (Aerosmith) that made the song.

As for The Sugar Hill Gang, didn't "Rapper's Delight" come out in 1979? I would say that by the early 1980s rap acts were creating their own original beats and sounds -- so basically I should give P. Shitty some love for making some bastardize production method of the earliest rap records some 17 years after the fact, when most acts moved on from playing a groove and rapping over it?

If anything, P. Shitty deserves a lot of blame for making rap music the commercialized joke it has become. It was like he played up every non-rap music fan's general impression of the genre. If he didn't have Biggie Smalls in his corner he may have been laughed out of the industry for being cartoonish.

namepeace said:

I looked through my catolog, and none of the artists I listened to were drug dealers who sold crack under a trash can near a KFC. The problem with your logic is that Biggie Smalls was spewing that same ideology in his music, so you can't separate one from the other like you can with most artists. With Ol' Chris, there is no clear distinction between his former life (which was committing criminal acts) and his musical persona.
[Edited 9/11/07 19:10pm]

Exactly! And that was their big crossover hit that introduced a lot of white kids to them and rap music in general. Since white kids make up for so much of rap's sales since the late 80s, it makes me wonder if that's all they wanted to hear from rap....someone rapping over someone else's song. I'm sure a lot of record label executives probably took notice of that song also and saw there could be a huge market for it.

namepeace said:

The difference between The Egyptian Lover is that he was a party rapper; his music's objective was to get people to move on the dancefloor. That's different from acts like The Notorious P.I.G., whose music doesn't cause you to want to dance to it. You simply sit there and nod at the most -- and given that this form of music is the predominant pop culture sound, maybe that's when you go to clubs people don't dance or don't know how to dance.

It's surely not because people can relate to the lyrics of Biggie Smalls' rhymes (unless you're a drug dealer, some ghettofabulous clown or someone he commonly likes to refer to as a ho or bitch).

namepeace said:

I'm sure you meant "Prince.org," but I'll let that slide.

Prince made sexual songs that were erotic in nature, but that's different compared to someone whose songs degraded women like The Notorious P.I.G.'s. I also don't recall Prince making songs about killing, sodomizing men as a form of punishment and other descriptive examples of violence. Do you actually see that as an accurate comparison?
[Edited 9/10/07 20:02pm]

vainandy said:

That's my whole point and the answer is simple: INSTANT MEMORY RECOGNITION. Someone will hear The Notorious P.I.G.'s "Juicy" and will say, "Oh, man! I remember that song he's rapping over!" referring to Mtume's "Juicy Fruit." The song has a very distinctive rhythm that can be recognized almost immediately by anyone who has heard the original.

That's what P. Shitty did, and it's not like he did some Terminator X/Eric B.-type of scracthing or mixing a snippet of it with his own, original stuff -- P. Shitty basically looped the original rhythm track so that was all you heard. Then on top of that, P. Shitty may have someone interpolate the vocals in the same manner Tawatha Agee sang on "Juicy Fruit."

All that reinforces that apparently P. Shitty couldn't create his own music without swiping what other acts had created before him.
[Edited 9/10/07 20:06pm]

And it's getting even worse with artists these days. Some of them are getting so lazy that they don't even add their own drum machine behind the sampled loop. I can't tell you how many times a song has come on the radio lately (usually a slow song) and I thought I was hearing the actual original song until either the singing or rapping started with lyrics of their own. The sad thing is, this type of laziness has become acceptable.

You know why the real talented rappers who came before BIG and Pac are not as revered as those:

They lived!

Except Cowboy of course. But even he hardly gets a blip. People talk about Melle Mel but can they mention the songs he and Grandmaster Flash did?

And "It's Like That", "Sucka MCs" and "Rock Box" weren't samples at all.

"Good Times" and "Rapper's Delight" came months apart from each other rather than years.

"Freedom" was one of the most original rap productions and so was "Apache", "8th Wonder", "White Lines", "The Message", "Survival", "Scorpio", "The Freaks Come Out at Night", "Friends" and the like, etc.

I hardly heard a BIG song with an original production behind it. Him and Pac's though Pac DID have some originals ("Hail Mary" I think was one of 'em, and maybe "Brenda's Got a Baby" but that was it).

BIG was cool with his lyrical flow but Spoonie Gee, Kool Moe Dee and 'em had sicker, faster flows ("Body Rock" wasn't a sample either, that was rock guitar behind a hip-hop beat and three talented emcees, i.e., the Treacherous Three). Pac was a good lyricist but Melle Mel, KRS-One and Kool G. Rap came before him and actually Kool G. Rap was one of the first rappers that really talked about violence and the ills of life ("Rikers Island" for one).

I like so many young kids also had some kind of thing about Pac and Big being THE best but now after hearing all I've heard on MusicChoice showing old school hip-hop, I have to respectfully DISAGREE with my original thoughts.

Even one of the interludes from Ready to Die ("BIG's making the scene, b***hes always say what the hell does that mean?") was covered/sampled YEARS before.

I hate to put a damper on your post because you are making excellent points and are right on time with most of them. However, "Freedom" is a sample of "Get Up And Dance" by a local funk band called Freedom from my hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. I just had to give props to the boys funkin' from my hometown since they weren't very well known nationally and didn't get much recognition. Grandmaster Flash got them nationwide attention for a brief moment.

