Recommendations for hip-hop without braggadocio (or these other tropes)?

As intriguing as I find hip-hop in terms of the beats or the wordsmithing, I find the braggadocio tiresome: for a performer to rap about how he is a great rapper just seems so lame. I also have no interest in mentions of weed or how life on the streets is tough. Thus, while I like some tracks by e.g. Roots Manuva, those tracks can seem like exceptions among the other material on those same albums.

Is there hip-hop completely without the aforementioned tropes? Has any hip-hop artist gone for abstract lyrics that are divorced from the performer’s public persona and his immediate environment? (Is there a hip-hop equivalent of Scott Walker’s Climate of Hunter album, for example?) Or is my wish as unreasonable as someone searching for oldies rock that isn't about dancing or sweethearts, or country music that isn't about pain and drink?

So, what recommendations might ILM have for me? Hip-hop is a global phenomenon now, so recommendations in languages other than English are welcome, too.

Jay-Z

If recent instances of 'abstraction' (to varying degrees) are what you're looking for, try Earl Sweatshirt's Some Rap Songs. Or clipping.'s There Existed an Addiction to Blood. Or Billy Woods & Kenny Segal's Hiding Places.

Thanks, pomenitul. A look at Genius reveals that the tropes I mentioned are still present of some of these artists’ work, but the existence of these artists is encouraging that there might be other performers out there who are entirely trope-free.

pomenitul's face-value response will be somewhat atypical i fear

A look at Genius reveals that

this is the problem

Man I forgot about hip hop like this, raw and real, wish an artist would bring back this kinda sound. Love today's hip hop but it's all getting a little stale

Hip hop then and hip hop now is like middle English and modern English.

here's the nice version, before i hand over to the rest of ILM for your correction: 'braggadocio' in this context is usually just assertion of self from the perspective of a black person who, along with their ancestors, have been constantly beaten down by white society. it is racially-charged and righteous. so while i can appreciate that you don't want to listen to artists going on about gucci or whatever, that is just a way of saying 'i belong, i made it', which is extremely important to be able to say when your people have been oppressed for so long

complicating this is the fact that a lot of 'braggadocio' comes in the context of extremely thoughtful + poetic treatments of race and class - indeed, often quite abstract treatments. you can have 'braggadocio' AND 'climate of hunter'

what i am saying is: learn to love braggadocio. it comes with the territory and you'll hear a lot more good, experimental hip-hop if you learn to embrace it

anyway, listen to Clipping

This is definitely not what you're looking for, Melomane, but how do you feel about the line 'even when I say nothing it's a beautiful use of negative space?'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0eRMVHLNaM

xp imago otm

Man I forgot about hip hop like this, raw and real, wish an artist would bring back this kinda sound. Love today's hip hop but it's all getting a little stale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCx7dyhQ7C0

this is not to say that there isn't an onrunning war within hip-hop where real-headz types like dälek moan about glam-thugsters who get all the sales and prestige because they went pop or whatever. obviously dälek is amazing and you should listen to everything they/he have ever done, but despite his experimental sound he raps far more directly, literally & non-abstractly about social issues than, say, young thug. & so the ones who are musically experimental and the ones who are lyrically experimental are not even the same quite often

I was so sure this was an ancient revive

milo/RAP ferreira is another one you should check out, his lyrics are wildly abstract and his flow is great, even if he too is a bit snooty about pop-rap

There's also… Death Grips, kind of.

oh and the new KA album. and loads more. ilm: engage

Imago, I can understand that braggadocio comes out of a certain American context, and it has resonated in other places around the world where minorities face a similar struggle. But hip-hop is now so global that it is being performed by people who come from outside an environment on the receiving end of injustice, and so what would the point of their braggadocio be except to merely imitate a trope? And I think a person can reasonably seek music unconnected to contemporary social issues, not everything has to be relevant to problems a society faces.

Yeah, the Ka is very good (Descendants of Cain is the title you're looking for, as KA is almost google-proof).

xp

By the same token, in the rock space I really like Slowdive-esque shoegaze because, by submerging the lyrics in the mix to the point of incomprehensibility, these songs avoid any risk of presenting the listener with doggerel (as so many popular-music lyrics are). Just as rock music eventually shrugged off the trope of being music of rebellion and made subgenres like shoegaze for listeners would consume, I would like to find hip-hop that has completely transcended its particular social origins.

If unintelligibility is a plus, then you'll likely enjoy this as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rtsZXEIxDs

Oh and there's always older backpacker stuff like Aesop Rock.

i would love to listen to hip-hop, but i hate one of the defining lyrical features of hip-hop. can anyone point me to some hip-hop that isn’t like hip-hop?

Again, voodoo chili, other music genres eventually developed forms that lacked what were initially one of their definining features, so why shouldn't a person look for hip-hop artists that have done the same?

