Let’s be honest, it takes a Yeezy-ego sized set of stugots to pop shit about Hip Hop in the 90’s, that is, if you can pridefully call yourself a Hip Hop fan at all. The “Golden Era” coinage for the genre is so irrevocably undebatable that some of its main contributors may even stretch the time period almost solely to include a few other greats- my theory, to make sure that the statement is that much more unquestionable. Fuck, way I see it, you have 85-99 which would include KRS, Run-DMC, MC Lyte, Slick Rick, The Fat Boys, The Tribe, Wu, Heavy D, Queen Latifah, LL, De La, Fugees (together), The Beastie Boys, Common, The Roots, Nas, Lauryn Hill, B.I.G., Pun, Jigga, Busta Rhymes, Pac, Missy Elliot, Beatnuts, OutKast, Eminem, Das Efx, Onyx, Boot Camp Clik, Cypress Hill, EPMD, Busta and a wholatta ovas, all instrumental in this movement that we all love so much.
My roommate is 37-38(?) so he tends to limit the Golden Era to 85-95, y’know, starting with Slick Rick and ending with Tha Fugees. I’m a fairly sexy-ass 30 so I feel like Mos Def & and Kweli, Hov, Eminem, Big L and Pun have to be included in this shit, I’ongivafizzuck what nooooooobody say.
As far as twenty-two year old Long Beach native/emcee Vince Staples is concerned, he be like “FUCK 90’s Hip Hop!”
Wait, maybe that’s all that people heard when he told TIME “The 90’s get a lot of credit- I don’t really know why?”
At first I’m like “nigga, whaaaaaaaa?!?”
Then I think about it for a while and what makes some of my favorite artists of the 90’s my favorite; the era itself, reminiscence, that, and I pretty much lumped a few of my favorites into what we call “The Golden Era” just because I’m dat Nigga.
I was a seven-year-old when my cousins Stephanie and Theresa were handing out treats for the first one to memorize “Scenario”, nostalgic, but not what I thought was the best in my more cognitive years. I had the commercial five that I thought were the best: Eminem, Jigga, Pun, Nas, and Jadakiss- I was budding drug dealer, fuck-can I say? Now, as an adult, Aesop Rock hails for me as best and favorite, not that the two adjectives will ever coincide while I’m maintaining an unbiased opinion.
So, let’s imagine, however accurately, that Vince Staples was born in 1993. Yeah, hard to imagine that someone born in the 90’s could be over the age of ten but, here we are. At the age Vince Staples was when I was given incentive to memorize Hip Hop lyrics, his older cousins would have been teaching him… what, I don’t know, Back Dat Azz Up? There was better Hip Hop at the time, Black Star, The Roots even but, hypothetically, if he was being put on to joints like Common’s “The Light”, homie’s actual interests wouldn’t have actually kicked in until the 50 Cent w/ G-Unit (including Game)/ Dipset/ Fat Joe (post-Pun) Era with Lil Wayne to reign after Jigga’s pseudo-retirement stage. You still had the remnants of relevance remaining OutKast, Eminem, Jay-Z and Nas but between the Jiggy-Era and the ultra-crack dealing era immediately after, the likes of Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco and Kid Cudi ushered in a new wave (ha, literally like the New Wave of Hip Hop) of sensitivity that hadn’t hit the Hip Hop scene as heavy since the coined “Golden Age.”
For a long time even I was stuck on the late-90’s under the impression that punch lines and flow just some shit that the “Old Skool” just wasn’t up on, yet “bust a nut inside your eye to show you where I come from” was something I missed in the second grade, my barber would be sure to remind me of this when I was fifteen and knew it all. Either way, you could say that I’d have still said that the game don’ changed. This way of thinking is what the Germans would call urdummheit, or, primeval idiocy
What is it about people in general that makes us believe that we are that much smarter than the generation before us and/or, even more so, our parents? What makes those members from the previous generations believe that they are so much smarter than us? Could it be that we might not be learning from their mistakes, or is it that we truly cannot teach the old dawgs new tricks?
The crazy thing about it is that Hip Hop is starting to reach an age where even some of its contributors are not to being required to give props to its founding fathers as much as they were, they just rap. No other genre requires its performers to do this shit either but, it also doesn’t mean much to these artists that the origin of their craft had originally come from black folks.
What would Bluegrass be without the influences of ol’ Negro Spirituals?
What would Rock be without the influence of Jazz or The Blues coming out of Treme or The Mississippi Delta? All of these styles came from rough times and no one is required to know them to be great at what they do, no more than a savant in any genre really; no more than any emcee has to know the sample on the beat that he or she is rhyming over; no more than any great graffiti artist has to know artists before them. They just have to be great at what they do. Sure, one gets the snide remarks for not knowing but, when you’re are just that good, does it really even matter?
Between the hundreds of books, blogs, websites, videos, songs, and visual art, Hip Hop is documented all too overwhelmingly well and is starting to get lost in the volumes upon volumes of over-information. Be that as it may, there are young Hip Hop purists like Joey Bada$$ who’ve mastered the art of nostalgia so, it is not impossible to get your uncle to add variety to his Boot Camp Click station on Pandora. There is however something daring to be said about the objectivists in the game and, if nothing else, Vince Staples has proven himself to be the Howard Roark showering from The Fountainhead of Hip Hop.
Yeah, I just did that.
