It’s the noisy, flashy style Harlem folks pick up across 125th Street and the gruff, no-nonsense speech of Brooklynites, the insular slang of the Queensbridge projects and the versatile blend of cultures you see in a trip through the Bronx. Old heads will tell you that New York rap is a distinct sound rooted in the thunder-and-lightning interplay between kick and snare drums in an East Coast boom-bap track, but really, it’s an attitude, a way to be. To decide the “best” of New York rap would only tell half the story - an uneven one - so instead, we invited a team of writers to rank a new type of local canon: 100 songs that capture a bigger picture of the sound of the city. As regionalism in rap began to ebb and artists from the East, South, West, Midwest, and overseas began trying out one another’s wares, stars like 50 Cent - and later Nicki Minaj - dominated via annexation, picking and choosing bits of popular sounds and fashions to graft onto their formidable arsenals of tricks. Drum-machine fanatics took after forward-thinking auteurs like Prince and Miles Davis, assembling clattering, inhuman percussion parts that would lead to epochal early-’80s gems like Run-DMC’s “Sucker M.C.’s (Krush-Groove 1).” A happy studio accident in the late ’80s inspired Queens native and Cold Chillin’ crew member Marley Marl to invent the art of sampling, setting the stage for the plush jazz-rap stylings of acts like A Tribe Called Quest and the abrasive kung fu rap of the Wu-Tang Clan in the ’90s as well as the triumphant sounds of the Diplomats’ “Dipset Anthem” and Jay-Z’s “Public Service Announcement” in the next decade.
#Old school rap instrumentals how to
When kids in the Bronx needed party music to distract from the violent tumult of the rocky ’70s, DJ Kool Herc figured out how to extend the climaxes of funk records, making long and euphoric vamps out of sweet seconds of ecstasy. But the spark that inspired the early bombers, breakers, DJs, and rappers to revolutionize art, dance, fashion, music, and language endures in New York City, changing alongside the advancing generations. Regardless of their ultimate fate, these are the hardest rap beats of all time.Hip-hop started out in the parks and traveled around the globe and back, picking up new accents and flavors in every region and time zone, rubbing elbows with other genres and cultures, and adapting to new climates and temperaments. While some of these songs crossed over to the pop charts, others remained favorites of real rap heads and connoisseurs. or Biggie contrast beautifully with the frenetic energy of the track and let the production speak for itself. Other times, calmly delivered rhymes by T.I. or DMX chorus helps amplify a beat’s intensity. The handclap from Lil Jon’s 808 can cut through the air just as sharply as a snare that DJ Premier lifted from a ’70s funk record. The Neptunes’ minimalism can be just as hard as The Bomb Squad’s noisy wall of samples. They’ve done so in part by showing us new ways to make a looped rhythm track sound like a solid, immovable object, or more likely, a steadily pounding mechanical piston.įrom Rick Rubin’s rock-rap anthems of the ‘80s to the Swizz Beatz synth bangers of the ’90s to the bombastic Just Blaze soul beats of the 2000s to the Lex Luger trap tracks of the 2010s, the most aggressive hip-hop hits of each era have their own unique texture. Dre to RZA to Just Blaze, have pushed the genre forward. Through the aforementioned techniques, and more, hip-hop’s greatest beatmakers, from Dr.
Or maybe an obscure sample with a piercing, high-pitched tone takes the energy of the track to another level.
Maybe the bass feels like it’s going to shake you out of your chair.
Maybe the drums sound like they’re going to punch through the speakers. But rap production has a somewhat abstract set of criteria for judging how hard a beat can be, and how a track can make the MC on it sound like an unstoppable Man of Steel. Every genre has its own way of going to loud and heavy extremes.
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