so Love Sosa & 300 just didn’t exist to you?

Yeah it's tricky. A remix is just a remix, but the way Ye did it with all those pretentious, random "artsy" sound effects added and his corny Calabasas raps was a...questionable...look

Obviously the man is a production genius, but he very much has his moments of watering down hip hop to appeal to the hegemony.

what tf does that have to do with the title of the thread? and I mentioned that s*** in my last comment smdh. I Don’t Like didn’t even hit iTunes until wayyy after it dropped on mixtape websites and YouTube closer to Finally Rich. ya’ll gotta stop this s*** lol

“trailblazing a path for gentrification” u sound stupid as s*** rn. kanye was just making music. he wasn’t laying down a master plan to destroy all of hip hop. when a genre goes mainstream, it gets gentrified, and within 10-20 years, it falls off. hip-hop was going to go fully mainstream, get gentrified, and fall off. this was gonna happen with or without kanye lets be honest with ourselves.

To be clear I also never said Kanye was the single-handed person who did this, or even that he only did this. This is why I asked "to what extent". It's a mixed legacy but I think it's fair to say that there are examples of Ye doing this and a lot of it stems from his sociopolitical views and celebrity status.

Yes but did Kanye contribute to this phenomenon, and how much more severe did the gentrification become due to his contributions? It's a worthwhile question considering his status in pop culture.

it sounds like ur saying he got too successful. like ur implying he should have stopped himself and said “damn im killing the game too much let me slow down and let someone else take the lead”. why tf would kanye west of all people do that, i wouldn’t even expect myself to do that 😂

Run DMC sampling Aerosmith was the beginning of the end

nigga was doing EDM songs like Say Yeah but that dude think Kanye caused that lmfaooo

niggas aren’t hiphop fans bruh, just political/corporate observers. stupid ass topic

Kanye threads taking over the music sxn again

We are back

It actually speaks against OPs point because he put Jadakiss on there even though no one in the world would've wanted him on the remix just to bridge old hip hop with the new drill sound

lmao
the Clipsters were a wild time

were you even around back then?

nobody cared if a song was on iTunes, everyone was downloading for free. didn’t matter if a song was only on mixtape sites, even to white people.

Ugh

I blame the Beastie Boys
& Rick Rubin

cant believe weve gotten to the point of reducing what one of the best artists of all time did for music was "gentrify" hip hop

you talking about suburban, mainstream white kids

they in fact, were using iTunes to get their music

they aren’t music nerds rummaging through websites to find downloads and editing the meta data and album covers in iTunes. I was there. lol so this just negates the topic entirely

no hip hop is not gentrified

wtf is this thread? Do people even know what gentrify means?

if you mean helped partly make it a bigger genre yes

Beasties had more than enough credibility

Just look at them

Rubin and Lyor however

Eh. It was a pop concession, but not full-on gentrification. Rock music has working class, black roots as well, and the song still sounds like a rap song, just with rock sampling and some guitar.

I think the beginning of the end was honestly The Chronic. That was the first rap album that people took seriously that also felt like it was, in its own way, "too good" to just be a rap album. It had pretty elementary raps for its day and the production, while innovative, was consciously crafted to sound as polished as possible.

Dre's entire narrative around the album at the time was how it was produced unlike any hip hop album before it. This is true, but I fail to see why that A) is a good thing inherently, and B) why it had to depart so much from sampling and lean so heavily into big budget engineering. It was also a relatively softer and more radio-friendly sound than say boom bap or even most jazz rap. You couple that with the remedial technical rapping and problematic subject matter and yeah, that's where it all begins imo.

in retrospect, the guy brought a bunch of white hipsters into the genre, watered down the mainstream sound of hip hop production, and ended his career by promoting nazism

it’s dishonest to pretend like the maga era (started 2016) is detached from the rest of his career leading up to it