Science says hip-hop is the pinnacle of American music

[natina]

Science says hip-hop is the pinnacle of American music

A bunch of researchers in the UK have applied a scientific approach to find what type of music has the biggest impact in America.
Ultimately, they boiled it down to just three distinct periods when a particular genre ruled the airwaves.
According to their findings, the genre that has the biggest impact is hip hop.
Press Association reports via Yahoo UK (https://uk.news.yahoo.com/hip-hop-hailed-music-pinnacle-230126677.html#GT9LH2U) that the researchers from Queen Mary, University of London and Imperial College teamed up with Last.fm, to study samples of about 17,000 songs, dating from 1960 to 2010.
Those songs appeared on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart at some point during that period.
An algorithm categorized the songs according to their musical properties – right down to the chord patterns, instruments and equipment used and tonal characteristics. They boiled all of that down and identified three key music “revolutions” where a particular genre ruled the charts:


1964: The “British Invasion,” ushered in by the The Beatles and Rolling Stones
1983: New wave and post-punk rock
1991: Hip Hop

Among those, “Hip Hop’s big entrance into the charts in 1991 was said to be the most far reaching,” the study shows. Lead researcher, Dr. Mattias Mauch admits some will disagree with their scientific approach “and think it’s too limited for such an emotional subject.”
Mauch compared hip hop with the British invasion, saying groups like the Beatles “merely followed existing American trends,” while hip hop helped empower marginalized black youth nationwide.
The researchers insist their motivations are purely scientific, saying “Those who wish to make claims about how and when popular music changed can no longer appeal to anecdote, connoisseurship and theory unadorned by data.”


http://www.businessinsider.sg/science-says-hip-hop-is-the-pinnacle-of-american-music-2015-5/#.VUwX7WfwvIU

[natina]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFO-JdGt5_U


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frIA7tuBqqY

[eded]

Now I understand why the American youth is becoming more stupid.

[wearboots4me]

Meh, nothing wrong with hip-hop if that's your thing. But I hate these articles, people should just listen to what they want to. Because whatever you feel like listening to is the best music. :wiggle:

[fred41]

music...can't imagine life without it. One of the most enjoyable things in life. Even though I have my 'go to' genre, I can't imagine just limiting myself to that.Never understood people that just listen to the same shit over and over...hell, even within the same genre, people sometimes get locked into a specific generation and will only listen to that. That will never be me.Maybe it's the weed.
Still love concerts too...but, for the most part, I do tend to go to more Rock/Metal/Goth shows than anything else...but not always. Nope...life is too short.
I do have to admit though, i don't like too much abstract shit, when it comes to music...like certain types of jazz. I like my music to have more structure than that.
Not sure where I'm going with this...lol.

[NedLeeds]

Wow, is it April Fools' Day again? :neutral:

a) Jazz. Hello? If you're choosing Hip Hop over Jazz on the basis of "chord patterns" and "tonal characteristics", maybe you've written the algorithms incorrectly. I guess it depends on how you define "the pinnacle", but it's blatantly skewed more toward money than actual creativity if you're going by the US Billboard Hot 100 chart from 1960 (when American music started, I guess) to 2010. You've pretty much eliminated those pesky niche markets of Blues and Country which aren't very American anyway, right, scientists?

b) anyone who's trying to quantify musical importance with algorithms is just abusing their resources unnecessarily. And how can you trumpet the merits of your scientific study while claiming the importance of hip hop because "hip hop helped empower marginalized black youth nationwide"? Is that scientific?

Anyway, New Wave and Post-Punk happened way before '83. Just so much silliness here, this feels more like some plucky undergrad's thesis than a legitimate attempt at science.

I think that might have been my first post and it had nothing to do with hotties. I knew I should've clicked on "Hanging Below the Skirt…" instead.

[Paladin]

Yeah, weird science...

[Ben in LA]

Don't worry; rap/hip-hop is on its way out </sarcasm>

[natina]

a short time ago

RAP/HIP HOP was the only music that was profitable.

country music was not even charting and rock & roll was not as profitable as RAP/HIP HOP


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3htOCjafTc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owdl9BnxHV4


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p9jSRxguAA


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDApZhXTpH8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljK_NZxNUn8

[MrFanti]

None of the scientists were educated in music theory obviously.
Profit is one thing but sustenance is another.

Heck, pet rocks were profitable too.

[runningdownthatdream]

we don't need some pop-culture study done by pompous university types to tell us this. Love it or hate it, rap and hiphop music and culture has massively changed Western society and it hasn't stopped there: from India to China to Thailand to Philippines you just have to listen to the local pop music and see the clothes people are wearing to understand the depth of the influence. I was in Poland in 2002(!) and neo-Nazi skinheads were rapping and pimping like they'd just stepped out of Brooklyn. Now we should ask ourselves this: WHY, why are disparate societies across the globe adopting, embracing, and worshipping the music and culture of a relatively small group of people based in urban centres across the US? For me - more importantly - I'd like to know why only the negatives from rap and hiphop are played up and never the positives. It's amusing and at the same time insulting to see some jackass out of Mumbai or Manila try to dress, rap, talk, and dance like he/she stepped out of a 50 video without having any notion what any of what they're doing and saying actually mean.

