The Zen of Primary Hip-Hop

Does it get better than My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy? Of course it does. What has it done to thump the world so deep?

Maybe it's the epoch of striking crossovers began by Walk This Way. 'Ye in his own brand of mastercraft motherfuckery has invited both autotuned neo-folkist Bon Iver(the hell else would you describe him?) for the single and Elton John for an almost-too-long-enough piano solo, placed carefully in front-center row, middle of nowhere. Takes balls. Much less to pull it off.

Sure it's a personal work, and the kid's tastes run diverse. But on a more meta level, the album's endearing- a telling and honest moment in mad respect for hiphop's origins.

Uniquely as a genre, hiphop developed sort of tangentially out of raw pop culture- elements of bebop, spoken word, jazz, irrelevant to try to list here- it never had the sort of cellular branching other forms of music had. Classical as we know it began as string trios, music on rails, rigid one-zero-one structure; unwilling to explore the glory it represented; and within a few hundred years, boom Tchaikovsky. Rock and roll roots in blues- man and guitar front porch- the same structures took decades to flesh out, and never entirely.

Hip hop for such a prime cultural creative force never had the same upbringing. It is the mutt of pop culture. Could you reverse-engineer it? Could you make an origin story, start over, reduce hip-hop to binary?

If not just as a genre but as an imposing influence on all what is, hiphop needs a reflection, a meditation on itself. What is essential about it- headphones in, streetlight, beat, texture- and no one does efficient, instrumental hiphop like Japan's DJ Krush.

His 1998 instrumental classic Kakusei and 1997 monolith Milight fulfill a loose basis for hiphop as binary language; touches on texture && open air all art needs, like the front por...fuck naw, the zen sand garden with churning Technic tables in place of a rake. Krush's collabs with rappers the world round about individualism, mourning and beyond have spun some of the most spectacular flows time's gifted the cold earth(including maybe my top 1 list). Get back.

Yeah, yeah, outside of pseudointellectual bullshittery and suchlike posturing, it has a place in the public thump- Lil' Wayne has been a timely surprise curator of primary hiphop with A Milli(that link is your licensed excuse to listen to it again you're welcome) and the surprise Six Foot Seven Foot; take one basic template, one unbroken flow, swing that shit where it belongs. I guess we're always about to find out where that is.

Glass half full / I'll spill ya

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Oh, howdy. I'm Will. Elsewhere you can find me here. By the way you're going to want to bookmark Blood Is One or add us to your Google Reader and whatever. Things are happening.