Will You '90s Babies Shut Up and Admit Rap Was 100 Times Better in the '90s?

Wait, you really, actually, seriously think hip-hop is better today?

You don't have to be old to know how that's complete nonsense.

Sure, there's a lot of great technology and a lot of free music. But the signal-to-noise ratio is preposterous, and much of what's made music easy to access and cheaper than ever hasn't made things any more enjoyable. If anything, it's made the task of hunting down the good stuff even more laborious, proliferating some of the worst parts of the culture.

And no, we're not Bitter Old Heads; all of us write about new rap daily, and have no problem finding new rap worth listening to. But there's plenty of other things missing from today's hip-hop that we took for granted back in the day. Now that they're gone, it's become so obvious how much better things used to be. As such, one small request:

Will You '90s Babies Stop It—Just Stop This—Shut Up, and Admit Rap Was 100 Times Better in the '90s?

(You probably won't. But we can still talk at you.)

Hip-hop style had nothing to do with the fashion industry.

If there's a publication that should criticize rap's embrace of high fashion (and vice versa), it's definitely not us (and it sure as shit isn't Lord Jamar and his ancient homophobic ass). But there's something to be said for the way hip-hop style worked in the '90s. That is, style started in the streets and worked its way up to mass appeal, not the other way around—style didn't follow fashion, it made fashion. And once clothes that kids in Flatbush and Bankhead and South Central made that jump to Yo! MTV Raps and Rap City, they were affordable enough that everyday people (in Omaha and Denver and Dayton) could actually cop the gear their favorite artists wore. Fashion came to us (see: how 95 percent of the world's youth dresses today), we didn't go to it.

Sample-based hip-hop spawned an entire culture of celebrating old, obscure, or forgotten artists.

Nerds will be nerds, and the obscure, forgotten, and underrated will always have their champions in the annals of music history. But hip-hop transformed the resuscitation of old artists into an entire wing of its musical museum.

In the late '80s, there was a run on James Brown loops, and you couldn't walk down a New York City street block without hearing his sped-up vocals shouting at you from a tenement window or passing car. Producers wanted to do more; samples became collages, and then the samples were distorted, bass lines were filtered, and artists began digging. At one point, a major hip-hop crew was even called "D.I.T.C."—Diggin' in the Crates. Searching for records to use as sample sources became a way to further the creative direction of the genre and cast off the shackles of JB's breakbeats.

Q-Tip sampled Roy Ayers, Large Professor sampled Donald Byrd and the music of R&B, jazz, and soul musicians again filled the airwaves and tape decks. Sometimes, older artists saw more money from the use of their samples than they did the originals. Sure, some rappers, from Puffy to Coolio, just re-imagined old hits for an audience that was too young for them the first time through. But plenty of producers were also playing with those breaks, re-inventing them and clipping distinct portions, rendering them unrecognizable. This tradition would wax and wane in popularity in hip-hop more widely, but once it started, it took on a life of its own.

There was no such thing as ironically bad rap.

Poor, poor Kriss Kross. If they'd come around 20 years later they'd be Williamsburg sensations, with an army of hipsters buttoning their flannels up the back and rocking skinny jeans ass-forward (come to think of it, that might be more comfortable). In the '90s, rap fans had to defend themselves against a constant barrage of attack from people who thought that rap wasn't even music. We didn't have any time (or room in our CD-buying budget) for an ironic stance about the music we loved. RiFF RAFF? That shit would not fly in 1994.

Freestyling meant freestyling.

The craft of rap once required—yes REQUIRED—multidimensional, varied abilities. Not to harp on "the art of the MC" here, but let's think briefly about freestyling: Gone are the days when one could lob five words, chosen at random, into the air for a mic-wielding poet to transform into an off-the-cuff narrative. Sure, the bars weren't always vicious (some folks, like Supernatural, employed stock phrases that helped to fill out his freestyles), but the infinite possibility and risk made it all so entertaining—and above all, was a proving ground for rap performance.

When 8 Mile exposed battle rap to the masses, the tide was already turning; the film completely flipped the free-flowing contests into a theater for pre-written punch-lines. Outside of performances, radio offered the best opportunity for DJs and listeners to test an MC's capability; if a rapper rehashed a 16 from an album, it was flat-out unacceptable. We needed to know if our rappers could actually rap.

Not everybody rapped.

In 2015, everybody and their grandma raps. Seriously, rapping grannies are all over YouTube. For every age, shape, size, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, educational background, and profession, there's somebody on a mic representing that. Inclusion, and using rap to express different POVs, should be a good thing, but the ubiquity of rap does have its downsides.

