After watching all of the hosts of BET’s “Rap City” get emotional about the end of their 20-year run as the premiere hip-hop music video show, BET decided to run a replay of the 2008 BET Hip-Hop Awards. I naturally took this opportunity to watch the whole thing, since I had missed the original broadcast. Amid the near-constant plugs for Obama and voting in general, the poorly scripted lead-ins for the presenters, and the repeated cuts to Lil Wayne’s reaction, it occurred to me that the Hip-Hop awards have substantially less fluff than any other awards show.
It was a two-hour telecast as opposed to the three hours of the VMAs or the 15 hours of the Academy Awards. On top of that, the show packed in nine performances in those two hours, in addition to three cyphers, where rappers took turns freestyling over a beat. Given the negative reputation of BET in the minds of hip-hop purists, I was surprised to see such a dedication to the culture, especially with regards to the freestyling, an art that is usually neglected by mainstream hip-hop.
Despite my surprisingly positive reaction to the show, there was one thing that still managed to bother me: vocal backing tracks.
This problem was best illustrated by the sequential performances of the one and only Nasty Nas and the overstuffed double performance of Plies and Ne-Yo, and Rick Ross, Nelly, and Avery Storm.
Like your middle school math teacher once advised, let’s work backwards. So Plies comes out yelling the intro to his utter non-hit “Who Hotter Than Me.” Then, the beat segued into his actual hit, “Bust It Baby, Part 2,” at which point the ever-dapper Ne-Yo took the stage to sing the hook from the song. Now I’ll admit it, I kind of like the song, despite the fact that the beat is a slice of pure J.R. Rotem bubblegum, and the fact that Plies’ attempts at detailing a good relationship are downright disgusting. The problem with the live performance was that both Plies and Ne-Yo were using backing vocal tracks. I guess I can understand a singer like Ne-Yo using the backing track, as it functions as kind of a pitch control for the singer, not unlike monitors. Even so, I felt like I was hearing more of the backing track than Ne-Yo’s voice.
But Plies using a backing track? He’s a rapper. There’s no pitch control to speak of, you either remember and say all of your words, or you don’t.
On top of that, the backing track is obviously at the set pitch of the recorded song. Since pitch doesn’t really matter in rapped vocals, rappers usually end up yelling their vocals louder when performed live, which increases the pitch of the vocals. What results is an unholy dissonant interval of the lower pitch of the original vocals and the higher pitch of the live vocals.
As if watching the (probably) functionally illiterate Plies wasn’t enough, Rick Ross then took the stage and had the exact same vocal dynamic on his song “Here I Am.” The song and performance featured Nelly, rapping with a backing track, and Avery Storm, one of Nelly’s pet projects, singing the hook without a backing track. I was totally surprised by this. Avery Storm looks like a caricature of a pimp, with his long hair and gold snaggletooth. Basically, he looks like Nelly snagged him off the street. But dude sang a pretty demanding vocal hook, falsetto and all, without a backing track, and it was pretty good. He even went so far as to sing the final hook a cappella, whereupon finishing he gave the funniest crooked grin I’ve seen in a long time. I never thought I’d say this, but the greasy-haired, thugged-out Avery Storm made Ne-Yo look narcotized by comparison.
On the rap front, the one MC who went as far as to go without backup was none other than Nas Escobar. Nas rapped the entirety of his single “Hero” without a backing track, which, in true Nas fashion, is densely constructed rhymewise.
The sad thing is that both “Here I Am” and “Bust It Baby, Part 2″ have totally outdone “Hero” on the charts. Artists who don’t have either enough talent, drive or confidence to rap their songs on their own are outdoing those like Nas who do have the talent to do so. On top of that, Nas usually has something to say, be it about Fox News, history or censorship, whereas Rick Ross just brags about what a cocaine kingpin he used to be and how rich he is, and Plies just brags about how he’s a “goon.” I think the real reason that Nas’ single has been outdone in the charts is simply that there is a very minimal sung hook in it, while the other two tracks have very prominent hooks.
The current trend of rap is that it’s becoming more and more like R&B every day. That on its own presents issues about hip-hop losing its heritage, but it’s really a shame that the song by an artist who encourages being a “goon,” a term usually reserved for comic book henchmen, and who also doesn’t have the guts to rap without a backing track is outselling a song with something to say by an artist who can rap on his own, just because it has a smooth hook.
If you’re going to miss BET’s “Rap City,” e-mail your top five favorite moments to Ayres at [email protected].