Regional Sounds in Hip Hop Still Matter
At some point, Hip Hop had clear and distinct regional differences. Regions and states had different sounds. You could hear a song and in the first few seconds know pretty definitively where the artist was from. Various influences, weather differences, and regional vernacular all came out in the music and gave people hometown heroes to root for. But as Steve Stoute mentioned in his Drink Champs interview, "mass adoption is corruption." As Hip Hop started to become more marketable and drive more revenue for record labels, they began to influence sound. Labels threw money behind what worked and also decided to sign carbon copies of whoever the popular artists were at the time. Authenticity went out the window, and soon the sounds were homogenized.
Kendrick Lamar's "The Pop Out" showed that regional sound still matters. Having a hometown hero is still something that matters. When watching the concert on Wednesday night, it was very much a West Coast moment. To be more specific, it was a Los Angeles moment. There is a difference in sound between Northern California and Southern California, so describing what was happening generally as West Coast may be unfair to the contributions of Los Angeles and Southern California. What Hip Hop needs truly, as we are now past the half-a-century mark of this young genre, is to get back to the regional sounds. It will improve the sound, it will give listeners opportunities to learn about different regions, and it will influence new subgenres because now young listeners can have more to draw from.
Hip-hop has come a long way. In the early 90s, as Hip Hop was growing, politicians moved frantically to counteract such a beacon of counterculture. They felt like it was tearing the country apart because of the aggressive imagery and messaging. Hip-hop acts such as the Los Angeles group NWA were the center for many discussions that focused on censoring the music and how destructive the messaging was for the youth. Fast forward to 2024, Amazon, which is one of the most valuable tech companies in the world, streamed a concert to millions of their subscribers that featured multiple LA artists.
Technology and Hip Hop are inextricably linked and what took place Wednesday was a marriage of how the two have been used to drive the popularity of Hip Hop. Subscribers around the world streamed the concert from the comfort of their homes. Not only was it streamed, but millions of fans commented on the event and engaged in conversation on Twitter simultaneously. Unless you were under a rock, you knew what was going on. You didn't have to be in California for the concert to be part of the conversation. Of course, being in the room beats watching online, but not everyone could be there. Technology has granted the audience more ways to consume art. It has also granted the audience more ways to interact with people about art.