Why is pop/catchy music frowned upon in hip-hop/R&B?

[Here Comes the Pain]

Op are you talking about artists like derulo, pitbull, Flo rida, etc?

 

[vaudevillevillain]

Hip hop never was and will be categorized as popular music.

meanwhile aubrey out here breaking records

 

[Wacky D]

Yes it was. Motown made Pop music. I mean, Barry Gordy told Marvin Gaye that What's Going On wouldn't be successful because people wanted to hear love songs from him.

ehh.

referring to Motown as pop is a bit much.

they were moreso in the business of making songs that reasonated with everyone. basically laying the blueprint for laface.

You're still acknowledging that she was indeed a rapper. Missy Elliott had the support of Hip Hop from the jump.

what hip-hop circles have you ever been around where missy was a hot topic?

what blocks have you been on where missy Elliot album cuts were being bumped??

and please be honest.

Missy is super hip hop. 4 elements include b boying. Watch her videos. Hip hop is not 1 thing. She is original and produces.

thats not what I'm getting at.

and everything you said, applies to Macklemore as well.

 

[JustCKing]

ehh.

referring to Motown as pop is a bit much.

they were moreso in the business of making songs that reasonated with everyone. basically laying the blueprint for laface.

And that's exactly what Pop music is. I won't even try to even understand your fixation with La Face. Motown laid the blueprint for every Black label that came after. Many have dreamed of building their own Motown from Puffy to Russell to Jermaine Dupri to Andre Harrell to just about every Black music CEO who was in the business of making music.

what hip-hop circles have you ever been around where missy was a hot topic?

what blocks have you been on where missy Elliot album cuts were being bumped??

and please be honest.

Circles that exist outside of the Internet. And while we're at it Hip Hop isn't limited to the block. There are people that are break dancers that Missy's music resonated with. Even beyond that, Missy's songs bumped in clubs. Yes, the clubs are a part of Hip Hop as well.

 

[TrebleMan]

End of the day it's just a preference like everything else and people voice their opinions on it.

Either you like pop music or hip-hop with pop music or don't.

Despite what anybody says, it doesn't make your less or more hip-hop. Some people will view you in one light for listening to it and some people will view you in a complete other light, but neither opinion holds more weight than the other.

I remember when hip-hop heads used to scold some of the legends they talk about today.It's all simply a narratives game.

 

[Cryptocurrency Scarface]

All the uninformed or lazy hip hop heads saying pop isn't part of the culture need to sit down. Dudes were rap/singing about "true love" since LL. Even Kool G Rap had "She loves me, she loves me not". Melodic/pop songs have existed since the start. It's only frowned upon by grandpa's who only listen to one genre, and its usually gangsta rap.

that's not pop that's being versatile you can make a song about females and be lyrical why was common still pretty underground compared to Nelly?

 

[Cryptocurrency Scarface]

were these rap songs not pop songs?

the first one is definitely not pop

 

[Wacky D]

And that's exactly what Pop music is. I won't even try to even understand your fixation with La Face. Motown laid the blueprint for every Black label that came after. Many have dreamed of building their own Motown from Puffy to Russell to Jermaine Dupri to Andre Harrell to just about every Black music CEO who was in the business of making music.



Circles that exist outside of the Internet. And while we're at it Hip Hop isn't limited to the block. There are people that are break dancers that Missy's music resonated with. Even beyond that, Missy's songs bumped in clubs. Yes, the clubs are a part of Hip Hop as well.

i have no fixation with laface. i don't even like that label.
and the Motown/laface comparison that i made, clearly went over your head.

as far as the missy part, youre not telling me anything that i don't already know buddy. and you'd be shocked to know that i like some of missy's stuff.
but thats neither here nor there when it comes to the point that i made, which you are clearly tip-toeing around.

 

[Cryptocurrency Scarface]

Beyonce & Rihanna makes pop/catchy music and no one hates on them for it.

Whitney Houston & Micheal Jackson made pop/catchy music and no one hated on them for it.