The element of surprise is lost. That first time you heard somebody who didn't fit your image of what a rapper looked or sounded like, it was mind-blowing and opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Now, if one of those aforementioned 85-year-old grandmas started kicking a verse, split open to reveal an alien, and that extraterrestrial kept right on rapping without skipping a beat, we'd shrug our shoulders. Meh. Saw that at Coachella five years ago, my dude.

Worse though, is that, with everybody rapping and able to record themselves and broadcast it on the Internet, there's zero quality control, nobody to make people think twice. A sea of wackness has watered down rap, and it only adds to our acceptance of horrible rap.

New Yorkers could still be snobby about New York rap.

Regional rap is finally getting its due, Atlanta has taken over as the central engine of hip-hop, and New York has slipped into a supporting historic role. But it's not hard to remember a time when New York ran shit, and it was fucking cool. New York didn't just lay the groundwork; every single rapper across the country who decided to get behind a mic was inspired by a New York talent, whether it was Big Daddy Kane's laid-back delivery, Slick Rick's flossing or Run-DMC's Raising Hell tour that sparked their interest. The plethora of styles that spread throughout the country were initially inspired by New York. You could find more variety in five boroughs than across the entire nation; there was no East-West beef, it was the Queens vs. the Bronx. And the city's identity and birthplace weren't tied to any one style; it was a city of true diversity. Any rapper who came up was indebted to New York, and everybody knew it.

Rap didn't give a fuck about a goddamn Grammy.

Nowadays you're likely to see rappers grinning and holding Grammy awards like they're holy artifacts (holy artifacts that you can drink D'ussé out of, sure, but still). But why? The rap awards still aren't presented during the main ceremony, which rarely yields performances of the nominated songs. The Grammys are still as fundamentally wrong as they've ever been about rap, and yet, they're cared-about and touted as achievements. Rappers didn't always used to care about Grammys. Hell, even Will Smith—not exactly known as the most hard-edged figure in hip-hop—protested the award ceremony. Rappers didn't always want Grammys, or give a shit about winning one, either. And until the Grammys treat rap with the respect it deserves, they still shouldn't (and even then, it's up for question).

Regional styles developed independently and weren't treated like trends.

Regional stars still exist. But rap's provincialism back in the '80s and '90s meant that distinct differences, production styles, and dialects developed independently. Artists, reliant on hand-to-hand promotion, performances, and word-of-mouth success, built their careers appealing to local audiences—and that meant that their sounds were driven by the communities they came from. While this kind of regional success still occurs, individual regional sounds are rarer than ever. First, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and resulting radio consolidation made for narrower radio playlists. Then the Internet came along, and the remaining below-the-radar scenes were blown up nationally; artists now connected with an online fanbase immediately. This new, post-regional rap treated retro-regional sounds as raw material to be reappropriated. The feedback loop between a regional fanbase and the artist, with a few extreme exceptions, was broken.

Mixtapes were actually tapes, and DJs had to have skills to create them.

The term mixtape has become an oxymoron in the Rapidshare era. But way back before hip-hop was a category on the iTunes music store, rap existed only at park jams, school gymnasiums, and neighborhood rec centers. If you weren't one of the "party people in the place to be" you missed everything. But this ephemeral art form proliferated by homemade cassette tapes recorded on portable boom boxes and traded like the treasures that they were. Tapes of DJs like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmasters Flash and Flowers were collected and dubbed and traded by a growing fan subculture.

Cab drivers and barber shops set themselves apart from the competition by keeping exclusive rap tapes in heavy rotation, cultivating a select clientele. Brucie B was one of the first to make a business out of producing and selling his own mixtapes, followed by Kid Capri and Doo Wop who packed their joints with exclusives galore. Then Ron G changed the game by mixing R&B vocals with hard rap beats to create the so-called "blend tape," which basically mapped out the whole Bad Boy Records sound when Puffy was still trying out for the high school football team in Mount Vernon. So the next time you get an email about so-and-so's new mixtape, remember that it's just a promo download. Because when Rakim said, "Eric B is on the cut no mistakes allowed," he was talking about deadly serious business.

We weren't so quick to call every album a classic.

Ever heard of the cognitive bias known as the availability cascade? Basically, it goes: Repeat something simple and superficially insightful, and repeat it long enough, and at some point it'll be accepted as truth. You wanna know what's bad about having a stupid, bombastic opinion early into an album's release? Rushing to judgment urges other people to rush to judgment, which then creates a wildly curved and inaccurate consensus, which can then drive the direction of would-be artists. That direction? To create contrived, first-impression classics. Also, it's just a conversation that makes us all stupider.

