NOTE: All that is written on this subject is related to personal experiences in my life as I experienced it.
“Digging”… a term used by DJs. This is the art of searching for all the right music to re-create something magical and original in your mix. As a DJ, I know this all too well. I am always in search of that next jewel that will set my mix apart from the many DJs of the world or listening to something that always makes somebody interested in the "different" that I am listening to.
I have been hearing these complaints for far too long, “What has happened to the poetry in rap?” or “Why does all Hip Hop music sound the same now?” Personally, the public is responsible for choosing all the “Li’l Young Ones” as the hottest rappers for all these years; but that’s another conversation.
What is true is that the REAL has always been there; it has never left. The problem is one of two issues. It has been in your face and you’ve ignored it or you haven’t been looking in the right places. Like anything, music is cyclical and every genre has its “Golden Years”. Hip Hop is a culture that won’t die. It is going through another change. Rap music has lost its way for over a decade now. As being a person who has experienced it from its beginning and has a genuine love for it, I like other genuine lovers of Rap music, know what is really going on.
Rap music originally started as an underground thing in parties, street circles and block parties. As Brionne Smith wrote, “We used to dance all night and party to tracks made by Kool Herc, Sugarhill Gang, Funky Four Plus One, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five and many more.” I was a youngster up in that party mix, but later as a DJ, I broke all the latest tracks of the others she mentions, “…Big Daddy Kane, KRS-ONE, Rakim, LL Cool J, & Chuck D who invented complex wordplay that made hip-hop an intellectual sport forcing an MC to express himself with words.”
Breaking tracks – one of the first to play the latest released single of an artist. The only way you can do this, you have to have your ear to the ground. You have know where to find the music as it releases, be apart of a DJ record pool, have a hook-up in the record store that would inform you, or any combination of the three. This, even-though I didn’t know at the time, was how it was to search the underground for the jewels. In the record stores 3-4 times a week digging through all of the records in search of new and old tracks. Hours upon hours, looking for and sometimes relocating a record so that only I could find it because I didn’t have that $7.99 + tax for that record at the moment. What I also didn’t know was that this would become the foundation of how I would search for music for the rest of my life. Speeding through time from those mid to late-80s to present, I still do the same thing, but now it is online.
I discover Rap music in its purest and rawest form, but now from a world perspective. In 2006, I came across some of the hottest emcees from the UK. During that same year, CL Smooth in my opinion dropped the hottest LP in Rap music that year. As recent as last year, I discovered some of the newest females in Rap that collaborated with 2 historian female legends, Bahamadia and Roxanne Shante and they did a European tour known as The Revival.
What has been happening is that newer artists are teaming up some of the legends. Other new artists are teaming up with DJs that promote their music online. In a sense, the REAL Rap music has went back underground. As the DJ that I am, I am still getting my “fix” of the true art form listening to real emcees by digging through the internet and visiting the websites of these artists, listening to independent shows and being apart of some exclusive, independent record pools. I have long since, stopped listening to the radio nor do I play the Rap music that is being played by the masses.
Wordsworth, Invincible and Sway are just a few of these artists that I am referring to. The point is this; the internet is the biggest resource you have available to you. If you are really interested in finding the Rap music that is not this every day, commercial imitation of Rap music, start digging. It is out there and the artists would really appreciate your support. Rap is not dead, it’s just underground and you just have to tap into the vein and insert your intravenous to get your fix. Just dig and you will find it!
