New York rap legend Nas has finally won a Grammy after three decades of music. While it’s long overdue, many things about the iconic emcee are still unknown. With his recent victory in mind, here’s 5 things you probably didn’t know about the legendary East Coast rapper. 1. Nas’ Real Name While everybody knows him […]
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From the fraught first year that the Grammys acknowledged hip-hop, it was clear that the then-emerging genre and the old-Hollywood music business establishment that puts the show on each year would never see eye-to-eye. Hip-hop is a youth movement; the average age of the Recording Academy was well into middle age until very, very (seriously, like 2018) recently. Hip-hop comes from the experiences of mainly underserved Black, Latin, and Asian creators; the Grammys — again, until recently — have always been very, very white.
And while the Grammys have made a concerted effort to address its shortcomings regarding its treatment of rap and hip-hop, the genre itself has undergone massive changes since The Fresh Prince first led a hip-hop boycott of the 1989 ceremony to protest the Grammys not televising the new Best Rap Performance award. For one thing, The Fresh Prince is now better known for his extensive filmography and the extreme dad energy of his Instagram and TikTok posts than he is for his mic skills.
Meanwhile, the very attributes a rap performer must display to be taken seriously have changed from night to day. Rather than reeling off rapid-fire punchlines about how “Fresh” you are, you’re more likely to switch breezily from chattering double-time cadences to cool crooning. The synthesizers and programmed drums of the early years have given way to cavernous 808s thundering away over warped samples from classical music and drumless soul loops spinning away behind intricate, ultra-violent drug tales.
So, it’d be difficult for the Grammys to “get it right” even under the best circumstances. Yet somehow, incredibly, that’s exactly what the show managed to do this year — even if no one will ever be truly satisfied with the results. The field, which included projects from California newcomer D Smoke, Midwestern coke rap kingpin Freddie Gibbs, New Orleans mystic Jay Electronica, New York veteran Nas, and Motor City rhyme mechanic Royce Da 5’9, represented one of the most balanced group’s in recent memory, pulling from multiple regions, generations, and sounds, with one thing in common: A commitment to the original tenets of “dope rhymes over dope beats.”
And while any rap fan could find plenty to complain about — once again, there was a dearth of women nominated, despite the sharp uptick in overall representation over the past several years, and no artist nominated was under 30 — there’s going to be a breaking point between having legitimate concerns and just plain moving the goalposts. In prior years, the complaint went, “The Grammys are too commercial,” only selecting projects from artists with sales numbers and widespread press, letting the importance streams overtake the value of artistic vision.
While this is a position that’s already hard enough to defend, considering the subjective nature of artistic vision in the first place, the fact remains that the Academy took long strides in addressing those concerns this year. Acknowledging longtime underground favorites like Freddie and Royce, paramount musicianship from D Smoke, and the bulletproof legacy of someone like Nas, the Grammys sent a clear message: That they heard those prior years’ complaints and took them seriously.
So, of course, it’s only natural that rap fans find something else to take issue with — namely, Nas’ win over Freddie. While both albums were collaborative efforts between two of rap’s top technicians and a pair of well-established producers in Alchemist and Hit-Boy, the fact remains that Nas is the more recognizable artist between the two among Grammy voters. He’s been a perennial contender for Best Rap Album, and while playing “what if” is always dicey, it’s almost certain that a win for Freddie over Nas would have drawn just as many vocal protests after the Queensbridge icon was once again “snubbed,” adding to his double-digit list of losses.
The fact someone like Freddie Gibbs could even receive a nod is a victory in itself — especially when you consider how many other artists were considered snubs this year. Lil Baby had one of the most-streamed albums of 2020, a No. 1 single in “The Bigger Picture,” and many rap fans’ hopes riding on him to legitimize the trap rap movement in the mainstream purview. Despite multiple female artists releasing worthy projects in 2020 or late 2019, none were nominated. No year’s field could ever be perfect, but the Gibbs nomination proves the Grammys are trying.
