Image via Complex Original
You know what really grinds our gears? Going on the Internet and hearing old people complain about how the Internet ruined everything. Fuck that.
The Internet's not perfect, but it is awesome. It gave us all the things we never knew we wanted. It’s 2015 and everything is amazing, nobody is happy, and everybody wants to bitch, bitch, bitch about how everything was better in the ‘90s. We’re tired of old 'heads badmouthing our generation, our music, and our livelihoods. We're the change we’ve been waiting for. The change you've been waiting for? Meh. We got now and we don’t care who had it before.
Were the old days really all that great? We get it, there were some classic albums in the '90s. We won't deny that. But there's irrefutably good music being made every single day, all over the world (something most old 'heads will at least begrudgingly if not readily admit). Thanks to technological advances, we have more access to more music, and more music culture, than we ever have before. It's why it's undeniably better to be a music fan today than it ever was before.
But since you old fucks just don’t want to admit that, here: 20 Good Reasons You Old 'Heads Need to Shut the Fuck Up About How Music Was Better in the '90s.
Live in the now. And try to watch that blood pressure while you do it, old people.
Written by Insanul Ahmed (@Incilin) & Lauren Nostro (@LAURENcynthia)
MP3s and digital streams are so, so much better than CDs, tapes, and vinyl.
On "Juicy," the Notorious B.I.G. once gloriously rhymed, "I let my tape rock 'til my tape popped!" Like the rest of the song, the line was meant to be a celebration—Biggie professed his love for hip-hop by showing just how much he played his favorite songs. But here's the thing: A tape "popping"—meaning it blew out and broke—isn't something to celebrate. In fact, it's the kind of thing that'll ruin your day.
Same with CDs, which could easily get scratched up after too many plays (or if you kept rewinding your favorite verse) and get damaged in any other number of ways. Remember skipping? CDs did that. And don't even get us started on how fragile vinyl is. You paid good money for an album on wax, and if you really, really loved that album, you played it...enough for it to break. So why spend your hard-earned money to buy it all over again?
All of these problems have a lot to do with why MP3s rose to popularity in the first place. MP3s don't get scratched. They're easily replaceable. Rewinding your favorite verse is an exact process, unlike holding the rewind button and guessing when GZA's about to go in.
Nas once rhymed, "Never put me in your box if your shit eats tapes." We can assure you, Nas: That's something you'll never have to worry about with us.
Taping music off the radio was time-consuming and massively annoying.
"Get your tape decks ready!"—a phrase you rarely hear in 2015, because nobody uses tapes to record live radio broadcasts anymore. Back in the day, fans would sit by their stereo, waiting for the DJ to play their new favorite Snoop Doggy Dogg or Method Man song, trying to hit record as the song started. Old heads make it seem like it was worth suffering for a song that was great, but, for real? Suffering kinda sucks.
What if they were just about to play the song, and you had to go to the bathroom? What if your tape deck wasn't set properly and you ended up recording over another song? What if the the DJ was talking over the beginning of the song, your favorite part? Well, too bad. You're shit out of luck.
Nowadays fans log on to sites like Complex, 2DopeBoyz, or the artist's personal site to hear Drake's latest single whenever they feel like. As fans, we all ultimately crave a high-quality, explicit version of a song that begins and ends when it's supposed to, not when a totalitarian radio DJ decides it should. Waiting by the radio is the type of shit you do when you don't have a job or anything worth doing besides...sitting and waiting to tape off the radio. And hey, if you miss sitting recording off the radio so much, why don't you buy a tape deck and try it again some time? Oh, yeah: You've got better things to do.
Despite their flaws, lyric websites are useful.
Just like sitting by the radio waiting for your favorite song to play, old heads tend to fetishize the idea of listening to a song closely and transcribing the lyrics themselves. And just like only listening to music on CDs, it's something you could totally still do, but seriously: Why would you? Writing lyrics down is a tedious, error-prone process. Don't even start about how people stopped transcribing lyrics because "Today's lyrics aren't worth it." F. O. H. People just realized how time consuming it was. That's exactly what gave rise to lyrics websites like OHHLA, AZLyrics, and even Genius.
And we know what you're gonna say: "I was reading the lyrics to one of the 10 million songs on that site and I noticed a tiny error and thus I'm morally superior to that website!!!" Uh, yeah it's true that all of those sites are riddled with errors. But then again, so was a Yale University book of rap lyrics. Hell, the few rappers who put lyrics on their own liner notes often have errors. If the collective hive mind of the Internet can't figure them all out well enough, why would you, transcribing a song by yourself, do any better? Why not just appreciate those sites for what they are: Tools, and valuable free services that can help you quickly learn and appreciate the lyrics to your new favorite track.
