Pop Rap
posted by the MusicMan, June 9th 2008
Pop rap (or Pop hip pop) is a pop music influenced style of hip hop that contains pop-influenced melodic hooks and pop influenced melodies. The style became popular in the early 1990s, as hip hop music found commercial success. Pop rappers such as Will Smith and MC Hammer were more radio-friendly than the explicit lyrics of gangsta rap such as Ice-T.
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History
The first commercial successful rap song mixed up with pop and funk was Der Kommissar by the Austrian musician Falco. It was among the Billboard Hot 100 (#72). Pop-rap has been popular since its beginning in the late-1980s, after various hip hop artists commenced entering the mainstream. LL Cool J just may have been the very first pop-rapper in history, when he rose to prominence on his 1985 debut album Radio. When he joined Russell Simmons' Def Jam label and decided to try merging rap with pop and R&B influences, some people were skeptical that it would ever work.
But in the end, one of LL's singles, the rap-ballad "I Need Love", actually became a success. The origins of Pop-rap lay in artists like Tone-Loc, and DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince putting emphasis right on their good-humored, storytelling skills, to great chart success. The were followers who also began recording similarly amiable party tunes and novelties.Since there had been a possibility of accepting this as real music, other emcees started to play up rap's connection to pop, R&B, and dance music.
Many pop-rap hits sampled hits as a backing track, "U Can't Touch This" by MC Hammer being the prime example, lifting the bass riff from Rick James' "Super Freak". Pop-rap artists were sometimes taken to court for the use of borrowing hooks from previous songs by other artists.
Other pop-rap M.C.s developed their own sounds, such as LL Cool J and Salt-N-Pepa. Very little of this commercially minded music was met with acclaim from hip hop enthusiasts or critics, however - Puff Daddy's "loop it and leave it" style of sampling, which most of the time just consisted of rapping over someone else's instrumental, was criticized.
Modern pop rap
"Pop rap" is simply now rap music with a pop music influence. The more typically rough elements of hip hop music are smoothed away in order to achieve a crossover-friendly sound. Around the 2000s, many rappers (i.e. Cash Money Records and the Hot Boys) most of whom grew up poor and in poverty tended to brag about having money and material things they could never afford before, such as jewellery, clothes, cars, and sometimes discuss their sexual conquests, which is now considered a more popular form of pop rap, that still exists today (Chingy's "Dem Jeans", Huey's "Pop Lock & Drop It", Nelly's "Hot in Herre", Nitty's "Nasty Girl").
Artists such as Rick Ross, Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy have begun to blur the distinction between hardcore, gangster and pop rap. While they all receive heavy airplay and have large fan bases, their lyrics often consist of more adult oriented content sometimes making references to drugs, sex, violence and frequent use of profanity, similar to more traditional hardcore rappers, such as N.W.A or Wu-Tang Clan.
Famous pop rappers
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