Every generation believes that it is the best, and the one before it was old and stuffy, and the one after it is weird and lame.
This is clearly reflected in the music industry. Rock & Roll was hated by the older generation of its day and was often demonised. Later as the genre morphed into Heavy Metal, and the Rock & Roll generation matured, so too did they echo the wails of their parents.
What's up with the crap these kids listening to today?
In the same way that their parents claimed that watching Elvis Presley's gyrating pelvis was a corrupting force that would only lead to hell and damnation. So too would they talk about the evils of Heavy Metal. Manifesting itself in a 1990s court case whereby Judas Priest were accused of embedding subliminal Satanic messages in their music.
Whatever musical genre you care to look at, there have always been examples of the ones before, frowning down on the terrible noise of the ones that come after.
Today we are going to look at the rise and rise of Mumble Rap, sometimes referred to as Soundcloud Rap, and we ask the question;
Have We Gone Tattoo Far?
Just like any popular movement, rap/hip-hop has gone through it's own cycle. From fringe underground movement, to popular driver of subculture, to fully accepted and respected musical genre.
Hip-hop was the cultural gumbo that came from the melting pots of the New York ghettos in the 1970s. Depending on who you believe the movement started in either Queen's Bridge or the South Bronx. Indeed many an early beef (argument) was started over this geographical point of disagreement.
Back then the older generation was down on hip-hop because it was said to sample real music in order to make that rap stuff.
Rap was built on a foundation of 70s funk, Marva Whitney, Bobby Byrd and James Brown provided the choppy beats and the mellow grooves that created the foundation for the entire movement.
We didn't need an entire song, we just needed a sampled hook, a drum machine beat and the rapping of some righteous poetry.
The youth of the late 70s and early 80s were barely aware of the funkadelic foundations to the music that they loved so much. Indeed it was only years later that I myself discovered the rare grooves that the music I loved was built on.
Of course the denizens of the funk movement looked at what the kids were doing and shook their heads in sorrow.
"These kids these days, they don't understand what real music is."
Mumbling Their Way To Riches
An undeniably major driving force behind the progression of music, is seen in the current available technology. For instance we wouldn't have had rock & roll without electric guitars and wah-wah pedals.
Dance music owes a massive part of its rise to the Roland 303 and 808 synthesisers. However it is not just the evolution of instrumental technology that has driven innovation. It is also the means of distribution that has affected how we listen to music.
Hip-hop was able to gain traction via the mixtape. Artists recorded themselves and then put their sound onto cheap magnetic cassette tapes. Before the invention of the audio cassette tape the only way for an artist to distribute their music on a wide scale, was by persuading a major record company to sign you and release your music on vinyl.
The mixtape was used to create a buzz and artists were often famous on the streets long before the wider world got to know about them. Forty years after the invention of the cassette tape, artists such as Fifty Cent were still creating massive success using mixtapes.
Today of course, we have the internet and the myriad of applications that come with it. One of which being the music website Soundcloud.
Soundcloud has been around for a while now, however when you mix it with Instagram, you have a perfect medium for distributing music to today's youth.
Whilst Soundcloud itself isn't necessarily aimed at today's youth. Instagram most definitely is, and at some point, somebody somewhere realised that they could leverage the tens of thousands, or even millions of followers they had on Instagram, and funnel them to Soundcloud.
It would seem that whoever that person was had no discernible musical talent. This however was a small problem that they did not let get in the way of their success. They instead got a catchy beat, made up a chorus using brand names like Gucci and words like 'gang' that resonated with their peers, and voila! Mumble rap was born.
Sidenote: There is a mumble rap tune called Gucci Gang, whereby the 'singer' of this monstrosity says the words Gucci Gang over and over again. The entire song contains less than twenty unique words. If you do not have a rising urge to kill while listening to it, then you are clearly under the age of twenty and very probably brain dead.
When The Music Is Not Enough
The problem with making music if you have no talent, is that not enough people will buy your music to enable you to make more of the stuff.
This was realised fairly early on by the mumble rappers. Sure a million followers on Instagram might get you twenty thousand sales, however if most of the people who bought it are tweeting about how crap the music is, you're not going to go very far.
Then you realise that just because you're in the music industry, doesn't detract away from the fact that we live in a visual world. So you start to change your appearance to suit the genre, in the world of the Soundcloud rapper, this generally means colouring your hair to look like a rainbow, and tattooing your face.
The Changing Face Of Tattoos
When I was a kid tattoos were only for big scary guys with a penchant for beer and fighting. However even those guys drew the line at tattooing their faces. I remember when I was around 14 or 15, there was a guy who lived near my mum's who had several facial tattoos. So many in fact, that you could barely see his real skin tone underneath the ink.
Back then, tattooing your face was a sign of madness. Even if you weren't actually mad, society deemed you so because, well, you tattooed your face, which let's face it, is pretty mental. So the guy who lived near my mum's, constantly had kids pointing and staring, and adults speculating as to which particular mental illness the man suffered from.
Nowadays though, it has become normal to deliberately disfigure your face, and the Soundcloud mumble rapper is to blame.
What is disturbing about this trend, is that the facial tattoos are often being done by people in their late teens to early twenties.
If you ask any thirty five year old if they feel that they are mentally the same person they were in their twenties. Most, if not all, of them will say that they are not. Whilst they might like the same music, or even the same clothes they did back then. They'll all say that they have changed, the common word used for such a change is, maturity.
Unlike poor fashion choices, tastes in music or friends, getting rid of your tattoos later in life is not easy and can be very expensive.
Depending on your skin tone, the type of tattoo you have and a blend of other factors, will depend on how efficiently and quickly a tattoo can be removed from your face. Plus of course you will be in extreme pain and discomfort for possibly a couple of years as you undergo many treatments to rid yourself of the mistake of a facial tattoo.
Mo' Money Mo' Ink
At the end of the day these Soundcloud rappers do not care about tomorrow, when they could be making money today.
It seems that some people are prepared to cover their faces in terrible art in order to make enough money to eventually be able to remove them.
One wonders for the ones that don't make it, the eighteen year old kid who decides to ink up his or her face. Then watches on in horror as they fail to make millions of dollars and live out their dreams.
At least when Takeshi 6ix 9ine gets to thirty, he'll be able to afford the treatments to rid him of his awful war paint. For most of his followers however, that will simply not be an option.
Did these ever look good?
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON FACIAL TATTOOS? WERE YOU AWARE OF THIS GROWING TREND? WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO YOUR TEENAGE CHILD THINKING OF GETTING THIS DONE? OR PERHAPS YOU ARE A YOUNG PERSON WHO HAS TATTOOED THEIR FACE OR NO SOMEONE THAT HAS?
AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Title image: Ana Sadli on Unsplash
Insert image: Donald Teel on Unsplash