Taste Battle in Rap: RationalMadman vs Type1

For the first time ever, R&B/hip-hop has surpassed rock to become the biggest music genre in the U.S. in terms of total consumption, according to Nielsen Music's 2017 year-end report.

Eight of the 10 most listened-to artists of the year came from the R&B/hip-hop genre, led by Drake, with 4.8 million album equivalent units (combined album sales, song downloads and streams), and Kendrick Lamar (3.7 million). Rap also experienced the second-highest growth of any genre, spiking 25% over 2016 and coming in just behind Latin music, which was up 30% in total volume.

Hip-hop dominated the charts in 2017, with viral hits such as Lil Uzi Vert's XO Tour Llif3, Future's Mask Off and Post Malone's Congratulations ranking among the 10 best-selling tracks of last year, according to BuzzAngle Music and Mediabase. Rap up-and-comers Cardi B (Bodak Yellow) and Migos (Bad and Boujee) each spent multiple weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 with their respective singles, while four of the five Grammy nominees for album of the year were R&B or hip-hop artists.

Album and song sales were down overall in 2017, dropping 19% against the year before. But streaming surged in their wake, growing 43% with 400 billion streams total (compared with 252 billion in 2016).

More insights from Nielsen about the year in music:

• Ed Sheeran's Divide was the most popular album of the year with 2.8 million album equivalent units. It was followed by Kendrick Lamar's Damn. (2.7 million) and Taylor Swift's Reputation (2.3 million).
  
• Reputation was released in mid-November, but still sold a whopping 1.9 million copies in 2017 — enough to make it the top-selling album of 2017. It's one of only two albums to surpass 1 million in sales last year, along with Divide.
  
• Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's summer anthem Despacito featuring Justin Bieber was the biggest song of the year in terms of total sales (2.7 million downloads) and streams (1.3 billion).
  
• Streaming now accounts for 54% of total audio consumption, composing the majority of audio consumption for the first time ever. (For comparison, streams accounted for 38% of total audio consumption in 2016 and a mere 22% in 2015.)
  
• 19 songs surpassed 500 million streams in 2017; of those, 17 came from the R&B/hip-hop genre.
  
• Despite rap's dominance on streaming platforms, rock continues to be the biggest genre for album sales, accounting for 35% of all albums sold.
  
• Vinyl LP sales were up 9% from 2016 and now account for 14% of all physical albums sold. The most popular? The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, thanks in part to a deluxe anniversary reissue on vinyl.
  

HIP HOP, GRIME AND RAP. WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

In this day and age there is so much music out there that the lines between genres are blurred, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing…

Hip-hop, rap and grime all seem to hold similar elements and fit within one another. Without realising, you could be listening to multiple genres at once but how, why, and why do we love it so much?

Rhyme became rap, rap became hip-hop and hip-hop became grime. Each step of this musical evolution oozes excellence due to the creativity of the artist’s voice and mind.

The roots of rap date back to the early 1900s and West Africa, where stories were told rhythmically over drum beats and decorative instrumental. But the rap we know today moved from Africa over to the US and blessed our ears from the 70s onwards.

Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five and Salt-N-Pepa from the 80’s exemplify the famous vintage rap sound that we recognise today and I can assure you that, if it hasn’t happened already, these sounds will be cranked up on the stereo at family parties and enjoyed by everyone. That is because 80’s rap is universal, it is positive and upbeat, and generally provokes a party atmosphere. It is often slower than the rap we hear today and usually in a major key (meaning it sounds happy), but we’re not complaining. Uhuhuhuhuh!

Rap today is closer to art than music, the mind boggles at how fast some artists can get words out of their mouths and how someone can think so fast on their feet without making one mistake. Eminem has to be credited here; in his “Rap God” he averaged 6.5 words per second, where ‘normal’ people average at 2.5 words per second, that’s a ridiculous difference and proves that Mr. Marshall Mathers, really is a “super human”.