(And yes, we use Genius. And we click the hyperlink for the definition just because. Stop pretending like you understand and can confidently explain every single rap lyric out there. You can't.)
It's easier to be a white person who likes rap.
There's an alarming number of white rappers these days, sure, but here's a term you don't hear much anymore: Wigger. Sadly, if you were a hip-hop fan in the early '90s, it was just a term you had to endure, as everyone from the kids at school to your parents at home made fun of you for "trying to act black." You were chastised for enjoying and perpetuating a culture people believed you had no business enjoying, and most people didn't take your passion seriously.
Today, hip-hop is so fused with the DNA of pop culture, even pop stars like Miley Cyrus can profess their love for Gucci Mane and it's all good. That's not to say that white rap fans don't get clowned regularly—and not to say that some of them shouldn't be (for reasons that have nothing to do with being white)—but that clowning used to be the norm, by default. That change is a great thing: While hip-hop might be predominately black music, it's still music that anyone and everyone should be able to enjoy.
Rap is generally less dangerous (and that's a good thing).
Rap fans who complain about how they miss the days when rap was overrun with true gangsters are like hipsters who say they miss the old New York back when it was "gritty." (FYI: Those people are stupid. The bad old days of New York before Giuliani were fucking awful.) Danger has a certain appeal in theory—we guess?—but ultimately, no one really wants to get stabbed at a Jeezy show.
As Rick Ross's career has proven, street cred only goes so far. The most important thing is whether or not your records are good, not if you're a card-carrying thug. Everyone cracking jokes about "I remember when rap beef got real," and so on, needs to remember that it got too real: Tupac and Biggie are dead. That might make for a good legend about how fucking gangsta they were, sure, but we wish they were alive more than anything else. We wish Max B wasn't in jail. There's an entire laundry list of events we wish never happened that we can only shake our heads at. No matter what you say about "who's real" remember this: Bad behavior often ruins a good time.
We get to talk about rap 24/7.
For all the talk about how the Internet has made us lonelier and pushed individuals further apart from one another while creating a false sense of blah blah blah, let's not pretend as if amazing sites like Twitter and Facebook haven't connected us in ways we could have never imagined before. For example, the Internet's done wonders to connect music fans to the point that we can discuss music with not only our friends, but also total strangers, great writers, awful writers, and sometimes even our favorite rappers. Plus, we can do it whenever we want because you know someone, somewhere is up at 2 a.m. listening to Drake songs holding back tears with something to say to him. And that moment is so, so real.
Rap is far less homophobic and misogynistic today than it ever was before.
Homophobia's still a big problem in hip-hop, and rap still tends to treat most women horribly, but you have to give the genre some credit: Rap is more progressive now than it's ever been before. Back in the '90s even “conscious rappers” who were ostensibly “enlightened” (see: Sadat X) were threatening to “shoot a fa**ot in the back.” In recent years, veteran rappers like Jay Z have come out in support of gay marriage while young guns like A$AP Rocky claim they don’t care about what someone’s sexual preference is. Meanwhile, Drake drunk-dialing a girl might seem pathetic, but we’d still prefer that to Biggie making a “love song” in which he threatened: “You talk slick, I beat you right.” Rap still has a long way to go (we refuse to speculate about whether or not there’s ever going to be a true rap star who’s also openly gay), but things have certainly gotten better than they used to be.
Shazam and SoundHound exist.
You ever find yourself in the cereal aisle of the supermarket debating whether or not to buy Cocoa Pebbles or Fruity Pebbles and then suddenly realize, "Holy shit WTF is this song that's playing? This shit is awesome!"? But then no one else in the store knows or even cares what record is playing since the music is meant to be background noise to fill the soul-crushing drudgery of a supermarket? Well, thanks to apps like Shazam and SoundHound, you can easily find out what song is playing.
The mobile apps work quickly and fairly accurately by identifying music from any medium—TV, radio, speakers—and tagging the songs. Not only can you discover new music, but Shazam has options to buy tracks once they discover them, and find tour dates or buy tickets to upcoming shows. Everything you need with music all in one. And no one can tell us that's not better than Googling whatever morsels of lyrics you can remember or hoping for that random song to play again sometime.
YouTube exists.
Where would the world be without YouTube? Well, there definitely wouldn't be as many struggle-rapper videos, but then again we wouldn't have Justin Bieber—but we also wouldn't have Karmin.... You get the point. YouTube's launched some of music's biggest popstars of the last decade into existence, and allowed us to search virtually any video, TV show, clip, movie trailer—anything. At all. Ever.
