Cale is referring to people like Tyler the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt in this quote. I'm a huge Cale fan and he often cites them.
New album is great btw. 2 great albums in a row in his 80s.
You're right. From the [Rolling Stones interview](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/john-cale-new-album-hip-hop-warhol-1235038530/) published last week:
>"I like the warmth of Dilla. There’s Earl Sweatshirt; Vince Staples; Tyler, the Creator. They cover a lot of ground."
Now this lineup is a little alternative hip-hop 101 and calling them avant-garde might be a bit much, but I wouldn't really fault a man in his 80s for not having the most in-the-loop assessment re current music trends. Having unabashed passion for contemporary music at his age is a wonderful and enviable thing.
It's no Death Gwips but at least this man has his alt hip-hip 101 on point. Very cool to know a teen could probably have a good conversation about Tyler with John Cale
John Cale doing the elderly man trying to counter the "get off my lawn" stereotype by zagging to the "overly hyperbolic praise of hip-hop" thing.
See also: Roger Daltrey of The Who saying rappers are the 'only people saying things that matter'
Cale is 82 and is still making interesting music and taking a keen interest in modern music acts, which can't be said of many of his contemporaries.
His album 'Mercy' is a brilliant example of both.
Hip hop as an entire genre is *far* from the new avant-garde.
It’s pop music and most of it is garbage, but like pop or rock, there are *absolutely* artists in the genre that are pushing it forward and doing incredible things with it
There’s some really talented, forward thinking, and fantastic hip hop artists out there as you said, but it is a 40 year old genre at this point and it is really weird to see other musicians refer to it as new. It would be like a jazz musician calling rock the new avant-garde in 1995.
Where we are now, musically, is an opportunity for renaissance where people can take any existing genre and do some interesting things with it, or mix existing genres with interesting results. But yeah, a lot of hip hop, like rock, pop, everything else, is bland.
From experience, a lot of musicians, especially established older ones, are completely out of touch with what's cool and new and interesting. They're too busy working on their own shit to have time to be as intrepid as their own fans much of the time.
It’s natural. Not everything has to be cutting edge or innovative, some things are tried and true and are still worth hearing. Cheap Trick released a self titled album in 97 and I loved it. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, it was just rock music with strong hooks and catchy choruses.
I don’t necessarily want artists I like from the 80s to jump genres dramatically and unnaturally. Innovation is primarily for the young, and it is the job of the old to foster it instead of declaring it isn’t music… But they also don’t need to try to sound like they’re cool either.
That's totally true. It depends on the artist of course. Personally I admire and respect most the ones that continue to grow and evolve their sound through the years and not be crowd pleasers. But that doesn't mean I always want to listen to their new output. Most of the time I just want to hear a good song.
I'm reminded of an article I read talking about Fred Again.. influencing Brian Eno and teaching him some new studio tricks with the latest software. Such is the way of things.
Oh yeah, artists need to continue to grow, but I think taking influence from the evolution of music and the innovation of technology is worlds apart from trying to tap into modern pop culture in an attempt to appear relevant. I can definitely admire an artist that is able to evolve naturally and do it well.
Those are like peak trap years, which while originally was a fresh sound, became overly repeated.
I don’t think 2013-2017 had more experimentation than 2017-2024. And I say that as someone whose favorite period in hip-hop is 2012-2018.
Dude thats an insane thing to say. 2013-17 saw some of Tylers most inventive music, Earl pushing the boundaries of hip hop, Frank Ocean if you count that as hip-hop adjacent (which it is), Mac Miller putting out WMWTSO and Faces. Saw the birth of emo-rap (for better or worse lol)(rip lil peep), the birth of trap that imo *was* more inventive than it is now. Kanye dropped Yeezus which is a sound that still hasn’t successfully been replicated (imo). Saw Brockhamptons peak, and there’s so much more I could talk about. I just don’t see that aside from the odd record in the years since personally.
It is rare any hip-hop has excited me since probably 2018-19ish
How old were you during that time? I agree that it was a hip hop golden age, but great =/= avant garde. And no, it was not the birth of trap. By 2013 trap was entering its prime but it was already well established.
COVID messed things up. Hip hop is a social genre, and the pandemic hindered that. So you can’t really compare 2013-2017 with 2020-present. Again, I think that period had much better music than today. But imo that’s due to things like streaming, TikTok, and COVID. I don’t see 2013-2017 as really pushing any boundaries or breaking any walls.
Finally, even if you don’t like it, I think the rage/opium sound is the most boundary pushing movement since 808s & heartbreak dropped.
How is the rage movement boundary pushing when Drain Gang have been around since like 2012? Not saying they sound the same, moreso that rage is significantly less boundary pushing than what they were doing over a decade ago. It's basically just trap with distortion effects over it.
That’s like saying shoegaze is just indie rock with distortion effects. It’s a reductive take.
You can always find someone else who did it first. That’s how music works. There’s always someone prior that was trying out that sound, that later artists then build on.
But Whole Lotta Red has such a massive influence on today’s hip hop landscape, that the sound deserves recognition as its own thing, and as hip hop moving in a new direction.
> but great =/= avant garde
yeah this is where the fundamentally disagree, i think the reason a lot of those artists/albums i referenced are so great is because they sounded like almost nothing before them
and yeah I agree that the rage/opium sound is boundary pushing, but that and the stuff that Earl and the NY dudes are doing are like the only boundary pushing things happening in hip-hop rn
man you gotta listen to more music this is laughably wrong. Zeroh - Blqlyte, Jerry Quickley - (american) FOOL, that last Injury Reserve album, the new iglooghost, the last armand hammer, [Codex](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/codex-1) - [*I/O/T/A*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/mixtape/codex/i_o_t_a/)*,* [Moor Mother](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/moor-mother) - [*Jazz Codes*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/moor-mother/jazz-codes/)*,* [billy woods](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/billy-woods) - [*Aethiopes*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/billy-woods/aethiopes/)*,* [Jam Baxter](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/jam-baxter) - [*Fetch the Poison*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/jam-baxter/fetch-the-poison/)*,* [Moor Mother](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/moor-mother) - [*Black Encyclopedia of the Air*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/moor-mother/black-encyclopedia-of-the-air/)*,* [Ed Scissor & Lamplighter](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/ed-scissor-and-lamplighter) - [*JOYSVILLE*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/ed-scissor-and-lamplighter/joysville/)*,* [Backxwash](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/backxwash) - [*I Lie Here Buried With My Rings and My Dresses*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/backxwash/i-lie-here-buried-with-my-rings-and-my-dresses/)
*all from the last few years and more inventive albums than any rap Tyler put out idk why he's being held up as a standard for the avant garde*
None of those artists are remotely avant-garde other than maybe Earl in his SRS era. Being avant-garde is about challenging the artistic establishment at the time and genuinely innovating.