It also shows that maybe just adding more Black, female, or “young” voters isn’t quite enough. There’s no guarantee that these measures will ensure significant variance between voters’ tastes — after all, Grammy voters also tend to run more “intellectual” and “refined,” which helps explain why rough-edged rappers like Lil Baby might fly under their radars. That said, the show’s producers picked up the slack elsewhere; newcomers like DaBaby, Lil Baby, Megan Thee Stallion, and Roddy Ricch not only appeared on the show — one of the biggest platforms to help them launch their future bids for mainstream recognition — but Megan also won for other categories, while Chika and Doja Cat were mentioned among the Best New Artists of 2021.
Those moments count too. After all, Nas’ win was as much a result of his stature among Academy voters as it was a consolation for all the other golden gramophones he never got to display on his mantel. Cardi B pointed out as much before the show; just giving these under-the-radar artists the look helps them further their careers, which is the real goal. The Grammys aren’t the be-all, end-all. Like Nipsey Hussle — another Best Rap Album “snub” who won a different award posthumously the next year — said, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
Perhaps that’s the view rap fans should take with the Grammys’ halting progress toward a more perfect relationship with hip-hop. While rap is too broad and diverse a genre to ever be able to honor every artist in every nook and cranny of rap’s various versions, there’s nothing wrong with giving them credit where it’s due, even as we ask them to consider angles they haven’t yet. That’s what they’re trying to do — heck, it’s what we should all aspire to do — and when even getting “snubbed” helps artists so much, that’s an effort that should be appreciated.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
While Freddie Gibbs fans had a minor collective meltdown over his album Alfredo being “robbed” at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, the Gary, Indiana rapper’s response was much more affable. Gibbs, who was tabbed by fans as a shoo-in for a Best Rap Album award win thanks to his razor-sharp flows and blunt, darkly humorous observations about his misadventures in the drug game on it, was beaten out by Nas, who won the award for his Hit-Boy-produced 2020 album King’s Disease.
Fred didn’t seem too broken up about it, though. In a video posted to social media by a fan at his private Grammy viewing party, Gibbs shrugged off the loss with his typical irreverent outlook and a cheeky comment, delivered in a flashy, salmon-colored suit. “Look, I might have lost today,” he admitted, addressing the crowd. “But I’m undefeated in court!”
Freddie Gibbs’ reaction to losing Best Rap Album at the Grammys
pic.twitter.com/E4BJwG69J7
— Hot Freestyle (@HotFreestyle) March 14, 2021
He’s referring, of course, to a handful of criminal cases that broke his way, as detailed recently by an in-depth profile on The Ringer by Jeff Weiss. In one case, a judge misreading the amount in case of possession of weed led to the case being dismissed. In the most recent example, Fred was arrested in France after being accused of sexual assault in Vienna, Austria. However, once the details of the case were heard in court, a panel of Austrian judges declared him not guilty, with video evidence confirming that Gibbs was alone in his room at the time the assault was alleged.
Check out Gibbs;’ tongue-in-cheek response to his Grammy loss above.
Freddie Gibbs is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Nas hasn’t had much success at the Grammy awards. Well, to be honest, he hasn’t had any. The legendary rapper failed to bring home the coveted award each of the 13 times he was nominated. Luckily for him, all of that changed on Sunday at the 2021 Grammys. Nas won in the Best Rap Album category with his 13th album, King’s Disease. The project was boosted by a refreshed sound thanks to Hit-Boy’s production as well as solid contributions from the likes of Big Sean, Lil Durk, Anderson .Paak, and more.