Rap and hip-hop come as a 2 for 1 deal in today’s music spectrum. Kanye, Kendrick, A$AP Rocky, J. Cole, Drake, Tyga, Jay Z; all black, all male, all dominating the hip-hop music industry, and that’s the name just a few. Hip-hop, like rap, is so versatile; there are almost genres within genres.

Today the consensus among artists and the consumer market is that the tone of the hip-hop song is more negative than in previous years. But this is what sells and what audiences want to hear. It feels truthful from the artists, as if they are telling a story very quickly and to instrumental, this is the beauty of hip-hop: each song has a story and each story is the truth.

Grime, is a fairly new genre, as far as genres go; it is to believed to have originated in Hackney, London, in the early 2000’s. Unlike its predecessors (rap and hip-hop) grime is a genre of British origin, and we here in the UK feel very patriotic about our creation.

Grime is usually accompanied by a garage backbeat, and often the artist has an East London accent, however this is not true with all artists and songs. The songs are generally fast paced and again, skillfully rapped over, by absolute music masterminds.

Stormzy, is one of the most influential names in grime this year; and won the best grime act for the past two years at the MOBO awards. Skepta is also very influential, one of his biggest hits being: “That’s Not Me” which repeats that exact phrase after most statements in the song. The repetitiveness is what makes this genre memorable, and why grime is becoming so big in UK clubs and festivals.

They are the songs that everyone knows and everyone can interact with.

Rap, hip-hop and grime make up a big chunk of the UK music market; each genre is inherently different but incorporates the same elements simultaneously. This is how and why the lines have been blurred, but we love this cocktail of music genres, and with new talent emerging in this market almost everyday, we can’t wait to see what’s next.

Poetry

Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.

It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used. The interactive layering of all these effects to generate meaning is what marks poetry.

Because of its nature of emphasising linguistic form rather than using language purely for its content, poetry is notoriously difficult to translate from one language into another: a possible exception to this might be the Hebrew Psalms, where the beauty is found more in the balance of ideas than in specific vocabulary. In most poetry, it is the connotations and the "baggage" that words carry (the weight of words) that are most important. These shades and nuances of meaning can be difficult to interpret and can cause different readers to "hear" a particular piece of poetry differently. While there are reasonable interpretations, there can never be a definitive interpretation.

Nature of poetry

Poetry can be differentiated most of the time from prose, which is language meant to convey meaning in a more expansive and less condensed way, frequently using more complete logical or narrative structures than poetry does. This does not necessarily imply that poetry is illogical, but rather that poetry is often created from the need to escape the logical, as well as expressing feelings and other expressions in a tight, condensed manner. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic Negative Capability. A further complication is that prose poetry combines the characteristics of poetry with the superficial appearance of prose, such as in Robert Frost's poem, "Home Burial." Other forms include narrative poetry and dramatic poetry, both of which are used to tell stories and so resemble novels and plays. However, both these forms of poetry use the specific features of verse composition to make these stories more memorable or to enhance them in some way.

What is generally accepted as "great" poetry is debatable in many cases. "Great" poetry usually follows the characteristics listed above, but it is also set apart by its complexity and sophistication. "Great" poetry generally captures images vividly and in an original, refreshing way, while weaving together an intricate combination of elements like theme tension, complex emotion, and profound reflective thought. For examples of what is considered "great" poetry, visit the Pulitzer prize and Nobel prize sections for poetry.

The Greek verb ποιεω [poiéo (= I make or create)], gave rise to three words: ποιητης [poiet?s (= the one who creates)], ποιησις [poíesis (= the act of creation)] and ποιημα [poíema (= the thing created)]. From these we get three English words: poet (the creator), poesy (the creation) and poem (the created). A poet is therefore one who creates and poetry is what the poet creates. The underlying concept of the poet as creator is not uncommon. For example, in Anglo-Saxon a poet is a scop (shaper or maker) and in Scots makar.

Sound in poetry

Perhaps the most vital element of sound in poetry is rhythm. Often the rhythm of each line is arranged in a particular meter. Different types of meter played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry. In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence.

