While perusing Facebook the other day, a saw a few musical videos my friends posted. While they weren't meant to be similar, I saw a trend. Both had to do with the evolution of musical genres.
The first video shows us an early Jimi Hendrix playing guitar for a group called Buddy and Stacey and the Upsetters. Recorded in 1965, two years before he started The Jimi Hendrix Experience, we can see Jimi playing the role of background piece. He is not the focus of the band, or the sound.
Through influences such as Buddy Guy and Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix was able to revolutionize rock music. He took the blues ideal of putting the guitar player in front, added new technology, mixed in the lyrical stylings of Bob Dylan and other folk performers, and set the world and his guitar on fire.
The evolution of Jimi Hendrix and rock music in general is similar to the evolution of hip-hop lyrics in another recent video. In a video for Vox Media, music journalist Estelle Caswell breaks down the progression of lyrics from the simplest bars and rhymes of Kurtis Blow to the complex composition of MF Doom.
But one of the MCs Caswell focuses on extensively is Notorious BIG and his 1997 song "Hypnotize". She calls it "one of the smoothest rap songs ever".
What is most interesting about Biggie is how he completely eclipsed his labelmate Craig Mack. While Craig Mack was a decent rapper and could hold his own bar for bar - see Flava In Your Ear - when Sean Combs signed Biggie, Biggie's style was so beyond Craig Mack that Mack became not only irrelevant on the label, but also in the genre.
I would love to see a side-by-side decomposition of Biggie to Craig Mack. I think therein lies why one is regarded as one of the best rappers of all time and the other is a footnote.
In the dog-eat-dog world of hip-hop, rappers have to battle for supremecy. Biggie did that when he toppled Craig Mack on Mack's "Flava in your Ear" remix. Guitarist rarely go toe-to-toe in the same song. There are few headcutting battles like we saw in the blues movie Crossroads.
Maybe that's why rock isn't as innovative anymore and why there isn't much complex ground being broken. Innovation is only on the fringes.
Rock needs a new Jimi Hendrix. But with music going digital, the world of musical innovation is either on a keyboard or in the pen of a lyricist. And that's why Biggie will always be regarded highly, perhaps as the Jimi Hendrix of Hip-Hop.