Would you accept self-deprecation instead?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WotkQ6vFuGw

Melomane, just go get some Kendrick. Let's say To Pimp a Butterfly to start with.

I looked at the lyrics for To Pimp a Butterfly when that album won the Pulitzer. Again, that album is replete with the tropes I mentioned in the opening post to this thread.

The Fatlip track is amusing and a nice change of pace, but still, I'm looking for tracks where the rapper doesn't even mention rapping, being a rapper, etc. As far as dealing with a negative self-image goes, Root Manuva's track "Crying" is a much better example of what I’m looking for, inasmuch as that track's lyrics are abstracted from the musical genre in which they are performed.

What do you make of these lyrics?

https://genius.com/Earl-sweatshirt-shattered-dreams-lyrics

The n-word, mentions of firearms, a probable mention of marijuana, and some angry words spoken at people in power makes these Earl Sweatshirt lyrics too thematically similar to trope-based hip hop even if they don't cohere into any straightforward storyline.

What he makes of that lexicon is quite different from the usual fare, down to the self-reflexive complaint about 'imprecise words', but that doesn't appear to meet the criteria you've set for yourself. How about this 'classic', then?

https://genius.com/Aesop-rock-daylight-lyrics

I had drafted a response fearful for the future of this board... but op might enjoy MF DOOM?

And… Deltron 3030?

I was so sure this was an ancient revive

^^^^

Unfortunately, a look at Deltron 3030 and MF Doom lyrics shows plenty of rapping about rapping.

I am still especially keen for recommendations from outside English-speaking countries. I know that many listeners abroad do not speak English to a level sufficient to understand the lyrics of American hip-hop. It is the beats and the delivery which tickle their fancy, while the actual words might as well be Prisencolinensinainciusol to them. Therefore, there must be artists somewhere on earth who have imitated this genre of words recited over a beat, but with a lyrical approach completely separate from original American hip-hop.

The French and Romanian hip-hop I like does not pass your cruel test. And you haven't told me whether Aesop Rock makes the cut.

Are you looking for a rap adaptation of Anne-Marie Albiach's ÉTAT?

http://www.theoperatingsystem.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/nudite-e1492809194610.png

https://youtu.be/-CmmdBWKnPM

I have never read Albiach, though I am a fan of Emmanuel Hocquard which Albiach's Wikipedia article mentions as a related figure. But sure, I would love to find rap which lyrically resembles 20th-century modernist poetry. The reason why I mentioned Scott Walker’s Climate of Hunter album as an example of what I would love to find a rap analogue of, is because that is a lyrical approach which feels of a piece with the kind of poetry I like reading.

I'm starting to think that you should become such a rapper (not even kidding).

How long before the bragging started though?

now thinking that what the OP wants is in fact the work of ILX user 'usic'

write a rap about onions

https://genius.com/Parappa-the-rapper-you-guys-sit-in-the-back-instructor-mooselinis-rap-lyrics

That's because you just got your license!

(Woo hooo!! Yes!!)

pure, untrammelled braggadocio

Just throw some beats on top:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYxpSjkyAg

This is totally an instance of self-aggrandizement tho:

No Greek will be able

to discriminate my body.

An American

is a complex of occasions,

themselves a geometry

of spatial nature.

troll level: expert

Troll or not, I think this is a worthwhile question. If the kind of hip-hop Melomane is looking for is really that scarce, that would be interesting. It might be fun to think about why certain genres are so strongly associated with certain lyrical tropes that instances of the genre without those tropes are rare. Melomane mentioned country and "oldies rock" as two other candidates.

man ILM is so much nicer than it used to be. i remember getting absolutely flamed by s.clover way back in the day for talking up DOOM and backpacker shit too much.

Just wait till deej gets here.

Btw I agree with JRN that this makes for an interesting thought experiment: how far can you stretch the lyrical material before it becomes 'un-hip-hoppy'? And should such a putative limit exist in the first place?

I still don't understand the negative response to my question here, let alone me being called a troll. Jazz was a genre defined by improvisation, but today it would be entirely valid for someone here to ask "Where can I find jazz that has no little or no improvisational element?" (there is music where the musicians perform entirely from a fixed written score, but which is categorized among jazz for reasons). The first half of the 20th century saw a revolution in classical music where it no longer had to necessary follow tonal harmony or even a written score at all. Rock 'n' roll, as I mentioned, stopped being solely music of rebellion or imitating bluesmen within two decades of its creation. Afrobeat now gets performed by people far away from Africa and unconcerned with the same issues that Fela Kuti was.

So, why is hip-hop so different?

Chief Rocker Busy Bee

Aesop Rock largely avoids the tropes I mentioned, so I guess he is an answer to my question. Still, his lyrics don't grab me and I am unlikely to listen to him for pleasure.