Poetry in English and other modern European languages often uses rhyme. Rhyme at the end of lines is the basis of a number of common poetic forms, such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of rhyme is not universal. Much modern poetry, for example, avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Furthermore, Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. In fact, rhyme did not enter European poetry at all until the High Middle Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language. The Arabs have always used rhymes extensively, most notably in their long, rhyming qasidas. Some classical poetry forms, such as Venpa of the Tamil language, had rigid grammars (to the point that they could be expressed as a context-free grammar), which ensured a rhythm.

Alliteration played a key role in structuring early Germanic and English forms of poetry (called alliterative verse), akin to the role of rhyme in later European poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry and the rhyme schemes of Modern European poetry alike both include meter as a key part of their structure, which determines when the listener expects instances of rhyme or alliteration to occur. In this sense, both alliteration and rhyme, when used in poetic structures, help to emphasise and define a rhythmic pattern. By contrast, the chief device of Biblical poetry in ancient Hebrew was parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three; a verse form that lent itself to antiphonal or call- and-response performance.

In addition to the forms of rhyme, alliteration and rhythm that structure much poetry, sound plays a more subtle role in even free verse poetry in creating pleasing, varied patterns and emphasising or sometimes even illustrating semantic elements of the poem. Devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, dissonance and internal rhyme are among the ways poets use sound. Euphony refers to the musical, flowing quality of words arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Poetry and form

Compared with prose, poetry depends less on the linguistic units of sentences and paragraphs, and more on units of organisation that are purely poetic. The typical structural elements are the line, couplet, strophe, stanza, and verse paragraph.

Lines may be self-contained units of sense, as in the well-known lines from William Shakespeare's Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question.

Alternatively a line may end in mid-phrase or sentence:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

this linguistic unit is completed in the next line,

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

This technique is called enjambment, and is used to create a sense of expectation in the reader and/or to add a dynamic to the movement of the verse.

In many instances, the effectiveness of a poem derives from the tension between the use of linguistic and formal units. With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the visual presentation of their work. As a result, the use of these formal elements, and of the white space they help create, became an important part of the poet's toolbox. Modernist poetry tends to take this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition. In its most extreme form, this leads to the writing of concrete poetry.

Poetry and rhetoric

Rhetorical devices such as simile and metaphor are frequently used in poetry. Indeed, Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor". However, particularly since the rise of Modernism, some poets have opted for reduced use of these devices, preferring rather to attempt the direct presentation of things and experiences. Other 20th-century poets, however, particularly the surrealists, have pushed rhetorical devices to their limits, making frequent use of catachresis.

Music is essential to many of our lives. We listen to it when waking up, while in transit, at work, and with our friends. For many, music is like a constant companion. It can bring us joy and motivate us, accompany us through difficult times, and alleviate our worries.

Music is much more than mere entertainment. It has been a feature of every known human society—anthropologists and sociologists have yet to find a single culture throughout the course of human history that has not had music. In fact, many evolutionary psychologists today make the argument that music predated language. Primitive tribes and religious practices have used music to reach enlightened states for thousands of years, and Pythagoras used music to heal different psychological and physical ailments. Currently, cutting-edge scientific research has shown the effect that music has on the brain, the individual, and society.

Not only does music reach us on intellectual, social, and emotional levels, but many describe it as spiritual or mystical. The use of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic devices in music can induce a psychological state in both the musicians and the listener that is beyond words to describe. Music can bring us back to ourselves, be our mirror, and show us a side of us we may have long forgotten or never knew existed.

Even though we are constantly exposed music in our daily lives, we rarely stop to actually think about what it is. After all, what exactly is music?

Fundamentally, music is a combination of sounds, and sound is vibration. One of the most succinct definitions of music comes from the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni, who said that, “Music is sonorous air.” It's extraordinary to think that a simple vibration unseen by the human eye can facilitate a deeply rich emotional experience, alter perception and consciousness, and induce ecstatic states of being. What is the process by which these sonic vibratory frequencies are heard by the listener, creating a profound psychological experience for them? How does something as fleeting as "sonorous air" have such a healing and therapeutic effect on people? And how does it facilitate personal growth?