And like everything else on the Internet, YouTube is 24/7, on-demand. We don't have to sit around waiting for MTV or the Box to play our favorite rap video. We can watch it any time we want. Complain all you want about the artists that YouTube has made famous, but think of all of the amazing music videos, trailers, and #deepcuts we can find on the site. Without YouTube, we would all be lost—and who doesn't like watching re-runs of their favorite rap video from 1994 online? Sure, it's blurry as hell, but at least it's there, and there to give us a window into how much better we have it than ever before.
It's much easier to share music.
When has sharing music been any easier than it is right now? There's no need to go out and buy blank tapes only to record someone else's purchased cassette or CD—there's no CD "burning" anymore. At one time, sharing music became a game of telephone where, the more times a song was shared, the progressively shittier the quality of the track became.
Now, it's all about posting the latest track on your personal blog or Tumblr, or even retweeting it to share with your friends. Plus, no one's even using Sharebeast or hosting sites that much anymore. With apps like Spotify, you can share tracks with friends on the app, and embed the codes on your blog right away. It's become that easy. Even old, nearly unheard tracks that are deep into YouTube can be converted within seconds to an MP3 file. Music sharing has never been better, which means more and more people have easy access to more music they're likely to enjoy.
"Parental Advisory" isn't a barrier anymore.
Younger fans might find this harder to believe, but back in the day that little "Parental Advisory" sticker was a real fence to climb. Sort of like how you can't get into a rated-R movie, you couldn't buy an album with too much explicit material (Read: Every rap album worth owning). But nowadays, thanks to the awesome powers of the Internet, you can just download everything you ever wanted without Pirate Bay asking you if you're 18 or not.
We have easy access to every release, new or old.
It's true that in the information age we're so bombarded with an endless stream of images, text, and flashing lights that trying to absorb anything is like trying to get a sip of water from a firehose. But while it might be overwhelming, it's better than the old days, because the only thing worse than getting too much of what you want is getting none at all. That's why it's so frustrating to hear fans complain about being inundated with music.
Back in the days, certain pieces of music were actually "rare"—you couldn't just type "rare Eminem freestyle" into YouTube and find a video so rare it only has 13 million views. And when something was "hard to find," it was a lot harder than an extensive Google search that didn't even require you to get up off your ass. You want to find something "rare"? Try finding a copy of Main Source's Breaking Atoms in 1994 after it was out of print, sold out, and Japanese crate diggers had driven up the price of the vinyl. See how much fun it is when you have to live in a world without "Just a Friendly Game of Baseball."
But whatever you do, don't believe the old heads when they tell you searching for a record and hunting it down made the music even better. It didn't and it doesn't. That album has the exact same beats, rhymes, and flows if you grabbed the cassette just before it fell into Mount Doom or if you took five minutes to download it. Having access to an infinite library of music is what an audio fiend ought to crave, not spending tireless hours trying to find music.
Music is no longer outrageously expensive.
Yes, we're the generation that decided to steal music.* And yet, even as downloading became more and more commonplace, record labels refused to lower the price of CDs. Albums were still selling for $17.99 well into the 2000s, which is completely monopolistic bullshit.
When it comes to technology, products get cheaper over time: That's the nature of innovation. Despite inflation or even a weak economy, the production, distribution, discovery, and promotion of records got cheaper, and yet, they refused to drop the price (at one point, they even tried to convince people album prices were too cheap). So, they paid the price. iTunes came along and undercut CD sales by selling a song for a mere .99 cents a pop, which helped turn music into a singles market again. Spotify showed up with a commercial-free, unlimited streaming option for $9.99 a month. Companies like Universal didn't make albums $10 across the board until 2010, way after the Internet had changed the game in unfathomable ways.
[*We're also the generation that decided to "support the artist." When fans buy A$AP Rocky's debut album a month after it already leaked, best believe they didn't buy it because they didn't already have it in their iPod. Fans who buy music today do it more as a statement of "I fuck with this artist and I want to see them win" because all music is essentially free.]
Anyone can produce a high-quality record in their basement.
Love Chief Keef or hate him, it's hard to deny the effects of his 2012 street anthem, "I Don't Like." Without getting into a debate about quality, there's only one undeniable facet of its success: A largely unknown rapper made one of the biggest songs of the year without ever entering a true "recording studio."
That's a far cry from a time when something you recorded in your mom's basement could barely pass for a demo (at best). Nowadays, both rappers and producers can pirate download legally purchase GarageBand, Pro Tools, Fruity Loops, Logic, and any other number of recording products and make a quality song in their house, which empowers the artist to be creative just about anywhere they want. Hell, Juicy J recorded "Bandz a Make Her Dance" in someone's house with a sock over his microphone and it became a smash. Anything's possible, by anyone.
