Instrumental hiphop never really kept up with the rest of the genre and was supplanted pretty rapidly, I assume due to the advent of DAWs and cleaner sampling methods gaining wider spread popularity in music production more broadly. Using the turntable as an instrument really seems to have fallen to obscurity, finding a learning community niche on Youtube, and its broader legacy is reductive, vinyl scratches strongly date a sound.
I miss it and felt like trawling back through. The sound of the equipment doing things it shouldn’t coupled with the collage of sound. The compulsive oscillating sound of a sharp tip on taut polyester teased from popular libraries of the 20th Century. A musical form that informed pretty much all production since but to listen to only this feels like it wouldn’t move crowds as much. It’s always had a sort of conceptual aroma that I think many repeat listeners would find distasteful or even pure gimmick. Here’s some curations from me thinking about what I like about it. Feel free to share whatever you think fits this category though I’d say its distinct from electronic and dance music more generally.
Some artists just explore a skit musically with as much foley and appropriate dialogue as they can muster. Sometimes the skits are musical in theme or they might just pivot about a mundane idea.
Others are musical flourishes that take an existing genre and deconstruct while still keeping the spirit through the lens of the deck. It’s a very semiotic mickey-mousing kinda music much of the time.
Performance technique can recede to allow sample structure to speak, mostly, for itself
Memories of a 5am paper route
Sometimes the ‘gimmick’ or ‘joke’ is in pure performance but technically impressive enough it can’t entirely be dismissed as such
Turn shit into music
Virtuosity as arcane magic of the fingers. Anyone can understand.
Some push the conceptual further almost to the point of being audio collage-poems than tracks as such
I even like the stuff that is formally like it despite not quite being it. Something about sound getting fucked up and sounding better for it.