Braggadocio in the snow, where will you go
To find something you could troll?
Cause the word out on the street is you are FP'ing

Beautiful, brings a twear to my eye.

was ilx actually a belle and sebastian fan forum first? that would be awesome

no idea about this connection to B&S. Google brought me to a book about fan cultures.

https://imgur.com/a/MVojVy5.jpg

I Love Tigermilk

i try again
https://i.imgur.com/lfOWm5J.jpg

Melomane, music fan on the end pew
You'd hip hop, but the tropes just won't let you
Le FP de la Braggadocio

(quiet)

brutal

I prefer "sleepy"

ILM = Joe Biden?

When people on ilx get backed into a corner via backlash they weren't expecting they either lose their cool and end up digging a deeper hole or they try too hard to appear thoughtful and save face with overwritten clarifications and... end up digging a deeper hole.

well i guess we found a sinister user amirite?

It's funny because I was on S*n*st*r (not embarrassed by this fact, just mortified by the content of my posts on there / the person I was aged 19) and then only joined ILX around um 2014 I think? And yeah, there were a couple of people on there like that.

it's good that ILE branched out to loving more than just things from the mid-2000s

Gotta stay with the times.

I thought the first ILM posters came from a Usenet group, and the Sinister folks arrived a year or so later.

There was also Freaky Trigger, obviously, since Tom E. started ILM. But I'm sure about the relationship between FT and alt.music.alternative.

some say the first settlers arrived from Gopher

What's the history behind this board?

"I Love Music" created as a discussion board for online pop fanzine Freaky Trigger.
"I Love Everything" created when lots of personal/non-music content was coming up on "I Love Music".

"ilxor.com" created when the server hosting those two boards began to get erratic and we decided we needed our own one.

― Tom (Groke), Friday, February 14, 2003 3:12 AM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

It also goes back all the way to alt.music.alternative, too.
― Michael Daddino (epicharmus), Friday, February 14, 2003 6:10 AM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

That's pre-history of a certain group of you, no? Plenty of us have been here since the start of ILX and having read Freaky Trigger for a while, without ever having had anything to do with a.m.a

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, February 14, 2003 7:04 AM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, to be fair if we're including a.m.a. in the history we should include S!n!ster too
― Tom (Groke), Friday, February 14, 2003 7:09 AM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

ah neat. And nary a mention of Belle nor Sebastian

That part of the borad's history has been hushed up by Big ILX.

it's mentioned in that final Tom E post...?

my bad, "S*n*st*r" mentioned. I thought Camaraderie above was doing some odd Google-proofing. I guess it had some stylized title.

yeah tbf I don't actually know anything about it! way before my time here

lol I've only just realized that Sinister was a B&S board. Shows how much I know about them.

the answer to op has been staring us in the face this entire time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ut7GhxcgSY

was poptimism a twee conspiracy

Wasn't there a whole B&S subboard at some point in the early years?

was poptimism a twee conspiracy

It's all coming together now.

was poptimism a twee conspiracy

the actual portmanteau is "conspiratwee"

hehe

the answer to op has been staring us in the face this entire time

Can't see the wood for the twees.

Ah, sit down and learn of the Before Times. In yonder days, when I first went 'whuh' at a newsgroup in 1993...

ha, I was on Usenet in 1989

gentlemen, braggadocio

On alt.rocknroll.metal.metallica you can see a 16 year old me preaching Christian faith to metalheads who really didn't want it while simultaneously saying "FUCK YOU" to people who didn't like Load

Did you manage to convert anyone to either of the two?

Yes, 1 person. I convinced myself both views were wrong

lol holy shit. There's a new "internet legacy" thread and we'd like to hear more

okay, now i'm glad this wasn't locked.

nice we could turn this into "where are we anyways?"

did anyone recommend 311

The only thing I remember from alt.music.alternative is "Bzangy Groink", though I don't recall what it signifies- Jyoti Mishra's Club night?

Anyhow, wasn't all this the subject of a Tanya Headon IHM column years and years ago?

Ah, yes. Here it is:
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/hate/2003/06/dj-format-the-hit-song/

Could DJ Format be just what OP is after? (I've never heard this track.)

ha, missed that. Did this guy ever say where he is supposedly from?

― maffew12, Monday, June 1, 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Braggadocia

― I am a free. I am not man. A number. (Neanderthal), Monday, June 1, 2020 bookmarkflaglink

lol

Pictured: OP, a month and a half later:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3-5YC_oHjE

🎵 braggadocio and put it in your pocket, save it for a rainy day 🎵

Harsh on such a well-respected, allround, fully participating and definitely not just here to stoke this particularly lame fire borad member

Just got some organic braggadocio in this week's veg box. Please share preparation tips.

roast vigorously for 400 posts, serve