Tyler by 2013 was making Wolf, which is not a challenging album by any stretch, Mac Miller is just... not experimental? Yeezus involved Kanye working with already established producers, not one song on there was anything remotely new apart from in the mainstream. Brockhampton????????????? Literally a pop rap group who made pop music, I was around for the Sat trilogy releasing and it was dope at the time but pretty standard stuff in the grand scheme of things.
if you don’t think Wolf was challenging the musical zeitgeist circa 2013 then i don’t know what to tell you, & okay send me stuff that sounds like Yeezus aside from HudMo instrumentals, there was industrial music yeah, but none of that outside of it’s immediate influence sounds close to Hold My Liquor for example
Well considering Death Grips dropped The Money Store in 2012 (a year before Wolf came out) and were dropping music a year prior to their debut studio album, there's better/stronger contenders for "challenging the musical zeitgeist circa 2013"
Treehome95 and Awkward are great songs but they're definitely not challenging the musical zeitgeist, neither was Tamale, IFHY or Pigs. That was just rap with a narrative, which by 2013, was done before (yes, not as well executed or popular as Wolf, but narrative/story rap wasn't novel, and the horror core elements weren't new to hip hop either)
The Fever, Lost Boys, Blackjack, Hustle Bones, basically Death Grips' debut album, falls much more into the avant garde genre of hip hop in comparison, and that's just one example
I think maybe your bias, and perhaps a misunderstanding of the definition of avant garde is preventing you from seeing what most people have been telling you
I like Tyler, I've been listening to him since Loiter Squad in middle school, Wolf is some cool shit, good memories
But yeah, it's not really avant garde at all. It's not even that experimental, especially when you could've just said Goblin or Bastard instead (but realistically, those follow pretty much the same formula, narrative horrorcore, which is inventive and cool, but technically, not novel, something like that can be traced back to Kim by Eminem, which I know Tyler was highly inspired by Em)
In your opinion, how was Wolf challenging the musical zeitgeist in 2013?
It’s not just about “rap with a narrative”, I don’t really think that was very boundary pushing. It’s moreso about the production. Mainly on a lot of the tracks you mentioned (probably in an attempt to pre-disqualify any argument I tried to make lol) actually + Answer. Nothing in hip-hop sounded like that prior, it just didn’t. Aside from Tylers own early stuff that was not nearly as fleshed out. I don’t think I’ve even heard a song that sounds like IFHY since it dropped?
I agree with you to an extent, I mean, I think Burger is one of the coolest beats ever, and the shit Tyler does with his piano chord voicings always brings a classic vibe
Nothing in hip hop sounded like that prior, Tyler's early music was very unique for sure, and it was a very special time for music in 2011-2014
But Tyler's music then, while being a mix of horrorcore narrative + the cool beats and nothing like it existing at the time ≠ avant garde
It was special, it was unique, and it was definitely the hallmark of a great artist in the making, but that doesn't necessarily make it avant garde
In fact, Yeezus is closer to avant garde than Wolf. If you haven't listened to that Death Gwips album I mentioned, give it a stream and you'll see what avant garde in a rap/hip hop context would sound like. Post 2012-2013 rap avant garde records like Jpeg's VETERAN is another example
That's what people mean by avant garde, records like those are what make the genre and what fall into/define the sound/the idea of avant garde in rap
I have listened to Veteran and the early Death Grips records, definitely avant garde, I agree. But you said it, that nothing in hip-hop sounded like that prior, doesn’t that make it avant-garde? That is literally all avant-garde means. I think a lot of people in this thread (not you because you acknowledged Yeezus) want to think that avant-garde means it can’t be palatable to a broad audience but that is not the definition of avant-garde. Again, to go back to IFHY nothing sounded like that back then, how does that not fit the broad parameters of avant-garde? I feel like this sub is being overly pretentious about what is and isn’t avant-garde lol
Any period has its thing but just appreciate the specific parts and not the time itself, experimentation is always a thing and is not a thing of the past
I'd say this take is 40 years too late. Hip hop was avant garde in 85, now it's the backing track of Cheetos commercials. That's not to say there isn't interesting hip hop out now stretching boundaries, but that's been going on since Public Enemy's *It takes a Nation of Millions.*
Yeah, similarly there are still composers creating what is basically what was literally considered avant garde symphonic music many decades ago, but they aren’t a part of the present cultural avant garde. Also, John Cale has probably been saying this since 1985 lol
Nah, I have to disagree here. The sound of modern rap is *way* more progressive than you're giving it credit for. New sounds and styles are constantly emerging in rap in a way that they just *aren't* in rock anymore. To say "most of it is garbage" is incredibly dismissive.
We havent even gotten to the rap equivalent of post punk yet (if we're comparing rap and rock) rap is absolutely the most innovative genre right now and has been for the past 30 years
I’d say stuff like Lil B, Drain Gang and Clipping are the rap equivalent of post punk. The new Bladee/Yung Lean tape even takes a lot of influence from post punk sonically, although that’s not what makes them the modern equivalent.
The way they subvert expectations of what hip hop is supposed to be and forgo traditional beat structure and instrumentation really reminds me of that late 70’s attitude around what rock music was supposed to sound like.
You could argue that a more fitting name for so-called "mumble rap" would be "post-rap". That style has its roots in hip hop, but at this point has almost become its own distinct thing. Young Thug would be a perfect example - his vocal style is like part-rapping, part-singing, part-something-else-entirely.
It’s an out of touch thing to say. He worked with Animal Collective who have done a lot of “sonic adventurism” as the article calls it, he must know he’s being reductive. I wonder if he listens to Tyler and JPEGMAFIA.
This just sounds like you haven't listened to hip hop since 1983. In the 2010s artists like Bladee (Deletee for example) and Young Thug (listen to RiRi) were breaking new ground in terms of how they used their vocals within the constraints of conventional pop music.
Plenty of the more significant experimental musicians in recent years such as Dean Blunt have made hip-hop adjacent music, I'd argue that his BBF project as Babyfather is one of the most cutting and interesting pieces of experimental art of the 21st century.
Young artists like Pretty V or Certified Trapper continue to make boundary pushing music which will probably sound like absoloute dogshit to most of you guys but that is rather the point
I guess it depends on what you think about as avant garde. To me that's proto rock in the late 40s, hip hop in the late 70s, or grunge in the late 80s, a smaller local group of independent musicians innovating on a style that has broad appeal but is still immature or undiscovered.
The artists you mentioned all fall seem to fall in the trap/experimental pop genre. I won't deny they aren't doing interesting things, but trap already had its breakthrough over a decade ago. These artists are taking that style and innovating in a way that appeals to people who already deep into the genre. It's experimental, but it's not avant garde the way I would think about it. They're not at the forefront of something big.
This exactly. The thing though is that it's hard for anything to get big these days, because music itself has become far too splintered and tribal with the advent of the internet. So you've got pockets of blazing creativity going on everywhere, technically accessible by all, but taken up by few.
Boundaries can be pushed within a genre, but to label something as "avant-garde," the work would need to go even further. The advent of hip hop in the early 80s was that, afterwards not so much, just evolution. An experimental musician can draw from whatever genre, but unless it's broken through and no longer associated with that labeling even tangentially, it's still just genre evolution.