I don't fukk with her music

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Exactly but similar structure doesnt indicate your genre. Corforming is going pop in HIP HOP. Dmx aint go pop on slippin nor hows it going down. Organic hits are not pop no matter how u structure it. You talkin charts talk about the music n youll answer ops question. We hate in HIP HOP when artist blatantly reach for a hit.

no...you're talking about intentional watered down rap. For example Early gangsta rap/dre's f-gunk was pop w/o actually trying to go pop

 

[IllmaticDelta]

It doesn't matter whether it's organic or not. "Slow Motion" is a song that got love from the hood and the streets before it even became a single. Once Juve released it as a single, it shot to #1. It was organic, but still a Pop song, because it wasn't just a song that was huge in the hood/streets and became popular all over. If it's consumed by the masses, it's Pop. If it's structured like a Pop song, it's technically a Pop song. It's not exactly rocket science. And yes, DMX went Pop without necessarily blatantly trying to become a Pop artist.

And no people don't hate in Hip Hop when artists blatantly reach for a hit. A lot of that hate comes from:

1) artists no longer fitting into the box that their original, day one audience put them in

2) they are no longer exclusive because now the masses know about them (pretty much started happening to Weeknd before he even had a Max Martin produced single)

Lauryn Hill and a host of other artist didn't conform, but the music still crossed over to the masses.

Exactly my point(s). This guy gets it

 

[FeloniousMonk]

meanwhile aubrey out here breaking records

He's a hybred rap/rnb singer who makes records specifically to chart and go pop.

A person who at one time in hip hop would be considered a sellout..

Different time, different generation..

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Sales dont make pop.

Conforming does. Jadas why crossed over he never went pop. Hip hop is not pop, its rebellion. Same as rocc was when it was pure. Why is it hard to believe its nikkas riding to grimey shyt? I grew up gang bamgin n hustlin I dont relate to simps cryin over hoes. Im much more westside gunn n conway than florida, why is that frowned upon. I pull up on hoes wit roc marciano playin while i smoke an l. We different

again, you're referring to intentional watering down to appeal the masses more that what's actually popular.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I don't think just because something is popular that makes it pop..pop is more of a sound and song writing structure than just "popular" IMO.

if you have a song with a pop structure but noone is consuming it, it's not true pop music pop music is nothing more than mass consumed/crossover music which is exactly the point in these articles

The best representation of "pop" is the top 40 and billboard top 100. Have you ever looked atthose charts? The music on them comes from the main core genres

Rap music doesnt debut on pop charts (unless its a marketing plan)

Rap does debut on top 40/billboard 100


Why Let Pop Steal Listeners, When Country Can Be Pop Too?

Top 40 pop radio has always been about taking the biggest songs from the respective genres and featuring them in one place. That’s pop radio’s job; that’s its niche in the marketplace. Now country is showing the early signs of coveting that position for itself.

Why Let Pop Steal Listeners, When Country Can Be Pop Too?


Fixing the Charts

S.F.J.: Who are Billboard’s charts for?

C.M.: Billboard’s stock answer is that the charts are for the industry. But I have long argued that the Hot 100 is not actually useful, day to day, for a record executive trying to do his job. It is an amalgam of a bunch of streams of data to produce one authoritative barometer of the biggest hits in the U.S.A. That’s enormously useful to the public—or, at least as long as that chart remains authoritative, it’s a handy benchmark. But if you’re, say, a radio programmer trying to figure out what to program, the Hot 100 will only get you so far before you have to kind of figure out, “O.K., but what works for my market? Or what works for the eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old females that I’m targeting?” But, for the public, the Hot 100 is an excellent Dow Jones Industrial Average of pop music for America.

I would say that, to some extent, the R. & B./Hip-Hop chart is the same thing. It’s more useful as a gut check or a benchmark for the industry on the biggest, most credible black, or urban—pick your euphemism—records in the United States.

