Blasphemy 101: Replacing The Elements of Hip-Hop

KRS-One is going to strangle us when he reads this.

Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

A few years ago, KRS-One was asked if he’d ever met someone who excelled at all four of the original elements of hip-hop. “Not yet,” he replied, as if holding out hope that it could still happen—maybe on one of his tours of the college lecture circuit. But who would actually want to be the guy who’s good at MCing, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti—the so-called “Original Four Elements” of hip-hop? If you actually encountered such a fellow, would he really strike you as the living embodiment of rap culture? Or would he be more like a Civil War re-enactor in an Adidas tracksuit?

The concept of the Four Elements is only powerful insofar as they inspired and incited the teenagers who first assembled a hip-hop culture in the bombed-out and violent New York City of the 1970s. But the great thing about hip-hop is that it has always cared more about the present than the past. The kids who invented DJing and graffiti weren’t respectful of the traditions of the previous generation. They wanted to shock the world. They wanted to tear everything up and rebuild it for themselves. They wanted to get their kicks in the moment and infuriate their elders at the same time. That’s the only essence of hip-hop. Not rules but the breaking of rules.

As with any culture, hip-hop is an unending sequence of bizarre trends; collisions of taste; tensions between the commercial and the anti-commercial; shifting appetites for newly maddening and exotic sounds. The hip-hop purist is a fool. Anyone who believes the culture rests on the four elements formulated in the Bronx is no different than the guy who thinks all rock ‘n’ roll should sound like Buddy Holly and Little Richard. And let's be for real: How many current rappers/rap fans actually b-boy or do graffiti?

The only way to participate in the living culture of hip-hop is to embrace its weird and sometimes unseemly mutations, because that’s what keeps it alive and keeps it fun. Because, trust, if those kids who came up rapping in the parks of the South Bronx were growing up today, they’d be sipping lean, trading downloads, and complaining about this list in the comments section. So come along, young and old, fundamentalist and insurgents alike, because we’ve taken upon ourselves to REVISE THE FOUR ELEMENTS OF HIP-HOP!

Written by Sam Sweet

Lean

Intoxication has been part of hip-hop's essence since Run kept a bag of cheeba inside his locker and the Beastie Boys offered unsuspecting girls sips of Brass Monkey laced with Spanish Fly. (And you thought there was something wrong with Rick Ross!) These days, promethize/codeine syrup, aka "Purple Drank" aka "Lean," has come to occupy a singularly elevated position in the culture. [Ed. Note—Though weed has long been apart of rap, everyone and their father now smokes weed. It's not exclusive to hip-hop anymore.]

Once a hip-hop sacrament exclusive to Houston, Texas—a town with such a thriving rap ecosystem that it could boast its own set of elements within these elements—Lean has become the best known recipe in rap, as best dictated by Pimp C in "Sippin' On Some Sizzurp:" "I got the red promethazine, thick orange and yellow tuss/Hydrocone, on the hands-free phone."

Pimp C is now among the many victims of what has turned out to be a terribly destructive potion. But I guess we can all find a bit of solace in the fact that Big Moe didn't live to see Mac Miller rap about taking "a little of that po', then we mix it up with that Sprite."

Twitter Beef

Sure, feuds have been in hip-hop since day one, but their shape has shifted. Initially, beef was solely musical and entirely innocuous. (Remember Moe Dee calling LL "Lousy Lame, Latent Lethargic, Lazy Lemon, Little Logic"?) Then beef became entirely non-musical and extremely fatal. (Remember Christopher Wallace and Tupac Shakur?) But it wasn't until beef took root in the arid-yet-strangely-fertile pastures of Twitter that it found its truest home.

For now beef can be both extremely personal and utterly inconsequential at the same time. Frank Ocean responding to Chris Brown's backhanded compliment by saying "I fucks wit Chris Brown, reminds me of a young Sisqo or Ike Turner" is one of the great rap disses of 2012 but it would have never occurred in song. Meanwhile, rappers like Azealia Banks have basically made an entire career out of beefing on Twitter.

Gunshot Sound Effects

This element is borrowed straight from the dance halls of Jamaica, where DJs reveled in the cacophonous din of street life years before DJ Whoo Kid teamed up with 50 Cent. While actual gunshots remain a signal of terror, gunshot sound effects signal something entirely different. In the context of a mixtape they do not indicate impending doom but rather sonic momentum.

As contemporary rap embraces cheap computer-generated production values (much like the Jamaican dancehall culture that preceded it) the gunshot drops have become more pervasive and essential. As much as they may reflect an urban reality, their primary function is as an indicator of the newfound urgency of rap's low-budget auditory onslaught.

Organized Crime Heroes

Crime movies are the folktales of modern America. Where blues and jazz performers once unfolded narratives about Casey Jones and Stagger Lee, the culture now has Tony Montana and Don Corleone. You'd think the presence of actual film would negate the oral tradition, but it doesn't. Rappers don't simply rehash movie narratives: they embody the fictional heroes as a means of documenting their own lives. Characters on a page became timeless symbols for a culture that prizes tales of struggle, survival and self-determination by any means necessary. More recently, the fictional narratives have given way to true-life ones, as real-world drug kingpins like Freeway Ricky Ross and Pablo Escobar, Big Meech and Larry Hoover are incresingly cited and emulated.