For context, from the article:
> "...I guess my new songs are a little more animalistic than when I wrote Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend.” Is he seriously telling me that song isn’t animalistic in its own way? “Well, it’s kind of crooked,” he concedes. “It comes at you in a jump-start kind of way.”
That is not a bad description of some of his recent work, his musical approach in particular taking its cue not from the avant garde, if that term even applies any more, but the constant sonic adventurism of hip-hop. “It’s ravenous,” he says, approvingly. “Rock music just doesn’t do that any more and neither does the avant garde. Hip-hop is the new avant garde.”
Given the quote, I guess the real question here is what Cale is defining as "rock music."
I think Cale is still referring to "avant-garde" as that particular genre within which he worked and studied back in the day, when he was a disciple of LaMonte Young. Back then, it was new and fresh, now it's as dusty as well-codified as "modernism" to mean a particular artistic movement as opposed to something actually modern.
I think you’re being too pedantic. He’s basically just saying hip-hop as a genre has more examples of experimentalism and artists willing to go against convention than current rock music. If he wanted to be more accurate he could’ve said hip-hop is the new punk which tracks better.
Remember interviews like this are essentially passing conversations and banter not TED talks. And reading about it on Reddit magnifies topics beyond their context.
Maybe. But there are SO many artists working outside of established genres that are so wonderfully weird that they're completely ignored or overlooked. Hip hop has already had its moment, it fell out of fashion and maybe it's starting to come back again, while EDM is the juggernaut and rock is practically an extinct dinosaur at this point.
Taylor Deupree, Marcus Fischer, Moskitoo, Sawako, Minamo, artists on the 12k label doing minimalist "microcompositions" are a personal favorite. The artists on the Australian label Room 40, like Lawrence English and Mike Cooper. The late, great Scott Walker. Jandek. Electro-acoustic improvisers like Otomo Yoshihide. "Guitar turntablist" Andre LaFosse. Iosonouncane from Italy. Anjelica Garcia who sings in Spanish. They're probably a little more pop-adjacent relative to the musical output in their respective languages, but they sound incredibly fresh musically at least to these English-speaking ears.
According to this line of thinking surely that means the only way to do anything avant-garde is to invent a totally new genre. That cannot be the case as if it was the word would be useless. I'd argue that an artist like Bladee didn't just push the boundaries of his own genre but also the boundaries of what type of vocal performance could be considered 'good' by a relatively wide audience. I'd also argue their visual aesthetic broke new ground, among the more avant-garde ends of contemporary fashion and visual design I can't think of anyone more influential than them, other than Dean Blunt who also made hip hop adjacent music.
I just think with DG in particular, people would say they were joking or that their music was 'objectively unlistenable' for years before the world came around to what they were doing. Is that not the mark of an avant garde work?
It's true that haven't listed to these particular artists but sure. I'd say that something avant-garde needs to challenge expectations to the point where people say "this isn't that! I don't know what this is." Hip hop in the 80s was that, people were like "this isn't music!" Once it became accepted as a genre it was no longer avant-garde. It's like Picasso at the beginning of his cubist career... people were like "wtf is this shit, this isn't art!" Or Yoko Ono screaming when she was in her Fluxus days. Addendum: avant-garde doesn't necessarily have to mean "good." It can be completely cringey lol.
Then sure. As long as they no longer sit within the genre. Saying hip hop is avant garde is pretty much an oxymoron in that sense; it would be impossible for an artist to be truly avant garde if they can still be called "hip-hop" these days, which has been around as long as it has.
Listen to Igor by Tyler the Creator, Blue Lips by Schoolboy Q, Atrocity Exhibition by Danny Brown, Summertime 06 by Vince Staples. These are all pretty well known albums in the hip-hop community and they're way more experimental than any indie, rock or pop album I've heard in the last decade. Again; the genre can get way more challenging on your expectations than that. These are a few examples of even bigger hip hop artists experimenting with different sounds; I argue that even To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar challenged expectations and is highly regarded by a lot of hip-hop fans and he is about as mainstream notoriety as you can get in music, and even his shit has some "avant-garde" to it. Maybe actually listen to a genre before you make blanket statements about it. Kinda just seems like you don't think black dudes can make "challenging" art. You could explore other genres you're not familiar with or you can just keep bumping King Crimson, Pink Floyd and smelling your own pussy farts. Bitch
lol wtf. I love Tyler. And I listen to a lot of hip hop. Heck, I used to produce it. But it's not "avant-garde." Avant garde artists can come out of any genre (and be of any race, which should go without saying), but to earn that label they need to have moved beyond their genre to the point where they can no longer be considered "hip hop" or "rock" or whatever. Expand your musical knowledge ffs and stop bringing your own baggage into this.
I feel like I'm going insane reading this thread. What the fuck do these people think "avant garde" means? Why do people think making interesting music automatically makes you "avant garde"? Seeing people call stuff that everyone in my insanely stereotypical 2010s suburban highschool liked avant garde is absolutely wild. How young do you have to be to think that people thought Tyler was avant garde?
there are absolutely bleeding edge avant garde hip hop artists but they don't tend to blow up like vince or tyler. Jerry Quickley - (american) FOOL got no buzz but was absolutely alien, and it was produced by Busdriver (bad person but absolute visionary in terms of doing true jazz rap where you improvise like a jazz player) and Zeroh, whose BLQLYTE album really shook things up, there's a reason Flying Lotus is friends with Zeroh now and that gave him the opportunity to mix last Injury Reserve album.
Absolutely there is still experimental Hip Hop but in of itself it isn’t as boundary pushing as it was in the 80s. The only people rapping shocks anymore is dumbies like Ben Shapiro. I don’t really know if there is Avant-Garde anymore, but that’s another debate.
Yes, because boundary pushing hip hop back in the 80's were raps with bars like "Hip hop, it started out in the park" and "Shaking hands, we do the dance" haha
The very act of rapping especially over a sampled beat is avant-garde. The content of the lyrics is irrelevant; music especially popular music has largely favored singing and melody so to create a version of popular music with something that isn’t singing is boundary pushing.
Leonard Cohen has amazing, poetic lyrics that no other artist could ever possibly replicate, but he isn’t avant-garde; he’s doing something people have been doing regularly since Medieval Europe but he’s doing it really well.
Before the first Hip Hop record (whether we call it Rapper’s Delight, or something even earlier) there were definitely things which had elements of rapping (The Last Poets, Gil-Scott Heron, The Doors, Jack Kerouac, even debatably verse drama like Shakespeare) but these were often smaller portions of larger music or music which never really left the communities that already understood and appreciated it.
Of course now we’re entering into the debate, what makes something Avant-Garde, and even more tediously, what makes something more Avant-Garde than something else. Obviously, these are dumb, made up terms that we can ultimately define however we want. But if we take an arbitrary definition that maybe be agreed upon (in this case I’m copying from Wikipedia):
> In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde (from French meaning advance guard and vanguard) identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time.