The win comes 25 years after Nas received his first Grammy nomination in the Best Rap Solo Performance category at the 1996 show for “If I Ruled The World (Imagine That).” His nomination for the Best Rap Album is also the fifth time in Nas’ career that he was in the running for the award. The previous four times came in 2000 with I Am…, 2008 for Hip Hop Is Dead, 2009 for Nas, and 2013 for Life Is Good. Prior to this year, Nas was high on the list of artists with the most Grammy nominations without a win. The names ahead of him include Martina McBride (14), Brian McKnight (17), Snoop Dogg (17), and Morten Lindberg who holds the record with 20 winless nominations.
Nas beat D Smoke’s Black Habits, Jay Electronica’s A Written Testimony, Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist’s Alfredo, and Royce 5’9’’’s The Allegory to take home his first Grammy award.
New York rapper Nas knows Lauryn Hill has reached iconic status. The hip-hop veteran has lit up social media with a big salute to his longtime friend and past collaborator on becoming certified diamond. Nas Celebrates Lauryn Hill Nasty Nas went to his Instagram page with a major shout-out for L-Boogie. Nasir shared a screenshot […]
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New York rapper Nas knows no one can give him a run for his money. In a recent interview, he put respect on his own name and spoke on the current state of hip-hop and its present stars. Nas Isn’t Losing Sleep Over Any Rappers While speaking to The Financial Times, Nas said that nobodies […]
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Despite working with a more modern crop of collaborators recently, it seems Nas hasn’t completely shaken his old-head views. Nas recently collaborated with some of today’s rappers, including Big Sean, Don Toliver, and Lil Durk, on his 2020 album King’s Disease, but that didn’t stop him from sharing his frankly unsurprising opinion with Financial Times during an interview discussing his impressive investment portfolio.
“I appreciate what’s out there, but there’s no one keeping me up at night,” he told the magazine. “I hear a new rap record and think it’s great, but I don’t listen to it the next week.” I guess Hit-Boy was the one making sure Nas stayed up-to-date on his new album.
Hip-hop’s generation gap is a well-worn topic for the Queensbridge veteran. While his outlook today is a far cry from “hip-hop is dead,” the sentiment after which he titled his eighth album in 2016, it seems that this attitude is born more of low awareness than an actual problem with hip-hop. For instance, it seems his attention seems pretty focused on New York — he name-checks Pop Smoke as one rapper who impressed him.
“We were happy to see that young king come up,” he says of the slain Brooklyn rapper, who will make his posthumous acting debut this Friday in Eddie Huang’s basketball movie Boogie. “He was a breath of fresh air.”
You can read the full interview here and learn more about modern hip-hop — of which there is plenty of great, memorable stuff being done — here.
Samples have always been the backbone of hip-hop. The very first raps were performed over beat breaks, which were looped and extended to provide B-boys a platform for their gymnastic dance routines and rappers their bombastic bars. However, despite hip-hop’s preference for calling back to the past, making history as modern as a freshly-released single, the genre has oddly few examples of another tool for paying homage to the forebears and icons of days past.
Last week, M1 and Stic.man of revered revolutionary rap duo Dead Prez revealed that the late, great Los Angeles legend Nipsey Hussle reached out to them prior to his death for permission to remake their seminal 2000 debut album Let’s Get Free — but the idea was never executed, as Nipsey passed away before he was able to begin work on the project in earnest. Besides this one high-profile example, there aren’t very many other albums by current rappers that seek to recreate the classic works that have inspired and influenced them. So, why doesn’t hip-hop have many cover albums?
Part of the answer may stem from rap music’s status as a young genre. Just 30 years ago, the culture as a whole was still fighting for its legitimacy, dismissed as a passing fad. However, that didn’t seem to stop musicians in other disciplines from nearly constantly covering each others’ songs to the point that there is widespread debate about the “best” versions of hits like “Respect,” originated by Otis Redding and made classic by Aretha Franklin; “Proud Mary,” a Creedance Clearwater Revival turned rocking revue by Ike and Tina Turner; and “Strange Fruit,” the defiant ode to Black resistance in the face of monstrous treatment sung by Billie Holiday and further popularized by Nina Simone.
