It’s a titanic album that redefined hip-hop at large and helped define a city, even if it didn’t fully define it. After all, Kendrick Lamar has been the city’s mainstream standard-bearer for the past decade, and he’s as much a descendant of Dr. hip-hop wasn’t just created inside the Death Row studio-its fathers and mothers also honed their crafts inside the Good Life Cafe in Crenshaw and later at the Low End Theory in Lincoln Heights each week. Dre and his cohorts are responsible for some of hip-hop’s greatest stylistic advances, so too are more recent rappers like 03 Greedo and the late, great Drakeo the Ruler, who essentially invented a new language and a new way of rapping. The music is not just all vibes here-the city has produced some of the most traditionally skilled lyricists the genre has ever seen. But to fixate on these things is to miss the totality of what Los Angeles has meant for hip-hop. rap-particularly the brand of gangsta rap codified by the N.W.A–Death Row family tree-it’s hard to envision much beyond these totems. The city is the land of palm trees but also Bloods and Crips-of beaches but especially Rodney King and riots.įor outsiders weaned on ’80s and ’90s L.A. a seemingly infinite number of team hats can mean different things depending on what block you’re standing on. In New York, it’s practically the dress code to wear a Yankees fitted, but in L.A. Instead of boom-bap, it’s G-funk instead of Bad Boy, it’s Death Row. you need to protect your home from the flockers. The stick-up kids roam the Five Boroughs, but in L.A. Out West, they don’t wear Timbs and Avirex they sport Nike Cortez and khakis. For much of its history, Los Angeles rap has been generalized as the diametric opposite of New York rap.
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