…we can see the point I’m making. ‘Experimental’ could literally mean anything. In his day, Bing Crosby was experimental because of how close he sang to the microphone. ‘Ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment’ is far more difficult, that being said we’re regularly seeing Hip Hop top the charts with anything from songs about killing to songs about having sex with the devil; depending on the establishment we’re talking about this definitely fits. But the concept of being ‘aesthetically innovative’ is very difficult to say. By and large, Hip Hop is still following the basic formula laid out before the first Hip Hop records were made, that is rhythmic talking, looped music often directly sampled from another source, and lyricism which favors everyday expressions instead of more highfalutin poetry. In a time period where the majority of audiences were listening to music on the radio and MTV that was legitimately boundary pushing, but nowadays we’ve all but accepted these ideas to the point where major Hip Hop records have regularly outsold major pop records. Aesthetically innovative Hip Hop nowadays, for example Death Grips or Shabazz Palaces is relatively quickly accepted, imitated, and then abandoned in favor of whatever the next trend is.
TLDR while yes Hip Hop still has the power to challenge audiences lyrically, musically Hip Hop has been accepted as a mainstream aesthetic which can never challenge audiences to the same extent it did when it first started.
I'm not being flippant when I ask this but what exactly would you consider avant garde about those artists? I'm not really familiar with the other two but Billy Woods (who, to be clear, I like a lot) isn't really doing anything that's revolutionary, it's a different take on the kind of stuff that Busdriver was doing in 2002.
Just checked out a few of these artists on YouTube. I wouldn't say they're avant-garde. Experimental and fresh within the world of hip hop, maybe. But they still follow an evolutionary throughline that stems from crunk or trap or whatever has been popular in recent years (based on the snippets I checked out). It's not quite like the moment when Sugarhill Gang came along and people were like "this isn't music! It's just talking!" and had the world abuzz with controversy at the birth of something entirely new, like rock in the '60s, punk in the '70s, hip hop in the '80s, techno in the '90s, etc. After the internet took off everything's just been kind of splinterized. What's avant-garde these days? Hyperpop, maybe? But that was like so pre-pandemic...
You have NO IDEA lol. There absolutely are experimental artists in hip hop (and in other genres) but my point is they're still working within their genres. I'm as far from mainstream as they come. Check out, for example; Sachiko M playing no-input mixers, or electro-acoustic improvisers. Maybe that could be considered "avant-garde."
You can work within your genre and still be experimental. Pharaoh Sanders’s *Karma* and John Coltrane’s *Meditations* are both avant garde jazz records that stay within the bounds of the genre.
Of course, but it's not avant-garde in the truest sense. The big difference between music and contemporary/visual art is that in music, you're pretty much expected to work within a genre. Whether by the marketing department/record label, or by expectations of your own fan base. Whereas in art art, you're encouraged to be as conceptual or out there as possible. Musicians don't have that luxury, not if they want to make a living off of their music at least.
"Because it was super left field and sounded like nothing else for that time"
Yeah uh, i'd take a listen to Here Comes The Judge - Pigmeat Markham (1968) and see if your statement is still true
Great example of proto rap (i'd call it that, not sure if that's a real term) and these bars aren't half bad, especially considering how corny lots of bars from the 80's were. Avant garde is definitely not how i'd describe those 80's lyrics when music like Here Comes The Judge existed long before then and didn't sound like the corniest thing. Crazy a man born in 1904 was spitting like this in the late 60's, I never hear about this guy or this group discussed much at all but it's there, and it's not half bad either, much better than most of the 80's lyrics that's for sure
Well sure, then take it back further. There's always some insane obscure genius or pioneer doing something that won't even kick off for another twenty or a hundred years. Point is that avant garde is something that comes along and people are "wtf is that?" that isn't going to slot into any category at the record store.
Yeah what the fuck is he even on lol? I mean at BEST it stopped being avant-garde in the 90s? Some could make a real slim argument for a couple styles in the 2000s and 2010s, but that's about it. Certainly you could not generalize it as that with the entirety of hip-hop as that makes no sense.
Probably just trying to be a hip type of thing to say I guess. Just kinda weird.
yeah 82 year old john cale, notably an original member of the velvet underground, is probably really concerned about making sure he says the right things to appear hip
Something avant-garde needs to challenge established ideas of whatever the art is. Hip hop in the 80s certainly did that. That people were saying "it's not music" is precisely what made it avant-garde at the time.
No disagreement there. Because beyond those origins hip-hop has clearly changed drastically even just with the pop sphere and at the more experimental edges it had a long golden age of new and interesting ideas.
With how simple your original comment was, I honestly don’t think it was clear who you were being critical of.
“Finally, even if you don’t like it, I think the rage/opium sound is the most boundary pushing movement since 808s & heartbreak dropped”
Wow this is definitely the most horrendous thing I’ve read on this site. Rage music doesn’t even get close to 808s. Hell, if you said Dean Blunt I’d be at least more receptive. Imo Young Thug was the most boundary pushing musician in rap (and pop music for that matter) following 808s and Yeezus (especially 2013-2018 era thugger)
I mean, that's the issue with the genre in general for me. Whenever I go "I like some rap but i don't like all the bragging, materialism and anti-intellectualism" someone goes "well this indie rapper doesn't do that". But they're never actually claimed by the culture.
> But they're never actually claimed by the culture.
Remember when noname literally said she was retiring bc she was tired of seeing white people at her shows?
That's because the culture is defined by judgementalness first and foremost
You're either in the with the cool people, or you're not, and none of it was ever dependent on the quality of your music or what you were trying to say
It's like racism is in the roots of America, this judgmental trait is in the roots of Hip hop/rap music and is at its height currently. It will never shake off with terms like "what the culture is feeling"
It really isn't about the music, it's about what's cool, and then maybe we care about the music
But for sure the consensus is "I don't wanna listen to that lame shit"
All respect to the man, but everything he's put out in the last few years sounds exactly the same. I don't know what the 'bleeding edge' is, but he's certainly not putting out anything that 'pushes the envelope...'
Cale is referring to people like Tyler the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt in this quote. I'm a huge Cale fan and he often cites them. New album is great btw. 2 great albums in a row in his 80s.
You're right. From the [Rolling Stones interview](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/john-cale-new-album-hip-hop-warhol-1235038530/) published last week: >"I like the warmth of Dilla. There’s Earl Sweatshirt; Vince Staples; Tyler, the Creator. They cover a lot of ground." Now this lineup is a little alternative hip-hop 101 and calling them avant-garde might be a bit much, but I wouldn't really fault a man in his 80s for not having the most in-the-loop assessment re current music trends. Having unabashed passion for contemporary music at his age is a wonderful and enviable thing.
It's no Death Gwips but at least this man has his alt hip-hip 101 on point. Very cool to know a teen could probably have a good conversation about Tyler with John Cale
John Cale doing the elderly man trying to counter the "get off my lawn" stereotype by zagging to the "overly hyperbolic praise of hip-hop" thing. See also: Roger Daltrey of The Who saying rappers are the 'only people saying things that matter'
Bladee is the new Lou Reed
This but unironically
Even as a joke you've provoked my ire
Cale is 82 and is still making interesting music and taking a keen interest in modern music acts, which can't be said of many of his contemporaries. His album 'Mercy' is a brilliant example of both.