So, how do you come up with a pop-chart metric, like R. & B. and hip-hop, that’s neither arbitrary nor overly narrow?

One of the big reasons the Hot 100 has it easy is because it’s all genres; we call it the pop chart, but anything can appear on the Hot 100. If a catchy Gregorian chant came out tomorrow—in fact, about twenty years ago, a catchy Gregorian chant did appear on the Hot 100—it would chart there. Whereas the genre charts that I speak about in this article all have this definitional problem.

Why not get rid of all the genre charts, publish a Hot 500, and add genre tag to each song? The chart would lean more heavily on better data, and let the reader sort out the relevant groupings. It’s not as if charts are a challenging read, especially in an age of constant data visualization.

I mean, sure, that would do an end-run around the problem of not being able to isolate genre-specific data in the digital age—one big chart for everybody. But I think it’d be a shame. I think it’s still useful to track the music a subculture is consuming, separate from the mass audience, and that it should still be possible—even in an era of big data—to pinpoint and pry apart that subculture.

I think the way Billboard solves this problem—and they had it right for about forty years, before they changed the chart methodology in 2012—is to make these genres about the audience, not about the definition of music. And as long as there’s broad agreement over what the center of a genre is, you don’t have to agree about all of the boundaries, because that’s impossible and ever-shifting. But as long we can more or less agree about what the center of country is, what the center of R. & B. and hip-hop is, then you sort of say, “O.K., now let’s identify people who are fans of that center of the music and track what they like.” Then the boundaries to some extent take care of themselves. Because if people who congregate in black record stores or listen to Hot 97 suddenly decide that they like Lorde, it’s okay for Lorde to appear on the R. & B./Hip-Hop chart, because that group of people is actually consuming that song.

On the other hand, we’ve actually got a system now whereby, in order for something to appear on the charts, there’s a gatekeeper in the sky, which in this case is Billboard, saying that the Lorde record is R. & B., but this Bruno Mars song is not. In this system, you get into the quicksand of who qualifies, what are the edges, what are the boundaries? And that’s a mess.

If you’re going to come up with a credible chart, I feel like you don’t want to be in the business of defining what the boundaries of that genre are. Like, just to pick something off the top of my head, twenty-four years ago, the British duo DNA remixed Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” and it actually charted in the Top 10 of the R. & B. chart. It didn’t just make the top five of the Hot 100; it actually made the Top 10 on the R. & B. chart. Why? Did some gatekeeper in the sky say, “Suzanne Vega is now black enough for us to put her on this chart?” No, of course not. What actually happened was that black radio stations and black-owned or R. & B.-centric record stores were playing and selling that record in quantity; ergo it appeared on the R. & B. chart.

I wrote a piece for Slate back in December that seems relevant here. A couple of weeks before the end of the year, I noticed there had not been a single No. 1 record on the Hot 100 by a black person; 2013 was the first time that had happened. In the article, I alluded to the idea that we’re in a so-called “post-racial,” Obama-era America. There’s this sense that we, as Americans and as music fans, want to move beyond this and pretend that these genres don’t exist and good music is good music.

That’s bullshyt. Even if the definitions of these genres are harder to define than they were fifteen or twenty years ago, they’re still subcultures from which interesting music emerges and bubbles up, and also still subcultures where stuff from the top pushes down. I was careful in the piece not to merely talk about R. & B. music like it’s this farm team for big pop records that white people can consume. I’ve always been equally charmed by the R. & B. record that starts on the R. & B. chart and migrates to the Hot 100 and, say, a Hall and Oates record that starts pop but migrates back to the R. & B. chart. The way the R. & B. audience selectively decides, “We’re not interested in these five Hall and Oates tracks, but ‘I Can’t Go for That’? We’re very interested in that track.”

Fixing the Charts - The New Yorker

 

[IllmaticDelta]

ehh.

referring to Motown as pop is a bit much.

they were moreso in the business of making songs that reasonated with everyone. basically laying the blueprint for laface.

that's what "pop" is