What if rap “music” was never invented?

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A somewhat related question would be whether the types of music popular in the 1980s could remain popular during the 1990s or with some 1980s genres perhaps even evolving into an early form of Synthwave?
 
Rap music was not invented but evolved from the street poetry of the 50’s. Coupled with the use of record machines turntables that came in the 70’s and other technology, rap became an unstoppable force just like rock music evolved from rhythm and blues and country and western music, plus the invention of the electric guitar allowed for more volume with less people and instruments playing.
 

hammo1j

Donor
Go-go around the early 80s was a form I wanted to hear more of. Maybe that could fill the 'rap gap'.

It was, I suppose, a form of rap, but the emphasis was placed on having a really hot real live instrumental dance band on the breaks.

Being able to sample and computers may have killed Go go purely on economic grounds.
 
What is heavy metal? Chopped liver? The modern heavy metal scene is actually pretty awesome.

Can't stand it from any era.

Have you ever considered that maybe music wasn't overall better in the past? It's far more likely that you weren't around to experience the past's bad music that generally gets forgotten.

Oh, I'm aware that music has been bad from previous eras was bad as well* - I've listened to some truly terrible oldies. And I do like some modern music.



*Some of the Beatles' songs are waaaaaay overrated, for instance. As for the Smiths :confounded:.

If you think music suddenly, irreversibly got significantly worse in the 90s (or at any given point, really), you either have a rose-tinted and cherry-picked view of earlier eras, or have not bothered to properly explore new music.

I listen to the radio all the time*, and the TV in my local barber's is permanently on one of the music playing channels, which has modern music on it. A lot of the new stuff ranges from "meh" to "make it stop", though the radio channel constantly playing the same thing day after day also spoils it for me. Don't get me wrong, some new music is truly great, like Emeli Sandé or the Scissor Sisters.



*I've listened to BBC Radio 2 for my whole life - I remember listening to Terry Wogan in the mornings before going to primary school.
 
70%-80% of all music since 1990 is bad. And I grew up during the 90s.

70%-80% of all music ever is bad and only 1% is remembered.

Heck. Even then it is luck. The classical music of Mozart etc was basically forgotten except that it was out of copyright at a time when record and movie producers needed cheap air filler. It is likely to be forgotten again now Looney Tunes has faded from children's consciousness.
 
Even then it is luck. The classical music of Mozart etc was basically forgotten except that it was out of copyright at a time when record and movie producers needed cheap air filler. It is likely to be forgotten again now Looney Tunes has faded from children's consciousness.

All of this is true tbh. By the time the Beatles broke up, well into the 90s, there was a critical and popular consensus that they were one of, if not the, greatest bands of all time. Now that boomers are beginning to die off, that’s becoming less and less of a widespread opinion.

Likewise, at the moment there’s a critical and (if we take rateyourmusic as a valid source) popular consensus that Radiohead is one of, if not the, greatest bands of all time. That consensus will inevitably fade as millennials age and die off, just as the Beatles’ popularity is fading. Music is an incredibly ephemeral artform.
 
a) This is very specifically about "rock and roll's" best year ever. b) This man was 21 in 1971. Maybe, just maybe, that's skewing his perception a little.
Do you consider James Brown and Marvin Gaye as centered in the Rock and Roll genre?

If not, why were they brought up in those links? They were solid R&B

from
Keith Kelleher

Why is 1971 the best year in Music? As someone said to me, “Well, it has to have the Beatles and Dylan in it…!” Not so! Even though the contributions of said artists are important, we had solo contributions from three of the four Beatles instead and there was even more going on in all genres like folk, country, jazz, singer-songwriter and of course rock.


Landmark albums for such important groups like the Rolling Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin, along with the swan song of the Doors, put 1971 right in the forefront of great musical years. We had classic soul from Marvin Gaye, Bill Withers and The Stylistics. Gil Scott-Heron blazed The Revolution Will Not Be Televised to the distraught masses. Carole King and Joni Mitchell created the singer-songwriter genre with Tapestry and Blue, respectively. Isaac Hayes’s masterpiece Shaft and Earth, Wind & Fire’s debut got us funkin’ to the 70’s. The birth of glam was just starting with Bowie’s Hunky Dory and T. Rex’s Electric Warrior.