You're right though, Grandmaster Flash had a lot of jams of his own that was original. As for the sampling on some of the songs, hey, he was a DJ and a very good DJ. It's not like sampling was something that had completely taken over music at the time. It was something unique at the time on radio. It didn't really threaten the future of music at the time since the majority of the other artists on the radio were full fledged bands. And considering that Grandmaster Flash was capable of and made original jams of his own, he was very welcome on R&B radio and belonged there.

Sampling never was a neusance or a threat to music until years later when major labels picked up on it. Most rap records in those days were on small individual owned labels and mainly put out 12 Inch singles only unless they were extremely successful, then they made an album.
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[Edited 9/10/07 21:04pm]

vainandy said:[quote]

But see, we're talking hip-hop. And you don't know enough about hip-hop past 1986 to speak on it with any kind of credibility.



1. You and Najee focus on singles. I focus on his entire body of work.

2. Name 3 other songs you've heard on each of B.I.G.'s albums other than what was played on the radio. You can't.

3. Biggie considered himself an MC, not a musician.




Answer: people buy it. Quit your bellyaching, do some work to find good music, and let the dead rest in peace.



A "sample"? They rapped over the whole song! And people dug it because they enjoyed the lyrics and the beat.



Quick: what was their biggest hit?

And if you listened to Biggie's albums, you'd find cuts in the same vein. But you won't because you cling to your presumptions, and they're not heard on the radio. Honeybaby, the radio left you a long time ago; time to go hunting for a new love!



But I didn't mention them, did I? But I digress. Hip-hop was built on sampling. While the artists you mentioned did well without relying on wholesale sampling, many more old school artists did.



All those artists were important in their own ways to the hip-hop game. And those hip-hop heads that go way back like you appreciate them. But brother, those acts are over 25 years old. They're not mentioned because they've been forgotten or undiscovered by most hip-hop audiences. Hell, ask the typical hit-pop fan who Scott La Rock or Terminator X is, and you'll get a blank look.



If people want to buy CDs, 12"s and cassettes of MC's rapping over instrumentals that they didn't compose or play, MC's are going to make them. Period. Get over it. Move on. That cat was let out of the barn 20 years ago.

And you haven't heard Pac or Biggie's work beyond what you hear on the radio, so you can't say that those MC's didn't come up with original work. That's like a vegetarian claiming he has yet to eat a good burger.

vainandy said:[quote]

See. the fact he wasn't a great rapper doesn't mean he wasn't a rapper. His rhymes were fairly simple.

And, a lot of people either want to escape TO the imagery of those MCs, or relate to the artists because they lived their experiences.



So, Egyptian Lover is Yeats now? Slow old boy down to 90 bpm and you'd be trashing him too. You got lost in the groove. Nothing wrong with that. Bt still.



The no. 1 patron of hip-hop is the young white male with disposable income. They patronize Biggie's work because they have a fascination with that "boring reality." It is kind of a reverse escape.

And still many others listen to it because they feel like Biggie, flaws, sins and all, is saying something that speaks to their experiences.

So how is that any different from your perceptions of Prince? Biggie "does it" for some folks.



So? That's you. You're bringing your own prejudices to the table. I might hate country music or emo, but I'm not going to say the artists that play that type of music are devoid of any merit.



So, None of Prince's work could be considered vulgar?

Najee said:[quote]namepeace said:[quote]PThe fact is The Notorious P.I.G.'s most known songs were songs based entirely on the loop of a prominently known song -- "Juicy" was from Mtume's "Juicy Fruit;" "One More Chance" was taken from the DeBarge ballad "A Dream;" "Hypnotize" basically took the entire rhythm section from Herb Alpert's "Rise."

You keep going on about his lyrical flow, when I'm talking about the quality of his music production -- which was little more than basing his song on someone else's song. Call it what you want, but P. Diddy's whole production style essentially was adding a drum beat to a rhythm arrangement, an interpolated chorus or SOMETHING that was taken from another record. That was stale.


But again, you focus on his "most known songs." Not his body of work as a whole. And the thread is about his appeal. Not his production.



Now you got it! I was indeed referring to "Walk This Way."

Actually, many of their singles drew from samples. But they were cut and looped in such a way that the ultimate beat that resulted from it became a distinct backing track. But again, for hip-hop heads, their entire body of work made them great: "Beats To The Rhyme," "Sucker MC's," "Peter Piper," et al. Not just the singles. Same with Biggie.




Who's bringing Diddy into it? The thread deals with the appeal of B.I.G. We can agree that without Christopher Wallace, Sean Combs would never have been famous; just some hustler who got kicked off the yard at Howard and got some kids killed by cutting corners at a charity basketball event. But like I said, Biggie makes those tracks go.



We can agree on that. Now, why is it that having Biggie in his corner put him over?

namepeace said:

Wow. An artist with a history of petty crime making a living writing about his life. That's never happened before.

namepeace said:

You can cut the sarcasm. Ol' Chris wasn't doing petty crimes -- he was a drug dealer. Petty crime is stealing an old lady's pocket book, not selling crack. Moreover, you're not talking about someone whose music or lyrics was anything positive and uplifting -- everything about Ol' Chris' music was negative, violent and misogynist.