GRANDGOOD

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5. CLANS, POSSES, CREWS & CLIQUES: WHO U WIT?
Safety in numbers. Movements, collaborations, big name guests, teams, crew beef, etc. The days of the solo roller are over. In the prime of rap, you were judged solely on your music. Rakim, Nas & Biggie (early on), LL, Kane…they all built their legend on music alone. Hell, Rakim had no guests on his first 4 albums.

4. TOO MUCH MUSIC
Like the crew theory, this is about quantity. People want more, even if it means a dip in quality. Some people can put out music quickly and do it well. Some people just want to bombard the market for the sake of doing it. Rakim did albums every 2 years. EPMD, Scarface and Ice Cube did it every year and that was considered fast. Nowadays, if you don’t have 2 albums, 5 mix tapes and 10 guest appearances a year, you’re slippin and people forget you. This attempt to keep up with the rush has cheapened the music.

3. TOO COOL TO HAVE FUN/NO BALANCE IN RAP
Not too many people are doin music for fun anymore…We all wanna get paid. Shit, I got bills too, I love money! But too many people just seem like they’d rather be doing other shit…Having fun is nowhere near as important as your life before you got signed. And there’s plenty of battle MC’s, political MC’s, soulful MC’s and killer thugs but it seems there’s not many funny artists no more. Like on some Biz Mark, Humpty Hump, The Afros shit.

2. LAW & ORDER: MPC
Hip-hop is based in illegality, but not maliciously. Ironically, many people got into it to stay out of legal troubles (a life of crime), but technically this positive move is also seen as a life of crime by the powers that be. Mix tapes, remixes, sampling, parodies (somewhat)…the appeal of hip-hop was always rearranging the old to create the new. It’s the lifeline of the music. One man’s treasure is apparently another man’s trash. In the wake of DJ Drama getting busted by the Feds for selling mix tapes that the labels and artists themselves approve and benefit from, it has never been more evident that the RIAA and their legal vendetta have just pulled the IV.

1. THE INTERNET
Talk about a double edged sword. Never has it been so easy to get your music heard. If I make a dope beat, I can put it on my myspace page and it’s up in an hour (depending on the servers, it may be “processing” for about 3 years). No more spending money and wasting time for records and test presses. Now people in Arkansas that only have MTV and the internet can hear my music. Limited distribution isn’t as big a problem as before. Everybody is almost equal, shit we all have myspace pages. But look at the flipside. Everybody is almost equal, shit we all have myspace pages. There is so much shit out and the internet lurks with a million people doing the same thing, its virtually impossible to stand out.