The “live album” concept became a cherished find with The Allman Bros at Filmore East and Aretha Live at Filmore West. Debuts by ZZ Top, The Doobie Bros, Little Feat, America, Nazareth, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Steve Winwood and Bonnie Raitt made it an epic year for new bands. The 70s erupted in 1971, giving the people of the era many ways to find meaning, love and purpose.



'71 was a very good year for all music, Rock, Country and R&B, even though there was just a bit too much of the Osmonds playing.
 
What's with the "music" quotes

Just because you don't understand it and don't like it doesn't mean it isn't music.

I personally take a platonic approach to music, going off Plato's forms, there exists an ideal form of music that we cannot grasp on earth, therefore all music as we know it is garbage, and the only good music is the music we make in our minds.

Seriously, the OP is probably someone who hasn't listened to rap/hip hop at all or at least enough to tell the difference, that it has as many other styles as any other genre of music that are all different from one another.

I guess I would be happy. Yeah, I hate it with a passion. Essentially it is just people talking. There are ever those that disagree and I am sure there will be many, but to me, it's just people talking somewhat faster than normal.

You too. The problem with disliking Rap as just people talking is that you are not considering it to be a musical genre in the first place, when rap/hip hop has both an emotional variance to it in terms of tone and usage of both instruments as well as sometimes highly intuitive sampling of other audio that it is in many ways no different than other music. Where would you put the song Heartbreak Hotel which has a very slow tone to its lyrics, or what about scat singing and doo-wop?

I don't like rap music either. I do not like to getting accused of racism, just because I do not like some genre of music.

It depends on your criticism of the genre. Reducing rap to merely just being nothing but spoken word or not "real" music can be seen as racist, as it largely denigrates style of music with African-American origins as somehow being not even up to same structural standards we hold most other music. Now let's say you find rap, in general, to be too closely related to American culture to appreciate or understand it, or maybe it has too much production ie chopping and screwing, autotune, remix's, for your tastes okay that's fine it is at least more valid than calling it spoken word.

To get back to the thread, what do we mean by no rap here, because it is as vague as saying a world without rock?
 
I personally dislike rap with a tiny handful of exceptions. I also dislike country and am not a fan of bluegrass. And rock and roll today is a shadow of what it once was. When I'm not listening to classic rock (pre-90's) I'm listening to classical. Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky still have a lot of relevance even today.
 
Michael Bolton is very talented and makes good music. Just because it’s not boundary-pushing doesn’t make it bad. He sings beautifully and makes well crafted music.

I’d much rather hear Time, Love, and Tenderness on repeat than hear Cardi B reciting pornographic obscenities or Lil Wayne rhyming “n***a” with itself or XXTentacion mumbling about how he can’t keep his d**k in his pants over a computer-generated beat.

Ahem, speaking of Michael Bolton.
 
What can conceivably steal rap's niche?
Dance musics ala Eurobeat, or techno?

Disco Polo, Turbo-Folk, and Hard Bass. The fall of the Iron Curtain will inspire American artists to take influence from the freedom-fighters of the Eastern Bloc. Concerned parents ITTL complain about how their children listen to music glorifying sex, cheap cars, war crimes, vodka, and narcotics.
 
6ixin9ine is more talented than any of the alleged 80s rock greats and is unjustly persecuted.

If it's 6ixin9ine or Michael Bolton I'll go with 6ixin9ine any day.
 
With regard to the OP putting "music" in scare quotes: people also talked about "jazz 'music'" "rock 'music'' "electronic 'music'" etc. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was of course "noise, not music." As Jacques Barzun once wrote, "Ah noise! Noise is the most constant complaint in the history of music. ln the heyday of music it was not only Berlioz and Wagner who were damned as noisy. Mozart before them and Haydn, and even earlier Lully and Handel. l suspect that the reason Orpheus was torn to pieces by women is that he made horrendous noises on his lyre while they were washing clothes at the river in what they thought was melodious silence..." https://books.google.com/books?id=rxcqDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT658
 
6ixin9ine is more talented than any of the alleged 80s rock greats and is unjustly persecuted.

If it's 6ixin9ine or Michael Bolton I'll go with 6ixin9ine any day.
Fine, I’ll agree that Stoopid is pretty good but uhhh you get whats coming to you if you date underage girls...
 
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