Who cares if you’re encouraging them to be arrogant, you have their money and know their dreams are incredibly unlikely to materialise, hence have the upper moral ground.
- Rod Blagojevich wiretap transcript.
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I guess the whole thing about this hip hop naming thing s, why did/does the hip hop community have the ingrained need to make up their own names for things which already have accepted names in every other genre of music? "Beats" are rhythm section, "making a beat" is either laying down a rhythm track or programming a sequence, "loops" are normally called "sequences", and "MC" is little more than lead vocalist.
"Producing", as the amateur hip hop community thinks of it, has no real counterpart because it's just not a task that one has ever considered big enough to have it's own name until now. It's kind of like arranging, but not quite. But it most certainly is not producing in the tradiitional sense.
Now, some of the real hip hop pros like Dre and RZA and others have indeed become real, standard definition, professional producers. But there is a B.I.G. difference between the scope of the work they do and the average home hip hopper laying a rap over a couple of loops.
What it comes down to, IMHO, is the hip hop community, which started in the ghettos and barios, needed an identity of their own; it was an anti-establishment move. "F*ck the man, I'm callin' myself what I want." More power to you.
The problem is, once you have lifted yourself out of the ghetto - or even more important, if you're just as middle class as Joe Punchclock and Sally Housecoat - then the vocabulary is just posing. Not a very attractive thing for a community who's rallying cry is "keep it real".
G.
