What Can't We Wrap in as Rap?

Rap is far and away not my favorite genre of music. That is not to say that there’s anything wrong with rap, and there are some artists I do enjoy listening to, but it brings me to an interesting discussion I had recently with Kira from Roll the Dice and Play Nice. The debate came up as to whether Rap is more aptly defined by the musical style, or the vocal style. My position, and I feel it will be rather hard to make me budge here, is that the vocal style more strongly typifies the genre. The opposing point was used as Jay Z has available both acapella  versions and "instrumental" versions of some of his songs available. The instrumental tracks were listed as rap, while the acapella versions were not. This to me is baffling. Often the backing music for rap songs are built off of samples from other songs, sometimes a large portion of the hook is done this way as well. However, the lyrical style of much rap is wholly unique to the genre, excluding some rock artists integrating rap intotheir style.

That said, it caused something of a mental spark, Nas’ “I Can” contains large portions of Beethoven’s “Fur Elise”, with only a synth drum beat accompanying it through most of the song. Based on the assumption that rap can be typified by the instrumental backing, Nas would have inadvertently made Beethoven the first rap artist. Conceptually this is plausible, but let’s be real here, no one is going to call Ludwig Van Beethoven a hip-hop or rap artist, which invalidates the point provided by the notion that Jay Z’s instrumental tracks are qualified as rap, without a vocal track. Clearly there is some amount of ambiguity here, one could argue that the addition of the percussion makes it an entirely different song (though I don’t know that I would go that far), and it is doubtful that one would argue that Primer 55 is a rap group despite their stylized vocals. Certainly it is an amalgamation of the two needed to call music rap, however it is rather hard to argue that the instrumentation is enough to declare a track as rap, many rap songs may very well be equally qualified as pop music in the modern age based solely on instrumentation while it’s rather hard to argue that the vocals would match up with what we expect from rap much more.

Perhaps it is much more applicable to say that no one aspect of a song solely typifies the genre it comes from. However, some are certainly much more indicative of a song/album’s resting place in the record store, or for those of you that don’t believe in owning hard copies of albums, what search term returns the expected tracks on iTunes.