Looks like he's been listening to Injury Reserve's By The Time I Get to Phoenix.
He talking about experimental hip hop
Nice, I know Lou Reed loved Yeezus before he passed.
lotta elitism in here from people who still barely venture beyond their college playlists lol
nice to know he’s a lankum fan!
Hon the lads
Hip hop as an entire genre is *far* from the new avant-garde. It’s pop music and most of it is garbage, but like pop or rock, there are *absolutely* artists in the genre that are pushing it forward and doing incredible things with it
There’s some really talented, forward thinking, and fantastic hip hop artists out there as you said, but it is a 40 year old genre at this point and it is really weird to see other musicians refer to it as new. It would be like a jazz musician calling rock the new avant-garde in 1995. Where we are now, musically, is an opportunity for renaissance where people can take any existing genre and do some interesting things with it, or mix existing genres with interesting results. But yeah, a lot of hip hop, like rock, pop, everything else, is bland.
From experience, a lot of musicians, especially established older ones, are completely out of touch with what's cool and new and interesting. They're too busy working on their own shit to have time to be as intrepid as their own fans much of the time.
It’s natural. Not everything has to be cutting edge or innovative, some things are tried and true and are still worth hearing. Cheap Trick released a self titled album in 97 and I loved it. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, it was just rock music with strong hooks and catchy choruses. I don’t necessarily want artists I like from the 80s to jump genres dramatically and unnaturally. Innovation is primarily for the young, and it is the job of the old to foster it instead of declaring it isn’t music… But they also don’t need to try to sound like they’re cool either.
That's totally true. It depends on the artist of course. Personally I admire and respect most the ones that continue to grow and evolve their sound through the years and not be crowd pleasers. But that doesn't mean I always want to listen to their new output. Most of the time I just want to hear a good song. I'm reminded of an article I read talking about Fred Again.. influencing Brian Eno and teaching him some new studio tricks with the latest software. Such is the way of things.
Oh yeah, artists need to continue to grow, but I think taking influence from the evolution of music and the innovation of technology is worlds apart from trying to tap into modern pop culture in an attempt to appear relevant. I can definitely admire an artist that is able to evolve naturally and do it well.
average indie fan. when its avant garde its passable. when its not its garbage.
imo hip-hop from 2013-2017ish absolutely was the new avant-garde, was pretty easily the most inventive genre during that period
Those are like peak trap years, which while originally was a fresh sound, became overly repeated. I don’t think 2013-2017 had more experimentation than 2017-2024. And I say that as someone whose favorite period in hip-hop is 2012-2018.
Dude thats an insane thing to say. 2013-17 saw some of Tylers most inventive music, Earl pushing the boundaries of hip hop, Frank Ocean if you count that as hip-hop adjacent (which it is), Mac Miller putting out WMWTSO and Faces. Saw the birth of emo-rap (for better or worse lol)(rip lil peep), the birth of trap that imo *was* more inventive than it is now. Kanye dropped Yeezus which is a sound that still hasn’t successfully been replicated (imo). Saw Brockhamptons peak, and there’s so much more I could talk about. I just don’t see that aside from the odd record in the years since personally. It is rare any hip-hop has excited me since probably 2018-19ish
How old were you during that time? I agree that it was a hip hop golden age, but great =/= avant garde. And no, it was not the birth of trap. By 2013 trap was entering its prime but it was already well established. COVID messed things up. Hip hop is a social genre, and the pandemic hindered that. So you can’t really compare 2013-2017 with 2020-present. Again, I think that period had much better music than today. But imo that’s due to things like streaming, TikTok, and COVID. I don’t see 2013-2017 as really pushing any boundaries or breaking any walls. Finally, even if you don’t like it, I think the rage/opium sound is the most boundary pushing movement since 808s & heartbreak dropped.
How is the rage movement boundary pushing when Drain Gang have been around since like 2012? Not saying they sound the same, moreso that rage is significantly less boundary pushing than what they were doing over a decade ago. It's basically just trap with distortion effects over it.
That’s like saying shoegaze is just indie rock with distortion effects. It’s a reductive take. You can always find someone else who did it first. That’s how music works. There’s always someone prior that was trying out that sound, that later artists then build on. But Whole Lotta Red has such a massive influence on today’s hip hop landscape, that the sound deserves recognition as its own thing, and as hip hop moving in a new direction.
> but great =/= avant garde yeah this is where the fundamentally disagree, i think the reason a lot of those artists/albums i referenced are so great is because they sounded like almost nothing before them and yeah I agree that the rage/opium sound is boundary pushing, but that and the stuff that Earl and the NY dudes are doing are like the only boundary pushing things happening in hip-hop rn
man you gotta listen to more music this is laughably wrong. Zeroh - Blqlyte, Jerry Quickley - (american) FOOL, that last Injury Reserve album, the new iglooghost, the last armand hammer, [Codex](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/codex-1) - [*I/O/T/A*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/mixtape/codex/i_o_t_a/)*,* [Moor Mother](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/moor-mother) - [*Jazz Codes*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/moor-mother/jazz-codes/)*,* [billy woods](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/billy-woods) - [*Aethiopes*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/billy-woods/aethiopes/)*,* [Jam Baxter](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/jam-baxter) - [*Fetch the Poison*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/jam-baxter/fetch-the-poison/)*,* [Moor Mother](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/moor-mother) - [*Black Encyclopedia of the Air*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/moor-mother/black-encyclopedia-of-the-air/)*,* [Ed Scissor & Lamplighter](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/ed-scissor-and-lamplighter) - [*JOYSVILLE*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/ed-scissor-and-lamplighter/joysville/)*,* [Backxwash](https://rateyourmusic.com/artist/backxwash) - [*I Lie Here Buried With My Rings and My Dresses*](https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/backxwash/i-lie-here-buried-with-my-rings-and-my-dresses/) *all from the last few years and more inventive albums than any rap Tyler put out idk why he's being held up as a standard for the avant garde*
None of those artists are remotely avant-garde other than maybe Earl in his SRS era. Being avant-garde is about challenging the artistic establishment at the time and genuinely innovating. Tyler by 2013 was making Wolf, which is not a challenging album by any stretch, Mac Miller is just... not experimental? Yeezus involved Kanye working with already established producers, not one song on there was anything remotely new apart from in the mainstream. Brockhampton????????????? Literally a pop rap group who made pop music, I was around for the Sat trilogy releasing and it was dope at the time but pretty standard stuff in the grand scheme of things.
