if you could make a hip hop super group...
- Thread starter Jake
- Start date
And there's a very good reason for it - first, many of these projects happen as desperate attempts to revive the careers of the individual members, but what is more often (almost always in fact) the problem is that putting several established MCs together in the same group is prohibitve to the establishment of the kind of chemistry between the MCs that made the classic hip-hop groups of the past so great. Hip-hop has gotten a lot more individual in the last 10-15 years - groups used to be the norm up until somewhere in the mid 90s, then they gradually disappeared and it's been almost all solo MC's since then. And groups used to trade rhymes with each other, have each individual's lyrics be part of a coherent whole, and make tracks sounded like and were based on the fact that everyone was in the studio at the time of recording and actively engaged in a very collaborative creative process. Now, it's all MC A drops the first verse, MC B drops the second, etc. and a lot of the time the content of those verses is such that they may be inserted just as well on dozens of other tracks, so it all ends up souding very incoherent and uninspired. Add to that my suspicion that many MCs go into these projects with the attitude "We have the super group, I can take it a bit more easily than usual, the other will carry the weight", which when everyone approaches things the same way is a guarantee for something half-assed, and it's no wonder these albums never live up to the hype
