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Table of contents
| Table of Contents |
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Child pages
| Child pages (Children Display) |
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Websites / Forums / Online Communities
- Blogs
- 2DopeBoyz
- Apparently this blog is closely associated with OKP.
- 2DopeBoyz
- Forums
- Articles
- 2013.08.07 - Complex - The Most Influential Hip-Hop Message Boards Right Now
- I added the forums listed in this article to the list below.
- 2013.08.07 - Complex - The Most Influential Hip-Hop Message Boards Right Now
- Boxden - Hip-Hop ← 178 members online, 237 anons, seems pretty active, but it seems listener-focused as opposed to creator-focused. Everything hip-hop is in a single subforum.
- TheColi - Very active, dozens of posts per day.
- "New registrations are currently not being accepted."
- FutureProducers.com
- Rap & Hip-Hop / R&B - ~3 comments per day
- Songwriting and Lyricism - one comment every 1-7 days
- GearSlutz.com - "The #1 Website for Pro Audio"
- Rap + Hip Hop engineering & production - ~5 comments per day
- Songwriting - 1-4 comments per day
- Genius - Rap ← Hundreds of comments per day.
- TheHoodUp - Though this isn't explicitly a forum about rap music—its focus is street life—rappers are a common topic of discussion on Hood Up.
- HypeBeast - Dead/Frozen. There's a message saying they're prepping to reboot it.
- IllMuzik.com
- IGN - Hip-Hop - ~10 comments per day. Listener-focused.
- KanyeToThe - 3000 people online?? It looks like 200+ members. Has "Creative Showcase" and "Gadgets & Tech" subforums.
- Lil Wayne HQ - Very active, hundreds of people per day.
- NikeTalk - Music - 130 mems / 260 anons. Listener-focused subforum of a shoe-focused forum. They have two threads that are open to people promoting stuff.
- Okayplayer.com - began as the official fansite of The Roots
- Philaflava - Almost dead, 1-3 posts per day. "the go-to site for East Coast/"Golden Age" rap purists"
- Rap Battles Forum - ~1 comment per day in a few of the subforums. They have a "Lounge" forum.
- RapMusic.com - Dead
- RapPad Forum
- Rap-Royalty.com ← This seems to be strictly rap battles. There's no "General" forum. 58 members online when I visited, it said 617 total people viewing. This is the #2 site on Google for "rap forums" after Genius.
- Articles
- News
- Reddit
- /r/makinghiphop
- A link to a search I did for references to existing apps.
- Lots of the threads are people asking for mobile (mixing) apps. Mobile is taking over...
- A link to a search I did for references to existing apps.
- /r/Parappa/ - Parappa the rapper players. Seems to only be posts about the game.
- /r/rap
- /r/hiphopheads
- /r/rapbattles
- /r/cringe
- /r/ThisIsOurMusic
- /r/Hiphopcirclejerk
- /r/radditmusic
- /r/makinghiphop
- StackExchange - Music
- YouTubers
- Full-on rap
- ColeMizeStudios
- Epic Rap Battles
- RapNews <- Russian
- TheWarpZone ← They do movie recap raps
- People who have made a rap song or two
- Diran Lyons
- Jake Paul
- h3h3 - They know that white rapper, Ethan critiqued Jake Paul
- Schmoyoho
- Full-on rap
Criticisms of rap
- The lyrics
- The accompaniment
- Lack of sophistication in the melodies
Keith Richards (of The Rolling Stones) - "What rap did that was impressive was to show there are so many tone-deaf people out there. All they need is a drum beat and somebody yelling over it and they’re happy. There’s an enormous market for people who can’t tell one note from another." (Source)
- Lack of sophistication in the melodies
...
- 2017.08.05 - YouTube - Thoughty2 - Why Is Modern Pop Music So Terrible?
- Rough summary based on my memory:
- He begins by talking about how experimental "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is.
- Timbre variety has been dropping. "Most music today is created with the same combination of a keyboard, drum machine, sampler, and computer software." (Based on a study by the Spanish National Research Council.)
- TODO: Finish summarizing this video. I was at around 4:20. All the stuff below is from my memory, while the stuff above is based on writing stuff down as I go through the video.
- Louder music tends to do better (is perceived as better?) and so there's a "loudness war". But because music often gets normalized to the same maximum volume (when played on the radio?), musicians are making their music seem louder by raising the volume of the quieter parts of their song, reducing the "dynamic range". But this is like trying to make an image bigger than it originally was, in that the new louder / larger version is clearly lacking detail, and so it looks / sounds worse.
- Two guys have written "the overwhelming majority" of pop songs over the past ~20 years.
- Producers are relying more on familiarity to get you to like the music, and so they arrange to have it playing on all the radios, in all the shopping centers, in all the movies, etc.
- Rough summary based on my memory:
Books
- Books that are neither a 'how-to' for writing lyrics nor about analyzing certain songs' lyrics (I have those books listed on the pages for those activities):
- Rap-Up: The Ultimate Guide to Hip-Hop and R&B
- This is just a simple history of hip-hop.
- Rap-Up: The Ultimate Guide to Hip-Hop and R&B
Courses
Articles
- 2011.02.01 - Poetry Foundation - How Ya Like Me Now: Does rap’s suspended adolescence keep it from serious consideration?
- TODO: Summarize this.
- 2011.09.30 - Yale Books - Adam Bradley Asks: Is Rap Poetry? Is It Good Poetry?
- TODO: Summarize this.
- 2011.12.07 - YouTube - TEDx - Hip-Hop & Shakespeare?
- IMO the best part of the video is where he performs Sonnet 18 as a rap.
- A lot of the later part of the video felt like fluff.
- The rap he does at the end (fitting the names of the plays into a rap) is boring because it's the typical "I'm the best, you're lame" diss rap.
- He's a good performer.
- 2016.02.04 - Reddit - r/hiphopheads - [Discussion] Knowing almost nothing about hip hop, I listened to (and ranked) 143 albums from the HHH Listening Club.
- hiphophead listening club ← This is the spreadsheet with his reviews
- r/hiphopheads Essentials List ← This is another spreadsheet with "essential albums" rec'd by HHH. Looks very helpful.
Tools
Terms
- punching - A technique used when recording a track where the rapper will start rapping part-way through the song, and then multiple recordings of them rapping will be stitched into a single track. This allows the rapper to correct mistakes more quickly. It's criticized by some people because it seems to make it possible to record raps that the rapper isn't actually able to perform live, because there's not enough gaps in the rap for the performer to breathe or because it's simply too difficult to get through the song without making mistakes.
Good Amateur / Underground Rappers
- Andrew hartman - Good flows, but half-nonsensical lyrical myricals, and they're trying to use a persona that doesn't fit with their likely upbringing.
International rap
Korean
- 2016.04.19 - YouTube - EUNG FREESTYLE (응프리스타일) - LIVE, SIK-K, PUNCHNELLO, OWEN OVADOZ, FLOWSIK
- rec'd by John