The fluctuations in format that
naturally stem from ever-advancing technology seem to play a larger
role than one may realize, in determining the overall climate, even
culture, of particular time periods in hip hop music.
An overlooked part of ’88 was not only were tapes outselling vinyl easily, (it was portable, you could piece it back together if it broke, play it in your car, plus record your own pause tapes off the radio) but CDs were starting to outsell vinyl too, with burnable CDs just having been invented as well. The DJ was really in the background by this point, we we’re now far away from the park, some fifteen years later, bumpin’ beats in our headphones, skippin’ track to track, no more blind fast forward. But this was also when it was all starting over again, the renaissance. Every flavor and archetype, if it didn’t already exist, was created or can be tied back to those years. And we made ’em all count, with CDs outselling tapes by ’93. As with vinyl and the old school in ’85, the decline of the tape was one sign that 1993 would close out the golden era.
We hovered in that nearly fully digital space for another, you guessed it, half dozen years, when we went from ’94, where it wasn’t unheard of for CD burners to go for a thousand dollars, to right before Y2K, with them being a couple hundred bucks at most. As those prices declined year after year, slowly but surely, so did the quality of the music, at least on a mainstream level. Independents thrived almost solely on word of mouth, due to not having the push that the majors did. And then all of a sudden this thing called Napster started up. From this another transitionary phase began, while everyone in the biz tried to make sense of it all. That lasted through the first year of the new millennium. Now these CDs we used to buy for twenty bucks a pop were CD-Rs that cost less than twenty cents each, often sold to us by the same corporations. We suddenly had power, control, technology, all at our fingertips. The stuff they made with their fancy equipment, we realized we could approximate that pretty well ourselves. Corporate greed, increased technological know-how, and networking through the internet all intertwined to create a perfect storm for music and the media.
Below the surface there was substance, but between 2002 and 2008, the longest stretch by a year, stand out hits weren’t there as much and the fans were feeling the lack of direction. In response to not knowing what the consumers were truly after, sub-genres either fused with one another or splintered into ever more obscure sub-sub-genres. When the economic kickback within the industry didn’t match up to the innovations in technology, the quality of the product suffered, at least on the face of it, and everyone changed up, in part due to our new gadgetry. YouTube started right as sales were beginning to drop dramatically. The machine felt it was being neglected and decided to not try nearly as much, knowing the public wasn’t going to listen regardless, that their minds were mostly made up. It was as if traditional marketing had been almost entirely abandoned and in its place were just hoards of street teams and social marketing, to varying degrees of success. Labels were for distribution but little else and people knew it. It was slow all around. We could now dig for so much old material, but with the new stuff you had to trudge through more for less. And so digital digging began, with time and research put in, in order to find gems. No longer did we need a five mic rating system to tell us what was and wasn’t worthwhile. Fans turned to forums, as any quality new music felt almost like a well guarded secret, harking back to the days when DJs would strip the labels off their records to preserve original taste.
It was a time of study and reflection, both for the fans and the artists. Really for the first time since the days of the park, any working class person, now equipped with internet access, could suddenly talk music on a level with the rich kids again. We were situated comfortably in the information age and this time around the renaissance was for the fans, the people who felt entitled, cheated, or simply had been missing out. Nobody seemed to care much that in the meantime, while everybody struggled to adjust and figure it all out, the way of life we used to know was falling by the wayside. It’s not like we went to Tower Records any longer anyway, they’d just rip us off, right? In 2008, MP3 sales begrudgingly started to beat the dismal sales of the CD, right around the time that you were seeing the start of blogs taking over and making a real influence. The internet age slowly was replaced by Twitter and the blogosphere. We now had blog darlings and year end best lists from our favorite social media writers instead of years in review from those long defunct magazines. It was almost like people didn’t even notice, everything’s being revamped, upgraded, and integrated all the time anyway.
You know that things go in cycles and the end of this year marks another six. The roots started the same way history had been for most of creation, dictated by memory and through the oral tradition, with scraps of light and bits of sound thrown in more and more as evidence of what was, as we moved closer to the present. The old school was almost exclusively confined to wax, few cared much about rap on 8-track. But by the new school, vinyl was on its way out and cassettes were the cool thing. After the golden era had vinyl finding itself even more played out, now it was tape or CD. Then we were in the digital period with our CD-Rs, until the MP3 liberated us from that entirely and left us the internet age. In the days of the blog, information devices are starting to be made without real accessible storage space of any kind, because all we need to do is add Wi-Fi to our battery powered speakers in order to press play. Are packets of data raining out of a cloud server about to fully engulf our audio, in addition to our visual entertainment needs?
Despite Bandcamp, Mixcloud, Soundcloud, Spotify, YouTube and a host of other streaming or download / stream programs, nothing has integrated enough to take over the MP3 and so the cloud hasn’t removed or supplemented most people’s need for digital copies yet, though it appears things are certainly headed that way. The question is then not if, but when and also, how? Lacking the logistical, technological, or economic push at the present moment, maybe we just have to keep building for another couple years, like we did in the mid-to-late eighties and again around the turn of the century. It’s inevitable that eventually everybody’ll need to change up yet again and we’ll all start to hear rappers telling us about how we need to sign up for their exclusive channel because they have the illest streams available, yo. And we’re gonna have to wait and see how that’ll determine the sound or quality of what’s next. One thing’s for sure though, regardless of when exactly that is or what it’ll be like, you can always count on the relationship between artists and their medium to be creatin’ more styles…
