- [Dometi] Montero Hill, also known as Lil Nas X,
released "Old Town Road" on SoundCloud
and began pushing it on social media.
But the 19-year-old didn't anticipate it
taking off the way it did.
- So we walked out to "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X
to celebrate the fact that it has just broken the record
for the longest running number one hit
on Billboard's Hot 100.
- To me, I'm like, it's an undeniable country song.
- But then when you get to those drums
and the way those 808s hit,
and the way, like that's hip hop.
♪ I got the horses in the back ♪
♪ Horse tack is attached ♪
♪ Hat is matte black ♪
♪ Got the boots that's black to match ♪
- There's like a little bit of a twang in it,
but then there's also a beat underneath it.
So people didn't really know what to do with it in that way.
- Artists are inherently complex. They wanna experiment.
They wanna push the boundaries of their voices,
you know, of their styles.
- [Dometi] So, when do we call it hip hop?
And when does it become something else entirely?
- Where rap goin' is back to the streets.
- Hopefully it goes back to the street,
and don't get caught up in a bunch of commercial politics.
You know, it's gonna cross over,
then you gonna see rap no more.
- [Dometi] As artists continue to evolve their music,
being defined by a genre is becoming irrelevant.
Why are we still using these seemingly archaic categories?
And what does that mean for the future of hip hop music?
I'm Dometi Pongo, and this is "Meaning in Music".
(upbeat music)
Even though there's a long history of hip hop colliding
with other genres, the music industry still has some trouble
allowing certain artists to step out
of their perceived boxes.
- If you let Miley Cyrus and Post Malone
oscillate between hip hop, and pop, and rock, and country,
why can't Lil Nas X do the same thing?
- When the song started jumping onto the charts,
that's when things started to get tricky.
- [Dometi] Soon, the song was removed
from the country chart, Billboard citing
that while it quote, "Incorporates references to country
and cowboy imagery, it does not embrace enough elements
of today's country music to chart in its current version."
This moment set off heated debates online.
- When you look at country artists
who are 100% considered country artists,
when they make a song that has a beat under it,
no one is like, are you a rap artist?
But if a rap artist makes a song
that sounds like a country song and it has a beat,
then everyone's like, "Ooh, we're not sure. We don't know."
- It was like, clearly, (laughs) you guys are racist.
This institution is racist.
- So he said, "Cool, I'm gonna get Billy Ray Cyrus.
I'm gonna go get y'all country god.
And he's gonna jump on this record with me.
And now you not gonna have no choice.
Like this thing is changing.
So you can accept me on your charts or not,
but when it goes down in the history books,
people will remember this as a country song.
- I just always felt like hip hop
and country music was about storytelling.
They're very heartfelt genres,
and they're attached to pain in a lot of the storytelling.
So there's a lot of similarities between hip hop
and country music to begin with.
- [Dometi] Though often unattributed,
country and rock and roll
have deep roots in Black history.
The banjo, a key instrument in traditional country music
can be traced back to West African stringed instruments
like the lute.
Otis Blackwell and Sister Rosetta Tharpe
had a major influence on some of America's
most beloved artists.
And Chuck Berry, who combined rhythm and blues with country
became known as the father of rock and roll.
- Rock and roll is Black music. It's just a fact.
Of course, Run-DMC was listening to rock and roll.
That's why did
♪ I'm the king of rock there is none higher ♪
♪ Sucker MCs should call me sire ♪
♪ To burn my kingdom, you must use fire ♪
♪ I won't stop rockin' till I retire ♪
- He knew what the hell he was doing,
he knew what he was listening to,
but he just presented it in a different way.
But Run-DMC were rockstars.
- Music is already moving up into replacing rock and roll
at this point, you know? - That's right,
not only that but rap is rock and roll, you know why?
Because we bein' rockin' as we rollin boy!
- [Dometi] Like rock and roll, hip hop is an amalgamation
of different traditions and techniques.
So it only makes sense that the two would find a synergy.
- It was hard for people to accept hip hop,
you know, critics and media used to say it was a fad,
it wasn't gonna last.
And that collaboration between Aerosmith and Run-DMC
did a lot for opening the world's eyes up
to the potential of hip hop.
I think by the time we get to Jay-Z
and Linkin Park "Collision Course",
which was a mashup of their biggest records,
wasn't that Jay-Z needed Linkin Park,
it actually maybe lended more credibility
to Linkin Park at that point.
The tables had turned a bit, but what it really did
was bring people together,
you know what I'm saying?
So it makes the tours bigger.
It opens up the fan base.
It was clear, this was the driving force of youth culture
in America and the world.
- [Dometi] Today, artists are producing entire albums
that defy categorization.
- When you look at someone like a Rico Nasty,
who makes music that sounds very punk influenced,
same with Playboi Carti, or Lil Uzi Vert, Travis Scott,
they all consider themselves rock stars in a way.
And they are all heavily influenced
by all of these other genres in their rap.
When you look at Playboi Carti's album "Whole Lotta Red",
he's billed as a rapper, but that was not a rap album.
He's not really rapping on it,
there's a lot of punk influence,
there's a lot of rock influence.
- [Dometi] On Wikipedia alone, hip hop appears
to have dozens of micro genres,
not to mention countless international scenes infusions.