Labels no longer have a monopoly on distribution.
As recently as a decade ago, record labels monopolized the sales and marketing of their signed artists, which inevitably meant they also had control of the distribution of materials their artists created. In the past, a record label (like most businesses) has been an oligopoly, which is where only a handful of the businesses controlled nearly the entirety of the distribution market (and to a large extent, they still do). But with the rise of social media, music blogs, and sharing sites, the control of distribution had spiraled out of their hands.
The Internet is a platform for artists to brand themselves as they see fit. Look at an artist like Tech N9ne who founded his own independent label, Strange Music, and distributes music on his terms as a prime example of making major money without a major label. Better yet, look at Mac Miller, who with very little airplay and fewer physical record sales than you'd think managed to become a major star through digital sales and a top-notch social media game.
The more power an artist has online, the less control their record label has. Music fans can buy exactly what they want online at any time, and while streaming or buying albums online is not on par with the prices that a distributed CD may be, it's opening up an entirely transparent world of music distribution that's better for fans and for artists and not that pesky middle man known as the record label.
You can keep up with scenes anywhere in the world.
The sentiment of one of Rakim's most famous lines, "It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at," still holds true today, but more so in the figurative sense than the literal one. In 2013, where you're from or at doesn't matter, because you can keep up with local scenes from all over the world thanks to blogs, Twitter, and all the other joys of the Internet. In contrast, people used to regulated to local scenes and only heads in Oakland had access to the tapes of guys like Too $hort or E-40. Nowadays, its all one click link away.
Radio is embracing all types of hip-hop, not just club music.
People tend to complain about hip-hop radio (a lot of which has to do with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the rise of Clear Channel, and things that have more to do with business than music), but props where they're due: If you take a look at Billboard charts from the '90s, you'll see a lot less of the rap records now considered classics (see: A Tribe Called Quest) and a lot of random hits that are kind of forgotten (see: Wreckx-n-Effect's "Rump Shaker"). A lot of that has to do with the narrow lane of strictly club-and-party music that the radio tended to play. Now, you can turn on the radio and hear records from acts like Kendrick Lamar, Macklemore, and even Chief Keef—artists who had virtually no chance of getting radio play in the '90s.
Even underground rappers can support themselves with grassroots support and shows.
Nowadays, without much radio airplay, rappers can live a halfway decent life just off of local shows and a strong, centralized fan base. Take Brownsville rapper Sean Price— who once dubbed himself "the brokest rapper you know"—but now can sell out a show in New York with practically zero radio support. The same can be said for rappers like Joey Bada$$—whose videos have been featured on MTV and occasionally on New York powerhouse radio stations—but lack the support that major signed artists receive. Compare that to rappers like Prodigy, who in his autobiography writes about dropping albums hailed as classics in the '90s but at times still struggled to pay the rent. These days, artists can make just enough money in the industry to get by without having to become major stars, while enjoying more longevity via a strong, centralized fan base.
Every rapper demo is online.
There was a time when the earliest works of some of your favorite rappers were virtually inaccessible. Sure, some floated around here and there on the mixtape circuit and if you knew the right guy maybe you could get the hookup, but for the most part they were hard to get your hands on. These days, rappers aren't even releasing demos, they just start posting songs on SoundCloud, YouTube, or even their personal sites that anyone can access at any time. But if you're really missing out on those old school demos, chances are, the ones you wanted to get your hands on as a kid in the '90s are somewhere online—whether on YouTube or on a music site, as the archives were opened and digitized in the past five years.
RELATED: The 30 Greatest Hip-Hop Demos
Record label execs have been made to look like the overpaid fools some of them really are.
GZA tried to warn us, but we just didn't listen: You gotta read the labels.
Back in the day, record labels were monoliths, towering above us and dictating what was and wasn't worthy of our record stores and radios, and therefore, our ears. But nowadays, after record labels have endlessly fumbled the transition from analog to digital and failed so incredibly at looking even remotely competent at staying contemporary with adjusting norms, it's much easier to spot the real talent from the fake.
When a record label executive does something right, they look like geniuses. Whether it's signing the right artist at the right time, promoting their products well, or helping create a quality album, it's a beautiful thing for the artist, the fans, and of course, the label. But that's less and less often the case than it ever has been before.
George Bernard-Shaw once wrote that "all professions are conspiracies against the laity." Labels had us convinced that they had some magic power over music; that only they could put together an album, or find talent. But there's no real qualification for being in the music business; no trade degree or professional licensing can get you in or keep you in it. Literally anyone (with the right talent, and hustle) can do it. And you know why everyone's an industry analyst these days? Because—as Kanye once put it—we all realized we'd rather not listen to the suits behind the desk no more.