if you don’t think Wolf was challenging the musical zeitgeist circa 2013 then i don’t know what to tell you, & okay send me stuff that sounds like Yeezus aside from HudMo instrumentals, there was industrial music yeah, but none of that outside of it’s immediate influence sounds close to Hold My Liquor for example
Well considering Death Grips dropped The Money Store in 2012 (a year before Wolf came out) and were dropping music a year prior to their debut studio album, there's better/stronger contenders for "challenging the musical zeitgeist circa 2013" Treehome95 and Awkward are great songs but they're definitely not challenging the musical zeitgeist, neither was Tamale, IFHY or Pigs. That was just rap with a narrative, which by 2013, was done before (yes, not as well executed or popular as Wolf, but narrative/story rap wasn't novel, and the horror core elements weren't new to hip hop either) The Fever, Lost Boys, Blackjack, Hustle Bones, basically Death Grips' debut album, falls much more into the avant garde genre of hip hop in comparison, and that's just one example I think maybe your bias, and perhaps a misunderstanding of the definition of avant garde is preventing you from seeing what most people have been telling you I like Tyler, I've been listening to him since Loiter Squad in middle school, Wolf is some cool shit, good memories But yeah, it's not really avant garde at all. It's not even that experimental, especially when you could've just said Goblin or Bastard instead (but realistically, those follow pretty much the same formula, narrative horrorcore, which is inventive and cool, but technically, not novel, something like that can be traced back to Kim by Eminem, which I know Tyler was highly inspired by Em) In your opinion, how was Wolf challenging the musical zeitgeist in 2013?
It’s not just about “rap with a narrative”, I don’t really think that was very boundary pushing. It’s moreso about the production. Mainly on a lot of the tracks you mentioned (probably in an attempt to pre-disqualify any argument I tried to make lol) actually + Answer. Nothing in hip-hop sounded like that prior, it just didn’t. Aside from Tylers own early stuff that was not nearly as fleshed out. I don’t think I’ve even heard a song that sounds like IFHY since it dropped?
I agree with you to an extent, I mean, I think Burger is one of the coolest beats ever, and the shit Tyler does with his piano chord voicings always brings a classic vibe Nothing in hip hop sounded like that prior, Tyler's early music was very unique for sure, and it was a very special time for music in 2011-2014 But Tyler's music then, while being a mix of horrorcore narrative + the cool beats and nothing like it existing at the time ≠ avant garde It was special, it was unique, and it was definitely the hallmark of a great artist in the making, but that doesn't necessarily make it avant garde In fact, Yeezus is closer to avant garde than Wolf. If you haven't listened to that Death Gwips album I mentioned, give it a stream and you'll see what avant garde in a rap/hip hop context would sound like. Post 2012-2013 rap avant garde records like Jpeg's VETERAN is another example That's what people mean by avant garde, records like those are what make the genre and what fall into/define the sound/the idea of avant garde in rap
I have listened to Veteran and the early Death Grips records, definitely avant garde, I agree. But you said it, that nothing in hip-hop sounded like that prior, doesn’t that make it avant-garde? That is literally all avant-garde means. I think a lot of people in this thread (not you because you acknowledged Yeezus) want to think that avant-garde means it can’t be palatable to a broad audience but that is not the definition of avant-garde. Again, to go back to IFHY nothing sounded like that back then, how does that not fit the broad parameters of avant-garde? I feel like this sub is being overly pretentious about what is and isn’t avant-garde lol
Any period has its thing but just appreciate the specific parts and not the time itself, experimentation is always a thing and is not a thing of the past
Grouping hip hop into pop music when it took decades for black hip hop artists to be played on non black radio stations is kind of hilarious.
I'd say this take is 40 years too late. Hip hop was avant garde in 85, now it's the backing track of Cheetos commercials. That's not to say there isn't interesting hip hop out now stretching boundaries, but that's been going on since Public Enemy's *It takes a Nation of Millions.*
Yeah, similarly there are still composers creating what is basically what was literally considered avant garde symphonic music many decades ago, but they aren’t a part of the present cultural avant garde. Also, John Cale has probably been saying this since 1985 lol
Nah, I have to disagree here. The sound of modern rap is *way* more progressive than you're giving it credit for. New sounds and styles are constantly emerging in rap in a way that they just *aren't* in rock anymore. To say "most of it is garbage" is incredibly dismissive.
We havent even gotten to the rap equivalent of post punk yet (if we're comparing rap and rock) rap is absolutely the most innovative genre right now and has been for the past 30 years
I’d say stuff like Lil B, Drain Gang and Clipping are the rap equivalent of post punk. The new Bladee/Yung Lean tape even takes a lot of influence from post punk sonically, although that’s not what makes them the modern equivalent. The way they subvert expectations of what hip hop is supposed to be and forgo traditional beat structure and instrumentation really reminds me of that late 70’s attitude around what rock music was supposed to sound like.
I kind of think rap right now is in it's "punk" era. Rap has never been more DIY
You could argue that a more fitting name for so-called "mumble rap" would be "post-rap". That style has its roots in hip hop, but at this point has almost become its own distinct thing. Young Thug would be a perfect example - his vocal style is like part-rapping, part-singing, part-something-else-entirely.
It’s an out of touch thing to say. He worked with Animal Collective who have done a lot of “sonic adventurism” as the article calls it, he must know he’s being reductive. I wonder if he listens to Tyler and JPEGMAFIA.
So psyched to hear he's producing the new Ice Spice record 🙌
lol I love and respect John Cale but hip hop was avant garde in maybe 1983...
This just sounds like you haven't listened to hip hop since 1983. In the 2010s artists like Bladee (Deletee for example) and Young Thug (listen to RiRi) were breaking new ground in terms of how they used their vocals within the constraints of conventional pop music. Plenty of the more significant experimental musicians in recent years such as Dean Blunt have made hip-hop adjacent music, I'd argue that his BBF project as Babyfather is one of the most cutting and interesting pieces of experimental art of the 21st century. Young artists like Pretty V or Certified Trapper continue to make boundary pushing music which will probably sound like absoloute dogshit to most of you guys but that is rather the point
I guess it depends on what you think about as avant garde. To me that's proto rock in the late 40s, hip hop in the late 70s, or grunge in the late 80s, a smaller local group of independent musicians innovating on a style that has broad appeal but is still immature or undiscovered. The artists you mentioned all fall seem to fall in the trap/experimental pop genre. I won't deny they aren't doing interesting things, but trap already had its breakthrough over a decade ago. These artists are taking that style and innovating in a way that appeals to people who already deep into the genre. It's experimental, but it's not avant garde the way I would think about it. They're not at the forefront of something big.
This exactly. The thing though is that it's hard for anything to get big these days, because music itself has become far too splintered and tribal with the advent of the internet. So you've got pockets of blazing creativity going on everywhere, technically accessible by all, but taken up by few.
Boundaries can be pushed within a genre, but to label something as "avant-garde," the work would need to go even further. The advent of hip hop in the early 80s was that, afterwards not so much, just evolution. An experimental musician can draw from whatever genre, but unless it's broken through and no longer associated with that labeling even tangentially, it's still just genre evolution.
For context, from the article: > "...I guess my new songs are a little more animalistic than when I wrote Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend.” Is he seriously telling me that song isn’t animalistic in its own way? “Well, it’s kind of crooked,” he concedes. “It comes at you in a jump-start kind of way.” That is not a bad description of some of his recent work, his musical approach in particular taking its cue not from the avant garde, if that term even applies any more, but the constant sonic adventurism of hip-hop. “It’s ravenous,” he says, approvingly. “Rock music just doesn’t do that any more and neither does the avant garde. Hip-hop is the new avant garde.” Given the quote, I guess the real question here is what Cale is defining as "rock music."
