Bicycles. That’s what’s missing. Remember Gin And Juice? At that time Snoop was rolling through the hood – not in a lowrider or a lexus, nor in a benzo or beamer – but on a bicycle. That was when hiphop was goooood.
There’s no future in cars. That should be obvious even to these rappers.
(Snoop still got it… more or less.)
Fella (from Trick Daddy’s Dunk Ryders) has read the writing on the walls and taken notes. He’s cruising his neighborhood on a classic, laidback model in his video for Thats All I Need.
Besides bikes, he has understood another very important thing about music today. As he says in his song, “I love my hood, and my hood loves me”. An artist aint shit without the community.
The phase we’re living in now, or rather a tendency that is gaining importance, has (atleast here in Sweden) been described as postdigital. Basically, that means that with the abundance of music we have now, with everybody walking around with the entire recorded history of music in a chip under their toe-nail, what’s live and what’s local is getting more and more important.
Something that ties into the live and the local is what Johan Söderberg says in Allt mitt är ditt; that we live in an authenticity economy. With an overflowing well of culture at your fingertips, people are ready to pay for what they feel is real and genuine. Which, of course, has very much to do with what’s live and local.
It looks like Fella got it all covered. But an artist like Snoop is going to need more than a fly bike to stay relevant.