Strip Clubs

Strip clubs used to be places where one might go to watch a woman gyrate at a low rate. It was rappers that made stripping a small focal point of a much bigger cultural scenario. The strip club became an essential status symbol and convenient location for all-important transactions of conspicuous consumption. It became a point of origin for rags-to-riches stories like that of Amber Rose, who started her career (we use that term very loosely) at Sue's Rendezvous in Mount Vernon, New York. And, of course, it provided the subject matter for a range of songs, from Nelly's "Tip Drill" to Juicy J's "Bandz A Make Her Dance."

Still, the booty club's most crucial contribution to the culture was one of sonics. By the early 2000s, radio hits were clearly being tested in rooms where the bass frequencies were the only thing more powerful than the aroma of cocoa butter. You can jam Mobb Deep on the F Train and you can bump Dre in a vintage Impala, but you haven't truly experienced rap euphoria until you've heard Project Pat over the speakers at Babes of Babylon in Memphis. Tell them Complex sent you!

Reality TV

Long before it became a mainstream fad, rap had served as its own form of reality TV. Any given album would find an artist presenting a grossly-heightened-but-not-entirely-untrue portrait of an actual life. This was typically accomplished by distilling an average week into a highlight reel of outrageous sex, inebriation, comedy and conflict.

Thus, it was natural for guys like T.I. and Flavor Flav to parlay their rap careers into reality television careers. Living a life of complication; performing like a ham; embracing an exaggerated lifestyle: the hallmarks of reality television come standard on any rap star's resume. Perhaps this is why it only takes one YouTube video of Gunplay cavorting around Six Flags to make an unknown rapper from South Florida a more entertaining reality TV prospect than anyone who's actually on television.

Auto-Tune

By transforming the voice of its user, auto-tune transformed the face of rap. Even though Biz Markie and Ghostface had long since made off-key singing an integral part of the culture, auto-tune-which was invented for the express purpose of correcting the flaws in the human voice-actually enabled rap stars to make themselves stranger, less intelligible, and in many cases, more vulnerable.

It changed the course of Lil Wayne's career when he found a way to weep through auto-tune. Meanwhile, Kanye used the device to exorcise his grief in the wake his mother's death. Currently, guys like Future and Kevin Gates are using it to invent a whole new vocabulary for rap crooning. Jay-Z's "D.O.A." (later this year, "D.O.H.": "Death of Hyphenate") was the old guard's last-ditch attempt to hang onto rules that had already disintegrated.

Many saw the device as the bane of hip-hop culture; many more saw it as indefensibly annoying. All the better: transmutation is healthy for the culture, and if the changes bother people, that only means we're moving in the right direction. Besides, if you can't hear the deep blues in Future's "Turn On the Lights" you must be listening for the wrong reasons.

Downloading Mixtapes

The free mixtape is the greatest thing to happen to rap culture since teenagers in the Bronx first ran electricity out of the lampposts in the public parks to power their turntables. From its very beginning, rap has invented and insisted upon its own economy, and while the rap game is still connected to the dying record industry, the preponderance and overarching support for free music sharing is further proof that hip-hop writes and adheres to its own set of rules.

Rappers now work constantly to release music at ten times the rate of artists from 1990s or 2000s, only to give away their wares for free. Some say this is a sign of artistic degradation, when actually it is proof of untapped vitality. Without the largesse of the old industry, rappers have no choice but to focus on the sole determining factor of a healthy artistic existence: production.

No more perfectionism; no more six-year hiatuses between releases; no more massive promotional strategies (unless, of course, you're in bed with Samsung). Instead, what you get is the principle of prolificacy above all else. You could say that this hurts quality control, but that's made up in for in freshness. (There's an old-school hip-hop concept!) Artists having to give away music gives hip-hop a value sorely lacking in all other musical genres: relentless work ethic. At a time when American manufacturing is at an all-time low, hip-hop is one of the few sectors where production is at an all-time high.

Comment Sections

Comment sections have roots in the stages of the chitlin circuit, the system of all-black venues that thrived during Jim Crow. In those days, hostile audiences were separated from performers by a barricade of chicken wire, designed to deflect the inevitable rain of beer bottles that crowds were permitted to hurl at performers as a means of expressing disapproval. Much of the toughness and ingenuity in hip-hop is descended from those bygone days, though the venues are now electronic rather than physical. Rappers' performances are viewed through a computer screen, which now serves as the metaphorical chicken wire separating viewers from viewed. In the modern scenario, those unruly crowds thrive in the comment sections of the internet. Cheers and jeers are pounded out on keyboards and flung to the ether in the same spirit of impulsive hostility that once drove our ancestors to fling bottles at their heroes. It's not any easier to hit a performer with a nasty comment than it was to bean James Brown with a bottle, but the action remains as futilely explosive and fun as it must have been back in the old days.

Lists

Invented by the jazz critics of the 1950s (if you think blog readers are thirsty today, check out back issues of Downbeatfrom 1956); perfected by the staff of ego trip in the 1990s; and currently practiced by the team here at Complex.com, lists have long been an inextricable part of the hip-hop experience.

Now more than ever, lists are the rap culture's sole means of digesting a world dominated by a daily hailstorm of facts, figures, and files. We make them because we need them; we hate them because we can't escape them. From the obligatory GOAT questionnaire or Top 5 debates to increasingly convoluted year-end roundups, lists are not only a reflection of the splendid dissent within the nation; they are the tool we use to prevent any inkling of stultifying consensus.