Image via Complex Original
It's not always easy to measure influence in hip-hop.
Sometimes, for an artist, it's an abstract thing: principles, subject matter, the ideology of a rapper's ideas and ideals.
Sometimes it's a surface-level aesthetic approach: the sound, the production style, or a particular sensibility.
Then there's the vocal performance. Sometimes it's about a rapper's delivery, how his or her voice comes across. Other times, it's about his flow: the rhythmic pattern of his vocals over the track. Or maybe it's the lyrical approach, the way an artist writes or conceives of his punchlines or figurative language.
Any way you dice it, the DNA of hip-hop often evolves in unexpected ways. You can't always anticipate what the truly "groundbreaking" work is going to be. Although The Bomb Squad's production on Public Enemy's records was revolutionary and game-changing, it was also so singular that it only ended up showing in the artistic approach of artists like El-P years down the line. Whereas Dr. Dre's work on The Chronic was so influential because it was so replicable: it was the tack artists would take throughout the West Coast and the South, becoming the dominant sound of hip-hop for a full decade.
But what makes up the sound of now? We took a look at some of current hip-hop's most influential artists. Some are who you'd suspect. Others might be a little unexpected. Here are the 10 Major Influences On Today's Rap Sound.
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Lil Wayne
Lil Wayne's impact is incalculable. He did more than anyone—even T-Pain—to popularize autotune, particularly with smash single "Lollipop." This helped spawn an autotune-drenched sound that would influence everyone from Future to the new generation of musicians worldwide. He transformed 50 Cent's mixtape-to-albums transition into the dominant mode of street rappers nationally, and evolved it into a prolific art form all its own. He pushed the limits of technical control—and good taste—with a continually evolving, mutating rap style. He was continually one of the genre's most creative rappers, his wordplay unparalleled. Alongside Kanye West, he was a primary influence on Drake, the genre's current superstar. He was a center of gravity unto himself, and perhaps the most influential rapper of the late 2000s.
MF Doom
The late '90s and early '00s were rap's commercial glory years, a time when every rapper with a distinctive, marketable style managed to cross over in some way or another. (After all, what was Del Tha Funkee Homosapien's collab with Gorillaz but an incredibly unlikely late-career realization of his early commercial potential?) There were plenty of underground artists and crews whose overarching sounds were distinctive (think Def Jux; Anti-Pop Consortium; Rhymesayers). But few rappers were also very distinctive stylists as rappers. But there was one major exception.
MF Doom was in a league of his own. This was true during his time in the group KMD through his re-emergence in the wake of Subroc's death as the metal-faced villain in the late 1990s. Critical attention reached its nexus in 2003, when he released three albums under three different pseudonyms: Madvillainy, King Geedorah, and Viktor Vaughn. They remain three of the most unique-sounding records in hip-hop history, each a variation on the unconventional sound Doom pioneered on 1999's Operation: Doomsday, which built upon a series of solo 12"s.
Of late, the sound Doom brought to the world has had a comeback. Never has that been more evident than in the music of Odd Future. Recently, Earl's Doris had a familiar sound, as Earl's low-key delivery over sparse jazz loops revived a sound reminiscient of Doom's golden era.
D4L
OK, sure, the obvious answer here is that D4L were an inspiration on all kinds of Southern "ringtone" rap, pop rap, novelty dances, etc. And that's probably true, albeit one data point in a whole line of singles. And no doubt group member Fabo, a true star, was influential, particularly in the South.
But perhaps D4L's most underheralded influence has been on the current California production style. "Laffy Taffy" hit No. 1 on the charts, and was released in January, 2006. (That same year, The Pack released "Vans"—a nominally snap-influenced smash that launched the career of, among others, Lil B.) (And let's not forget DJ Quik's late-period snap classic, "Can U Werk Wit Dat.") The current style of DJ Mustard—which he's branded "ratchet"—was, according to his collaborator Ty Dolla $ign, influenced by snap as well. Ty was instrumental in the early days of Mustard's career, and describes the "Rack City" beatmaker as having popularized a sound they'd been creating for a few years.
"We’ve been doing that sound since ‘07. We wanted something that wasn’t so … jerk?" he told us, referring to the style of dance-oriented teen rap that popped off in mid-2000s Los Angeles. “Something more ‘G.’ [Ratchet] is all the same drum pattern as ‘Toot it and Boot it.’ A blend of some West Coast shit with some down south snap music, but sped up.”
Timbaland/Aaliyah
Timbaland's late-'90s work in the worlds of R&B and hip-hop contributed in large part to the genre's escape from breakbeats. His move towards more syncopated drum tracks, freed from the rhythmic monotony of the early '90s, was his primary innovation. And he popularized this innovation because he was a great songwriter, and he worked with great songwriters (Missy Elliott) and performers (Aaliyah) alike.
Since that time, Aaliyah's demure mystique—conveyed with understated poise—and Timbo's balance of sleek, smooth production and syncopated bounce became an inspiration for hundreds of artists from a wide variety of genres. From indie electronic artists like the Junior Boys to alt-R&B newcomer Kelela to hip-hop's dominant performer of the moment, Drake, Aaliyah and Timbo are two of the game's most namechecked artists. (Sometimes to the point of cliche.)