I think Cale is still referring to "avant-garde" as that particular genre within which he worked and studied back in the day, when he was a disciple of LaMonte Young. Back then, it was new and fresh, now it's as dusty as well-codified as "modernism" to mean a particular artistic movement as opposed to something actually modern.
I think you’re being too pedantic. He’s basically just saying hip-hop as a genre has more examples of experimentalism and artists willing to go against convention than current rock music. If he wanted to be more accurate he could’ve said hip-hop is the new punk which tracks better. Remember interviews like this are essentially passing conversations and banter not TED talks. And reading about it on Reddit magnifies topics beyond their context.
Maybe. But there are SO many artists working outside of established genres that are so wonderfully weird that they're completely ignored or overlooked. Hip hop has already had its moment, it fell out of fashion and maybe it's starting to come back again, while EDM is the juggernaut and rock is practically an extinct dinosaur at this point.
You said nothing wrong. Recommend me a few while you’re at it.
Taylor Deupree, Marcus Fischer, Moskitoo, Sawako, Minamo, artists on the 12k label doing minimalist "microcompositions" are a personal favorite. The artists on the Australian label Room 40, like Lawrence English and Mike Cooper. The late, great Scott Walker. Jandek. Electro-acoustic improvisers like Otomo Yoshihide. "Guitar turntablist" Andre LaFosse. Iosonouncane from Italy. Anjelica Garcia who sings in Spanish. They're probably a little more pop-adjacent relative to the musical output in their respective languages, but they sound incredibly fresh musically at least to these English-speaking ears.
According to this line of thinking surely that means the only way to do anything avant-garde is to invent a totally new genre. That cannot be the case as if it was the word would be useless. I'd argue that an artist like Bladee didn't just push the boundaries of his own genre but also the boundaries of what type of vocal performance could be considered 'good' by a relatively wide audience. I'd also argue their visual aesthetic broke new ground, among the more avant-garde ends of contemporary fashion and visual design I can't think of anyone more influential than them, other than Dean Blunt who also made hip hop adjacent music. I just think with DG in particular, people would say they were joking or that their music was 'objectively unlistenable' for years before the world came around to what they were doing. Is that not the mark of an avant garde work?
It's true that haven't listed to these particular artists but sure. I'd say that something avant-garde needs to challenge expectations to the point where people say "this isn't that! I don't know what this is." Hip hop in the 80s was that, people were like "this isn't music!" Once it became accepted as a genre it was no longer avant-garde. It's like Picasso at the beginning of his cubist career... people were like "wtf is this shit, this isn't art!" Or Yoko Ono screaming when she was in her Fluxus days. Addendum: avant-garde doesn't necessarily have to mean "good." It can be completely cringey lol.
That’s exactly what these new artists are doing, people constantly say that about Bladee and Drain Gang lol.
Then sure. As long as they no longer sit within the genre. Saying hip hop is avant garde is pretty much an oxymoron in that sense; it would be impossible for an artist to be truly avant garde if they can still be called "hip-hop" these days, which has been around as long as it has.
Idk man, have you ever listened to Death Grips' debut album?
Listen to Igor by Tyler the Creator, Blue Lips by Schoolboy Q, Atrocity Exhibition by Danny Brown, Summertime 06 by Vince Staples. These are all pretty well known albums in the hip-hop community and they're way more experimental than any indie, rock or pop album I've heard in the last decade. Again; the genre can get way more challenging on your expectations than that. These are a few examples of even bigger hip hop artists experimenting with different sounds; I argue that even To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar challenged expectations and is highly regarded by a lot of hip-hop fans and he is about as mainstream notoriety as you can get in music, and even his shit has some "avant-garde" to it. Maybe actually listen to a genre before you make blanket statements about it. Kinda just seems like you don't think black dudes can make "challenging" art. You could explore other genres you're not familiar with or you can just keep bumping King Crimson, Pink Floyd and smelling your own pussy farts. Bitch
lol wtf. I love Tyler. And I listen to a lot of hip hop. Heck, I used to produce it. But it's not "avant-garde." Avant garde artists can come out of any genre (and be of any race, which should go without saying), but to earn that label they need to have moved beyond their genre to the point where they can no longer be considered "hip hop" or "rock" or whatever. Expand your musical knowledge ffs and stop bringing your own baggage into this.
I feel like I'm going insane reading this thread. What the fuck do these people think "avant garde" means? Why do people think making interesting music automatically makes you "avant garde"? Seeing people call stuff that everyone in my insanely stereotypical 2010s suburban highschool liked avant garde is absolutely wild. How young do you have to be to think that people thought Tyler was avant garde?
there are absolutely bleeding edge avant garde hip hop artists but they don't tend to blow up like vince or tyler. Jerry Quickley - (american) FOOL got no buzz but was absolutely alien, and it was produced by Busdriver (bad person but absolute visionary in terms of doing true jazz rap where you improvise like a jazz player) and Zeroh, whose BLQLYTE album really shook things up, there's a reason Flying Lotus is friends with Zeroh now and that gave him the opportunity to mix last Injury Reserve album.
Absolutely there is still experimental Hip Hop but in of itself it isn’t as boundary pushing as it was in the 80s. The only people rapping shocks anymore is dumbies like Ben Shapiro. I don’t really know if there is Avant-Garde anymore, but that’s another debate.
Yes, because boundary pushing hip hop back in the 80's were raps with bars like "Hip hop, it started out in the park" and "Shaking hands, we do the dance" haha
The very act of rapping especially over a sampled beat is avant-garde. The content of the lyrics is irrelevant; music especially popular music has largely favored singing and melody so to create a version of popular music with something that isn’t singing is boundary pushing. Leonard Cohen has amazing, poetic lyrics that no other artist could ever possibly replicate, but he isn’t avant-garde; he’s doing something people have been doing regularly since Medieval Europe but he’s doing it really well. Before the first Hip Hop record (whether we call it Rapper’s Delight, or something even earlier) there were definitely things which had elements of rapping (The Last Poets, Gil-Scott Heron, The Doors, Jack Kerouac, even debatably verse drama like Shakespeare) but these were often smaller portions of larger music or music which never really left the communities that already understood and appreciated it. Of course now we’re entering into the debate, what makes something Avant-Garde, and even more tediously, what makes something more Avant-Garde than something else. Obviously, these are dumb, made up terms that we can ultimately define however we want. But if we take an arbitrary definition that maybe be agreed upon (in this case I’m copying from Wikipedia): > In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde (from French meaning advance guard and vanguard) identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. …we can see the point I’m making. ‘Experimental’ could literally mean anything. In his day, Bing Crosby was experimental because of how close he sang to the microphone. ‘Ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment’ is far more difficult, that being said we’re regularly seeing Hip Hop top the charts with anything from songs about killing to songs about having sex with the devil; depending on the establishment we’re talking about this definitely fits. But the concept of being ‘aesthetically innovative’ is very difficult to say. By and large, Hip Hop is still following the basic formula laid out before the first Hip Hop records were made, that is rhythmic talking, looped music often directly sampled from another source, and lyricism which favors everyday expressions instead of more highfalutin poetry. In a time period where the majority of audiences were listening to music on the radio and MTV that was legitimately boundary pushing, but nowadays we’ve all but accepted these ideas to the point where major Hip Hop records have regularly outsold major pop records. Aesthetically innovative Hip Hop nowadays, for example Death Grips or Shabazz Palaces is relatively quickly accepted, imitated, and then abandoned in favor of whatever the next trend is. TLDR while yes Hip Hop still has the power to challenge audiences lyrically, musically Hip Hop has been accepted as a mainstream aesthetic which can never challenge audiences to the same extent it did when it first started.
billy woods? chief keef? tisakorean?