It was OK to be a "funny" rapper

There was a point in rap history where smiling became wack. Granted, that point was in the late '90s, but bear with us here. No one smiles in rap anymore, and hasn't for 15 years: Tyler's eaten a roach, Keef's going to jail, Drake's lost his cat, everyone's sad, or angry, or throwing bottles at Chris Brown, or all of the above. Can you imagine any of those rappers dropping self-deprecating raps like Positive K's "I Got a Man" or the Pharcyde's "Passin' Me By"? In 1991, Biz Markie released an album called I Need a Haircut that featured him on the cover getting a shape-up with a fucking chainsaw. Talk to us when Rick Ross comes out with his I Need a T-Shirt mixtape.

We preferred quality over quantity.

Blame the Internet; the world wide web created an audience thirsty for free content. Listening to music was an investment, and if you wanted your money's worth, you were going to spend some time with it, too. As a result, for listeners, consistency was important; and as an artist, the ability to create a consistent project of the best possible material was important, too. Sometime in the late 2000s, though, the floodgates opened; by 2009, everyone was releasing free artist mixtapes, and they were no longer freestyles over industry instrumentals, but any and everything an artist recorded. The non-stop drip to blogs and livemixtapes.com meant quality control went out the window; the most important thing was generating as many headlines as possible, keeping an artist's name on websites so they'd buy the album when it dropped in Nevruary. And suddenly it was a race to the bottom, as every demo, half-hearted song, and underwritten punchline made its way into one .zip file or another. Only the most talented rappers learned to adapt to the changing environment; many just killed quality control altogether.

People believed rap could actually change the world.

It was the late 1980s, and the world was going through a major shift: College admissions, once largely dominated by men and closed to people of color, were diversifying their ranks. With it came to a political reckoning, as systemic racism and sexism were attacked by a new, younger generation. As college education broadened, hip-hop was simultaneously coming into its own, and from the bookcases to the boulevards, there was a cohesive move toward change. Sure, N.W.A would strike around this time, making gangster rap's therapeutic Id a rising trend. But it was one color of a multi-hued contingent of artists who upset the status quo; even politicians in Washington were paying attention. It felt like even the music that played to our basest instincts, like 2 Live Crew, were a part of something bigger and more important, a fight against censorship and the establishment.

But the best rap at this time also made it cool to be conscientious. Gold dookie ropes were traded in for Africa medallions. Public Enemy had folks shunning material goods in favor of a raised fist, and the wave of pro-black conscious rap that followed, from X-Clan to Brand Nubian, made awareness of social justice issues a key part of hip-hop's DNA. But it wasn't just a trend; there was a feeling that hip-hop could, in fact, change the world, that it was an engine of the voiceless and the silenced, not just hip-hop's CNN but America's next revolution.

A rapper's live show was crucial, showmanship ruled, and people actually paid attention instead of taking pictures of themselves or checking Instagram.

As MC Shan pointed out on "They Used to Do It Out in the Park," hip-hop is, at its core, a live art form. There was a time when the greatest compliment you could pay a rapper was to say he was "live." Crews would battle it out for respect and sometimes to keep from getting stuck up at the end of the show. Rappers didn't have street singles and club bangers and lead singles—they had "routines." That's what Phife is talking about on "Check the Rhime" when he says, "back in the days on the boulevard of Linden/We used to kick routines and our presence was fittin'."

A routine was not just a tune but a way of putting that tune across, complete with costumes, choreography, and crowd participation. Remember that line about "Wave your hands in the air, and wave 'em like you just don't care"? That shit used to mean something. Now people can't wave their hands in the air because they're too busy Instagramming and Twitpic'in and Snapchatting and branding themselves as a 21st century "party person in the place to be" instead of paying attention to the artist on the stage. The real question: Is that their fault? Or the fault of technology? Or are today's MCs just not living up to Rakim's definition of the term: "'Cause to me, MC means move the crowd."

Rappers didn't talk about their "brand" or do corporate-sponsored showcases.

And corporate sponsorships, much less corporate-sponsored showcases? Sorry, DJ Quik wasn't playing any bar mitzvahs in the '90s, much less Wal-Mart Jam 2013. Aside from Sprite and A Tribe Called Quest and a handful of others (mostly liquor sponsorships), corporations didn't want rappers pushing their product. In fact, in the early '90s, companies ran from hip-hop like it stole something (which it probably did). Reasonable Doubt-era Jay Z wasn't a businessman (not that kind at least), or a business, man, and he didn't break bread with Warren Buffett, Jimmy Buffett, or any of those other Buffets from middle America.

We went to music stores to get music.

