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You hear some people talking about how hip hop and electronic music are finally coming together. You hear other folks talk about how it was always this way, twenty or thirty years ago… And you hear even fewer folks talking about how hip hop is, fundamentally, a form of electronic music (though it went in a much different direction than the music that we consider to be ‘electronic,’ went in) but here’s something that you don’t hear people talking much about too much…

Prepare for a rant: hip hop is actually a form of trance music; I’ll explain why, now…

Back in the early 1980s (actually, it was the late 1970s…) there was a reformed gang leader, back from a trip from Africa, with lofty and inspiring ideas that certainly went on to help change the face of culture.

He organized hip hop blog parties where folks could hang out and enjoy some good rap music and dancing – and he also defined what hip hop was – a combination of graffiti, breakdancing, MCing, and DJing. It was all about positivity, as the organizer of this movement was trying to help give young kids in the ghetto an alternative to gang life. The man’s name was Afrika Bambaataa.

Now, if you would indulge me, I would like to explain how hip hop and trance music tie together so well…

There was a German band from the 70s, Kraftwerk, who dropped such trancey (…”trancey”..?) gems on the world as “Autobahn,” which goes on and on and on. Or, there’s “We Are the Robots,” which was another fun little number. Africa Bambaataa enjoyed the synthetic European trance pop sounds of the group, and decided to incorporate it into his own tunes, remixing Kraftwerk (and making the beats more interesting) as well as rapping over them, and by doing this, he helped in creating a new musical template.

He helped – though he was not the first to rap over a beat – but the trance link goes even deeper than just Afrika Babaataa sampling Kraftwerk – it goes MUCH deeper…
When DJs took the most danceable section of a disco/funk/r’n’b/pop tune and looped it, they were allowing for the ‘authenticity’ of that 4 second sound (including the tonality, the slightest amounts of reverb, the ‘organic’ variations of melodic and rhythmic quantifications – not to mention any scratches or imperfections in the vinyl recording) to be repeated, over and over… and over and over and over, creating a trance-like groove that was infectious. It was truly a pop-ish post-modern form of trance, in every sense possible.

The DJs realized, early on, that when an MC toasts and boasts over the record, it got the crowd excited… Maybe they realized that playing a hip hop beat on repeat was one thing – and having breakdancers break to it was yet another things – but including vocals made it altogether more whole, in a way (which is something that a lot of edm trance DJs don’t see to realize very often)…

So, when you hear DJs talk about how they’d “stay up for hours, listening to loops,” they’re listening to their own self-constructed trance tunes. Hip hop was, in a very fundamental way, a radical experimentation of sound and culture. Consider this – a whole musical genre was built on the basic premise of taking pre-existing funky tracks and converting them into a trance music structure (while at the same time keeping the original sound entirely intact) – that’s what hip hop music is (or, at least, was… though time has passed and the template is evolving once again, in some ways).

In structure and style, you can call it trance. If you consider the specific sounds of electronic music and edm/trance, hip hop also maintains a lot of the same sounds – the drumboxes, a heavy usage of synthesizers (and, in some cases, like Bambaataa, sampling actual electronic artists).

So, what is my point in all of this? My point is that trance has actually been one of the dominant forms of Western music for about twenty years, it just isn’t recognized as such. It never has been…

And no, not the kind of trance music that’s made exclusively for clubbers/hippies/mushroom-eaters, either. I know that’s the stereotype, but at least one or two of the aforementioned labels probably apply to at least 90% of hardcore enthusiasts of what is considered ‘trance’ (edm-trance) music…

So there you have it… Trance can be created by repetitive funk loops and reciting rhythmic poetry on top.

That’s pretty much it. I feel I don’t need to elaborate much more, as my point has hopefully been understood. I guess the reason I’m writing this is to show that despite what experts say…. (be they the old-guard ‘experts’ at Rolling Stone or VH1 or whomever… or even musicologists in universities who stubbornly refuse to recognize a trend that came along any time after the halfway point of the 20th century…) the experts are often not likely to reconsider their rigidly-held viewpoints, and therefore, are stuck in a bubble of their own creation. Bottom line – everyone is wrong except for me, StrangeFlow.

No, I’m just being sarcastic. Hell, sometimes I’m wrong about music, too! (…uh… occasionally… and on purpose) …

Some people get enraged when you try and label a new form of music – and this is true more often in electronic music culture, as much as anywhere else. I have my own theories on why this is, and obviously, there are good as well as bad implications of having a hundred different styles of music to look through. It can be daunting, to say the least, unless you are an extremely casual observer. But here’s the thing – subgenres are always based on preconceived notions of music style: if one goes back and reconsiders the ‘rules’ of music, the ‘exact’ history of the dynamic between music and culture, they might occasionally stumble upon revelations. Revelations, for example, like the link between hip hop and trance… or the revelation that, by definition, Chicago juke is actually a form of folk music, in addition to a super-fast dance music.

What are these revelations worth? Well, if people start to realize and appreciate a particular influence in a style of music they’re making or listening to, perhaps they’ll view that style of music a little differently… And once they start to view it and think about it differently, they will, invariably, start to go about interacting with it and creating it differently, in the future.

And so, really, what’s wrong with that? Especially considering that the only thing that has changed is one’s perception of an art form… If nothing else, this is just one more consideration / analysis in the ongoing understanding of the link between the artist’s mentality – and their resulting artwork.

-StrangeFlow