Eminem
For a few years, it seemed like Eminem's aesthetic impact in the game had waned, overshadowed by artists like 50, Jeezy, and Kanye. Then, in the past year, or so, his sound suddenly seems more relevant. You can hear it in Kendrick Lamar's precision writing and love of the extended metaphor (it's tough to imagine Lamar rapping about how "your parachute is a latex condom hooked to a dread" without Em). Certainly Danny Brown's drug-addled hedonism seems to show Em's influence. And the shock-humor (and subsequent media furor) of Odd Future definitely owes a defiant debt to Slim Shady. But perhaps the artist who's most obviously picked up the Detroit rapper's torch is Chance The Rapper, whose dexterous writing and vocal fry show a heavy debt to Eminem.
Kanye West...then Kanye West, again.
Kanye West is, obviously, one of the most influential artists of the past decade-plus. His first impact hit in the early 2000s, as his production sound joined likeminded artists like Bink! and Just Blaze in reintroducing a soul-sampling style that contrasted directly with the synthesizer aesthetic that rose with the success of artists like Cash Money and Swizz Beats.
His revolution was also ideological. He stressed relateability and an accessible, regular-guy middle-class sensibility in a time when hip-hop still reflected a streets-oriented consciousness. He single-handedly created a lane that enabled artists from J. Cole to Mac Miller to Chance to Drake to thrive today.
His second major aesthetic revolution came with 808s and Heartbreak. Although it certainly didn't invent autotune, for a certain audience, it legitimized it, adapting the form and helping to popularize what is now an everpresent sound in popular music.
Gucci Mane
Love him or hate him, Gucci completely reoriented how an entire style of rappers performed in the late '00s. From his slang to his delivery, new street rap consistently shows the impact of his punchlines, his creativity, and his delivery. He popularized most current slang and lyrical tropes, shifted rapping to a laconic, behind-the-beat style, reoriented rap towards a certain style of imagery and punchline delivery, and completely reinvented the adlib. Never mind his innovations to the mixtape game—the rapper took Wayne's mixtape prolificacy to the next level. From 2 Chainz to the Migos to Chief Keef to Young Scooter, it's tough to think of an artist in the South or Midwest who hasn't been impacted by Gucci in the past few years.
Three 6 Mafia
There are two major ways Three 6 Mafia have impacted today's sound. The first is in production. As was made evident on Juicy J's latest album, produced by Mike Will, Young Chop, and Lex Luger, the production style pioneered by Three 6 Mafia and other Memphis acts in the mid-1990s is still reverberating today.
Of course, Three 6 are just one strand of influence in club rap's current production style. (DJ Toomp, for example, also deserves a significant portion of the credit.) But Three 6 impacted the art of rapping as well. The group was a part of an underground tape scene in Memphis in the mid-90s that innovated certain flows and rap styles still used today. Alongside Ohio's Bone Thugs N Harmony, Three 6-affiliated artists like Kingpin Skinny Pimp invented an approach to rapping that proved widely influential on artists throughout hip-hop, both within Memphis and nationally, including groups like A$AP Mob and Raider Klan.
DJ Screw
Even putting aside the seismic way Screw reinvented the sound of Texas—thirteen years after his death, the city is still heavily impacted by the couple hundred tapes he made during his lifetime—Screw has had a major impact on music. And it's not just the Screwed and Chopped versions of popular albums that drop every month. From A$AP Rocky, who's used screwed hooks throughout his career, to Drake, who came up rapping over screwed tapes in his bedroom, current rap performers continually pay deference. But the debt isn't always explicit; popular artists from both hip-hop and R&B use slowed vocals as an effect, the lethargic, narcotic sound of Screw mutating pop music's DNA.
Rhymesayers
Macklemore is one of only four new rappers to have gone platinum in recent times. He's indisputably one of the genre's most successful superstars. And his roots are only tangentially in hip-hop. As has been pointed out many times, his success took place with a very white grassroots audience.
His delivery has been, in the past, compared to rappers like Slug from Atmosphere and Sage Francis. Even if you think the comparisons are overstated, though, aesthetically and philosophically, his heavily moral approach and independent, grassroots grind owes a lot to the indie hip-hop scene of the late 1990s—and that's a scene of which Rhymesayers played a significant role. As Jon Caramanica put it in a recent piece for the New York Times, it's "message music": "These are the values and themes of the old hip-hop underground, independent rap’s late-1990s-to-early-2000s heyday, the womb for Macklemore’s style."
Of course, Rhymesayers was a more complicated, idiosyncratic music than their successful aesthetic offspring would suggest. Macklemore has never, to our knowledge, released a song that ended with him murdering cattle. Nonetheless, it's tough to imagine the sound of today without the impact of late-90s indie rap: from Scribble Jam to the Hip Hip Infinity website to the Rhymesayers record label.