[giovanni_hotel]

Jazz???

So much rap music is disposable pop cotton candy anyway.

After a certain age if rap is the only music blasting on your radio, you look emotionally stunted.

Hoes, whips and stacks. There's more to life than that.

Grunge(modern rock) also was a huge music revolution in the early 1990s, but hasn't sustained like rap has.

Because something is popular doesn't mean it's the pinnacle of American music.

That would be the equivalent of saying Benny Goodman is more important than John Coltrane because he sold more records.


I can listen to Thelonious Monk and Steely Dan alternately and not feel like I'm losing brain cells like I do if I try to jam out to Jay Z and Biggie 24/7.

What about the music revolution before the Beatles that started in the 1950s, you know, ROCK AND ROLL??lol

Or Motown in the 1960s and the birth of modern R&B??

Pop music is really too varied and complex to distill it down to three periods.

[Ben in LA]

Hip hop is more than Jay Z and Biggie...and more than "hoes, whips, and stacks" as well.

[runningdownthatdream]

I'm not disputing that MANY of the popular artists/music influenced by rap/hiphop are atrocious but the fact remains there are far more globally popular artists using that style of music than there are artists demonstrating an influence by jazz, R&B, or even rock for that matter. Sales DO count. If you're losing brain cells listening to Jay-Z or Biggie then you're clearly not listening with the right ears as both have demonstrated the ability to create challenging, lyrical, and even profound rhymes.

[MrFanti]

Hip hop is so unimaginative theory wise that it has to sample (quite often) from the much more imaginative and (more complex in theory) Soul and R&B eras.

[Plaything]

The first overt recognition and acknowledgement of rhyme.

[giovanni_hotel]

I'm not disputing that MANY of the popular artists/music influenced by rap/hiphop are atrocious but the fact remains there are far more globally popular artists using that style of music than there are artists demonstrating an influence by jazz, R&B, or even rock for that matter. Sales DO count. If you're losing brain cells listening to Jay-Z or Biggie then you're clearly not listening with the right ears as both have demonstrated the ability to create challenging, lyrical, and even profound rhymes.

My personal opinion, but JayZ is really overrated.
Biggie was a talented lyricist but the subject matter he rhymed about was mostly in the gutter.

I agree with Ben in LA that hip hop is more than just gangsta rap, but the artists who chart in hip hop are usually wastes of time artistically.

That said, hip hop is currently the dominant pop music standard, but calling it the pinnacle of American music is just trolling music lovers for clicks.

[Stavros]

A definition of American music would make for a lively discussion.
On the face of it, most American music by origin is either Black or Jewish, given the enormous influence of the music brought to America by slaves - from the field-holler to the blues and Jazz- out of which came rock and roll and soul, long before Rap went back to the field-holler mode of communication- rap is part of a lineage linked to the explicit scat that was common in the 1920s and 1930s with its lyrics of sex, violence and often misogyny too (see the link below) -very little in music is original. On another train, the American musical was dominated by George Cohan, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin and may be a mix of the music they and their families brought from the Shtetl filtered through classical music. A book of American songs would thus have to include all those numbers from Broadway as well as Tamla Motown. To me there are cultural markers which have regional characteristics -what was the influence of Cajun music imported from France on the development of Country Music? Why, by contrast, does the music of the immigrants from China and Japan appear to have had such little influence on popular music? For that matter, Caribbean immigrants do not appear to have had as much fortune with Reggae, Bluebeat, Ska and Rocksteady as happened in the UK -was Bob Marley ever big in the US? I don't see a connection between Reggae and American youth music. And a lot of that comes out of Calypso which comes out of slavery....

http://www.cracked.com/article_17625_7-songs-from-your-grandpas-day-that-would-make-eminem-blush.html

-note, I do not endorse the content of these lyrics!

[runningdownthatdream]

Agreed on Jay-Z........

Agreed as well about the term 'pinnacle of American music'. I don't appreciate much of the shit that gets labeled as rap or hiphop and haven't since the late 90s. Perhaps the more appropriate term might be 'most Influential American music' within the past 40 years. Really, since disco can you think of any other musical genre which has influenced more cultures across the world?

[runningdownthatdream]

Stavro, reggae has influenced hiphop tremendously and many of the most well-respected rappers are 1st or 2nd generation West Indians including the currently well-known Nicki Minaj (Trinidad). But it's not played up much and not reflected much in the language as indeed West Indian culture tended to just merge into black American culture. In the UK you have a different dynamic: West Indians carved out an identity within the British culture which eventually adopted many West Indian themes like reggae and (unfortunately) patois. I'm somewhat fascinated by the way patois (a bastard of the English language) found it's way back home to end up mixed back into the original English!

[Stavros]

Thanks for the information as there are a lot of things about youth culture I simply do not know. Not sure why you are hostile to patois, as it has always been part of immigrant communities as they try to adapt their mother tongue with the host language. I think it would be seen by many to enrich the social fabric, even if it does alienate some -but the Queen's English is not for everyone!