There's more melodic rap,
where artists are less lyrically verbose
and rely heavily on Auto-Tune, like this track by Future.
♪ Love is just a word, it don't matter to me ♪
♪ I got so rich, nothing matters to me ♪
- [Dometi] Or harder trap music,
which includes variation like drill,
and within that is Chicago drill, Brooklyn drill, UK drill.
And then there's Latin trap, funk, and tread,
and even still music labels and award shows
tend to limit artists to a single category.
- Tyler, The Creator is a perfect example of this.
His album "Igor", which was not a hip hop album, honestly,
I think it was nominated in a hip hop category,
or in like an urban category.
- And there was lauded as an amazing rap album.
That album is not rap, right?
There's so many different elements to it
that people just don't know what to do with it,
and they go, "Oh, he's black, put it as rap."
- [Tia] He was singing, it was very experimental.
(synth music)
♪ Can we be friends ♪
♪ Are we still friends ♪
♪ I've got to know ♪
- [Dometi] For an album with very little rapping,
Tyler, The Creator won a Grammy for Best Rap Album,
but he wasn't exactly thrilled.
- It sucks that whenever we,
and I mean, guys that look like me,
do anything that's genre-bending or that's anything,
they always put it in a rapper, urban category,
which is, and I don't like that urban word.
It's just a politically correct way to say the N-word to me.
- When Tyler wants to make a rap album,
you know it's a rap album, you know what I'm saying?
When he wants to make "Igor",
you know it's in the pop lane, or alternative,
or however you wanna classify it.
I think as an artist, he should be able to classify himself.
- It doesn't make sense to me that we're calling
what Lil Uzi Vert does the same genre as Public Enemy.
You know, you look at rock and roll,
and people aren't putting Green Day next to Led Zeppelin.
Hip hop is the only one where everything
has to be under this one same umbrella,
and that's where I think much of the confusion comes from.
Down south, they've created whole new genres.
(upbeat music)
- From me growing up as a kid,
you would have different samples coming
from all types of different sounds or different beats used
to create the sound of hip hop.
A lot of times,
people, when they want to hear a Freedia song,
they expect strictly bounce.
But I have experimented with hip hop, with pop,
with a little gospel.
- [Dometi] Big Freedia is an artist from New Orleans
who's often referred to as the Queen of Bounce,
or as she likes to say-
- Big Freedia, the Queen Diva.
- [Dometi] Bounce music is considered a variation
of hip hop, but it has its own distinct sound and culture.
- I describe bounce music as up-tempo
heavy base call-and-response-type music.
It has a lot to deal with shaking of the ass
and moving of the body parts.
It's full of energy, it's full of life. It's repetitive.
And it difference from all other music and hip hop,
because the formulas that we use to make the beat-
- [Dometi] Like Freedia's classic hit, "Gin In My System"
♪ For ya, shake, shake, shake, shake ♪
♪ For ya, shake it for ya ♪
♪ Work, work, work, work, for ya ♪
♪ For ya, for ya, for ya, for ya, for ya, for ya ♪
♪ Shake, shake, shake it for ya ♪
- The key elements, the trigger man.
(light electronic tones)
The cheeky black clap.
(upbeat synth drums)
The brown beat.
(upbeat synth snare)
All of the essentials that you need
to even start to make a bounce beat from scratch.
- [Dometi] Artists labeled as hip hop or rap
have been blending sounds and blurring genres for decades.
And today, it's even harder to categorize them,
due to new technology and social media.
(record scratching)
- There's so many different genres of music,
and you can access them through your phone.
There's less need for gatekeepers now
because someone can blow up and be the biggest artist
in the world with no record deal,
without ever winning any awards on an award show.
And they're still huge online,
and they still have huge fan bases.
- [Dometi] But this departure from being defined
by a single genre is also the general evolution
of most artists.
- I make hip hop music primarily,
but I make all types of music though.
House music, I've made rock music, soul music,
hip hop was not the first music that I started listening to
and I really fell in love with, and it was not the last.
- You shouldn't be limited by these boxes.
Genre is really just a way to market music to the consumer.
- [Dometi] So if hip hop is diverging
and continues to experiment with different sounds,
when does it stop being hip hop all together?
- If you're from a certain generation,
as hip hop evolves, you may start to feel like
it loses the essence that it had when you were a kid.
- There's this balance, right,
of respecting what hip hop used to be
while acknowledging that it's not there anymore.
I don't wanna hear Sugarhill Gang,
but I respect that Big Daddy Kane informed Jay-Z,
and Jay Z is my favorite emcee.
So it's like, you just respect the tree
as much as you respect the branch that it comes from.
- But I think if you're hip hop,
you know hip hop when you hear it.
It's an attitude, like,
it might be harder for corporate America to define it,
or for the uninitiated or the untrained ear,
but you could hear something and be like,
"Nah, that's some hip hop."
- So I think 10 years from now,
hip hop is going to sound wildly different
than it does now.
I would like to think that it will sound very different
and be very experimental,
but I think that there has to be a balance
between experimenting with new sounds
and making sure that we protect the ethos
and the essence of what it is.
- People are still experimenting and changing the sound,
and what can they do different to make their music different
from back in the day?
- I think the culture's changing,
I think the music is changing,
and I think the institutions have to change with it.
And the institutions aren't changing quick enough.
(gentle synth music)