Tapes rocked 'til tapes popped. CDs scratched and skipped. Richer-sounding vinyl required constant attention or it warped like neglected children. And for all these headaches, a tangible music collection could also have your spot looking like an episode of Hoarders. Still, as these technologies went the way of the wooly mammoth, hip-hop lost something important: the music store.

Every community needs a place to gather, share information, and debate. Until the digital revolution, famed shops like Manhattan's Fat Beats, Brooklyn's Beat Street Records, L.A.'s VIP Records, and lesser-known but equally important local fixtures were musical Meccas where rap heads made weekly pilgrimages to cop new releases (when "first" actually meant something), be put up on artists, watch in-store performances, hop in freestyle ciphers, and kick it with people who shared their passion for boom-bap.

The Internet provides the simulacrum of the record shop experience with social networks, message boards, and music databases, but connecting (in the loosest sense of the word) to 100 million people in isolation via "likes," RTs, comments sections, and tag-driven links to other artist pages pales in comparison to looking someone in the eye and giving them a pound. Not to mention, it might get you catfished.

Figuring out the meaning to lyrics was a personal process of decoding and discovery.

You know what one of the great thrills of listening to rap is? Decoding it. Picking it apart, bar by bar, going deeper and deeper into a record. Taking the entire sound in, and savoring the work that was put into creating it. It yielded an appreciation for the artistry put into lyricism, an appreciation that's been diluted if not completely endangered via the immediate gratification of lyrics websites. Smart rap fans worked to enjoy their rap. Now, you don't have to work for shit: Just Google it. And that will, in the long run, make rap fans stupider.

You appreciated all coverage of hip hop.

Look: It's not a bad thing that the Internet has helped democratize music criticism and music writing. Or, rather, not a terrible thing. The problem with this democratizing, though, is that it flooded the marketplace of ideas with the critical equivalent of bootleg Louis Vuitton bags: People who were calling absolute shit rap the greatest thing since sliced bread. And even that is okay up to a certain point. Opinions are good! They should be varied, and diverse, and should interrupt a monolithic consensus. The problem with that, though, is human nature.

See: Music writers—human beings (sometimes)—are attracted to money, fame, and power, just like rappers, but on a far smaller scale. Many of these people that the Internet's given rise to have motivations that don't involve giving an accurate and fair opinion of rap so much as upping their own cachet. So even though only three or four outlets had power back in the day, those outlets (Vibe, The Source, XXL, and Spin and Rolling Stone, kind of) had to compete with the core alternatives in their field, and bring their A-Game to writing, criticism, interviews, news, and the sole prerogative of being rap's must-read publication.

Value was placed on authority. And it yielded great writing, great reporting, and especially great rap criticism. There was a time when a Five-Mic Source review really meant something (or when a music review meant something, period). It was great for debate. It was great for standards. It was great for a culture of professional, learned discourse with regards for institutional knowledge. In other words, it was great for so many of the reasons rap writing—even, yes, rap writing like this—is now so superfluous and fleeting.

Music videos were big-budget and watched on TV, not 600-pixel width YouTube boxes.

Back in the day, you waited for Yo! MTV Raps to come on in order to catch a block of rap videos. Or you played with the rabbit-ears just to get a chance to catch rap videos by-request on The Box. Either way, you saw them on TV, where the artists gained a larger-than-life significance. As the art form evolved, the budgets got bigger. Remember where you were the first time you saw the "Triumph" video? The epic presentation of "Victory"? Or the alien New Orleans experience beamed into your home through Juvenile's "Ha" video? The Hype Williams era, in particular, was big-budget, experimental, and impressive. Expectations have since declined significantly. Hip-hop videos are shot in grandmother's basements, and that's cool because they're watched in blurry, pixelated windows on YouTube. The line between "video director" and "guy with a cameraphone" has declined significantly, and labels are no longer investing in many yacht-centered big-budget cinematic video experiences. Why spend the money when a ten-dollar video can just go viral?

Social media hadn't yet ruined rapper mystique.

The more you know, the less you wish you knew. Social media has enabled a level of embarrassing over-sharing and self-promotion from rappers who, in previous eras, were more content to keep their knowledge jewels on tape. And it made them more interesting for it. Rakim wasn't getting into Twitter beef with Big Daddy Kane, and Kool Moe Dee wasn't subtweeting LL Cool J. The mystery that surrounded your favorite rapper made their music all the more interesting and made you focus that much more on the lyrics. They were rappers, not performance artists. Today, a Riff Raff fan is more likely to quote his Twitter than his music. In hip-hop, less is more. It's just not the same watching Cormega livetweet a basketball game. Actually, on second thought, watching 'Mega livetweeting is one of the rare examples of this working out for the better.