Rock artists have also had a long history of reinterpreting classics for new generations. Consider Dirty Projectors’ Rise Above. In 2007, bandleader David Longstreth set out to replay Black Flag’s 1981 album Damaged from memory despite not hearing in for 15 years prior. If that sounds ambitious, Beck’s 2009 project Record Club would seem downright obsessive, as the genre-hopping multi-instrumentalist sought to cover whole albums in just one day each with a fluid collective of musicians. These included Leonard Cohen’s Songs Of Leonard Cohen, The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, and INXS’s Kick.
The form is a staple of other genres, such as rock and soul, but seems foreign to hip-hop, despite the fact that hip-hop now has enough history behind it to have several generations of “old-school” music, as many a millennial has been dumbstruck to learn in recent years. Where a 35-year-old today may have cited NWA, Public Enemy, or Run-DMC as “old-school” based on their high school experiences, a 15-year-old today looks at that 35-year-old’s high school faves like Jay-Z, Ludacris, or Nelly, and sees only a pack of old fogeys — Public Enemy may as well have been recorded on Fred Flintstone’s Dictabird.
Further complicating hip-hop’s relationship to cover projects is its reliance on samples and insistence on originality. Biting lyrics is a no-no of the highest order in hip-hop, and while sampling is the foundation of the art form, rarely are songs recreated or reinterpreted — and sometimes, choosing a sacrosanct record to recreate is seen as blasphemous. Just look at the reaction to DJ Khaled’s Outkast sample on his 2019 song “Just Us.” Borrowing the melody of “Ms. Jackson” didn’t work out any better for him than J. Cole’s similar homage — borrowing the loop from “Da Art Of Storytelling, Part 1” on “Land Of The Snakes — did for the North Carolina MC.
However, there is one example of a hip-hop cover album that was both well-received and tastefully done. In 2011, former Slum Village member Elzhi set out to pay tribute to one of his favorite MCs, Nas, by recreating Nas’s revered debut album Illmatic with a live band. The resulting mixtape, cleverly titled Elmatic, saw Elzhi putting his own unique twists on both Nas’s rhymes and the ’90s masterclass beats; Elzhi deftly re-worded some of the more iconic lyrical sequences, keeping the familiar diction and cadences, channeling them to flip Nas’s autobiographical tales into narratives of his own Detroit upbringing. The band embellished on the Ahmad Jamal, Gap Band, and Michael Jackson samples, bringing their musicality to the fore, where previously the drum tracks were the centerpieces of the album.
Elmatic‘s success only highlights how intriguing the idea of hip-hop cover albums truly is. Rap music, despite its reputation as a youth genre with little use for its elder statesmen, has always held a deep reverence for the history, breadth, and depth of Black music. Puffy can sample Diana Ross for a celebratory posthumous Notorious BIG single and Three 6 Mafia can turn a 30-year-old Willie Hutch soundtrack cut into an international players’ anthem, thoroughly disproving the trope that hip-hop doesn’t respect its elders. Rappers and producers simply choose to reinterpret what has already been done. If that’s not the essence of a cover, nothing is.
Nipsey Hussle and Elzhi both understood this, and both were willing to take the plunge, risking the disapproval of hardcore hip-hop heads to salute their musical forebears. That’s to be applauded — and imitated. Hip-hop now has a rich history of its own, just waiting to be mined, paid homage to, and translated into new terms for younger ears that may not be familiar with it, but are certainly much more receptive than they are given credit for. Whether it’s a New York boom-bap standard, a West Coast G-funk essential, or a Dirty South crunk classic, it’s time for hip-hop to begin giving its older albums some fresh looks.
Nipsey Hussle is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
New York rap legend Nas is paying homage. This week, the hip-hop veteran went onto social media to salute and honor late civil rights leader and Blacks rights icon Malcolm X. Nas Pays Respect To Malcolm X Nas took to Instagram with a dope shot of the African-American Muslim minister. He kept it simple in […]
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