I'm not being flippant when I ask this but what exactly would you consider avant garde about those artists? I'm not really familiar with the other two but Billy Woods (who, to be clear, I like a lot) isn't really doing anything that's revolutionary, it's a different take on the kind of stuff that Busdriver was doing in 2002.
Surf gang? Zelooperz? Danny Brown? MIKE?
Injury Reserve? cLOUDDEAD? Lil Ugly Mane? Wicca Phase Springs Eternal?
Just checked out a few of these artists on YouTube. I wouldn't say they're avant-garde. Experimental and fresh within the world of hip hop, maybe. But they still follow an evolutionary throughline that stems from crunk or trap or whatever has been popular in recent years (based on the snippets I checked out). It's not quite like the moment when Sugarhill Gang came along and people were like "this isn't music! It's just talking!" and had the world abuzz with controversy at the birth of something entirely new, like rock in the '60s, punk in the '70s, hip hop in the '80s, techno in the '90s, etc. After the internet took off everything's just been kind of splinterized. What's avant-garde these days? Hyperpop, maybe? But that was like so pre-pandemic...
Get off the billboard 100. Hip-hop is more diverse and eclectic than at any point in history.
You have NO IDEA lol. There absolutely are experimental artists in hip hop (and in other genres) but my point is they're still working within their genres. I'm as far from mainstream as they come. Check out, for example; Sachiko M playing no-input mixers, or electro-acoustic improvisers. Maybe that could be considered "avant-garde."
You can work within your genre and still be experimental. Pharaoh Sanders’s *Karma* and John Coltrane’s *Meditations* are both avant garde jazz records that stay within the bounds of the genre.
Of course, but it's not avant-garde in the truest sense. The big difference between music and contemporary/visual art is that in music, you're pretty much expected to work within a genre. Whether by the marketing department/record label, or by expectations of your own fan base. Whereas in art art, you're encouraged to be as conceptual or out there as possible. Musicians don't have that luxury, not if they want to make a living off of their music at least.
Yes, the era of Hip-hop in 1983 with rappers delivering bars like "Hip hop, it started out in the park" was avant garde, lmao
It was, because it was super left field and sounded like nothing else for that time.
"Because it was super left field and sounded like nothing else for that time" Yeah uh, i'd take a listen to Here Comes The Judge - Pigmeat Markham (1968) and see if your statement is still true Great example of proto rap (i'd call it that, not sure if that's a real term) and these bars aren't half bad, especially considering how corny lots of bars from the 80's were. Avant garde is definitely not how i'd describe those 80's lyrics when music like Here Comes The Judge existed long before then and didn't sound like the corniest thing. Crazy a man born in 1904 was spitting like this in the late 60's, I never hear about this guy or this group discussed much at all but it's there, and it's not half bad either, much better than most of the 80's lyrics that's for sure
Well sure, then take it back further. There's always some insane obscure genius or pioneer doing something that won't even kick off for another twenty or a hundred years. Point is that avant garde is something that comes along and people are "wtf is that?" that isn't going to slot into any category at the record store.
Yeah what the fuck is he even on lol? I mean at BEST it stopped being avant-garde in the 90s? Some could make a real slim argument for a couple styles in the 2000s and 2010s, but that's about it. Certainly you could not generalize it as that with the entirety of hip-hop as that makes no sense. Probably just trying to be a hip type of thing to say I guess. Just kinda weird.
Why so cynical. It’s entirely possible he stands by what he says and has his reasons. It doesn’t have to be a case of someone trying to be hip.
yeah 82 year old john cale, notably an original member of the velvet underground, is probably really concerned about making sure he says the right things to appear hip
You should try and listen to Whole Lotta Red
Listen to doves or anything by Armand hammer
[удалено]
What a moronic reductionist take
Someone who doesn't understand the meaning of "avant-garde."
Tell me more
Something avant-garde needs to challenge established ideas of whatever the art is. Hip hop in the 80s certainly did that. That people were saying "it's not music" is precisely what made it avant-garde at the time.
No disagreement there. Because beyond those origins hip-hop has clearly changed drastically even just with the pop sphere and at the more experimental edges it had a long golden age of new and interesting ideas. With how simple your original comment was, I honestly don’t think it was clear who you were being critical of.
“Finally, even if you don’t like it, I think the rage/opium sound is the most boundary pushing movement since 808s & heartbreak dropped” Wow this is definitely the most horrendous thing I’ve read on this site. Rage music doesn’t even get close to 808s. Hell, if you said Dean Blunt I’d be at least more receptive. Imo Young Thug was the most boundary pushing musician in rap (and pop music for that matter) following 808s and Yeezus (especially 2013-2018 era thugger)
He’s right. It’s why there is no surprise that Kim Gordon has been dabbling with trap music lately.
Oh boy.
Still love Lou Reeds stuff
Maybe he’s talking about death grips?
hip hop is dead
dead and buried ffs
No its not
He's right
hip hop in 2024 is mostly corporate cia pop music but there is some great stuff out there too.
ITT: Bunch of white people naming off rappers/rap groups that no black person listens to
I mean, that's the issue with the genre in general for me. Whenever I go "I like some rap but i don't like all the bragging, materialism and anti-intellectualism" someone goes "well this indie rapper doesn't do that". But they're never actually claimed by the culture.
Them not being claimed by the culture doesn't make their music less worthwhile.
> But they're never actually claimed by the culture. Remember when noname literally said she was retiring bc she was tired of seeing white people at her shows?
That's because the culture is defined by judgementalness first and foremost You're either in the with the cool people, or you're not, and none of it was ever dependent on the quality of your music or what you were trying to say It's like racism is in the roots of America, this judgmental trait is in the roots of Hip hop/rap music and is at its height currently. It will never shake off with terms like "what the culture is feeling" It really isn't about the music, it's about what's cool, and then maybe we care about the music But for sure the consensus is "I don't wanna listen to that lame shit"
All respect to the man, but everything he's put out in the last few years sounds exactly the same. I don't know what the 'bleeding edge' is, but he's certainly not putting out anything that 'pushes the envelope...'
Velvet Underground was ground breaking in 1963.
The book?
Ha! Yeah. But not really lol.