Every ten years, hip-hop has a revelatory moment. In 1980 (okay, late '70s, but quit nitpicking) the term was first coined, the movement began in South Bronx, and the first hip-hop record was released. The genre of hip-hop represented a way in which largely oppressed African-american communities could express themselves musically without having to afford expensive musical instruments, and in this way, was comparable to the punk movement going on around the same time. Hip-hop was a way in which North American culture (via vinyl LPs) could be manipulated to sound entirely different, so that it represented a community that was largely excluded from middle-class popular music culture.
By 1990, records like Criminal Minded, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Three Feet High and Rising had turned hip-hop into something more than just entertainment. The former two albums used hip-hop as a political tool to challenge social norms and narrow-mindedness while the latter expanded the genre musically, incorporating multiple genres en route to making what could be called the first conceptual hip-hop album.
By 2000, the genre had stagnated slightly: Gangster rap, which was initially created to voice anger at the inequality of North American society, had become a cheap imitation of itself, and in what would less than a decade later be considered a joke, the genre of rap-rock was trying to marry the two genres to no avail. Only the Soulquarians, a hip-hop collective featuring acts such as the Roots, Mos Def and Common, could be considered revelatory, but despite releasing classics like Things Fall Apart, Black on Both Sides and Like Water for Chocolate, the group’s soul-oriented sound went largely unheeded by the mainstream (long-time soul-hop progenitors Outkast excepted). The genre spent most of the 2000s floundering in the tired gangster posturing of 50 Cent and the faux-artistic hip-hop types associated with Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. music. The 2000s forced us to look outside the mainstream to find challenging hip-hop, which came in the form of artists like MF Doom and hip-hop veterans who operated just outside the mainstream.
What, then, is there to point to as game-changing in the new decade? Maybe nothing concrete yet, but if Gorillaz’ latest, Plastic Beach, is any beacon, this turn of the decade could mark the moment when hip-hop freed itself by finally loosening its idea of what hip-hop means.
Is Plastic Beach a hip-hop album? Hip-hop purists might argue that it’s not: more than half the songs here are either orchestral or electronic soundscapes over which Damon Albarn sing-speaks pretty little melodies. There’s no turntablism and no gangster posturing, but listen closely and you might just hear the most striking omission here of all: there’s no fear. No fear of over-stepping the restrictions and boundaries of hip-hop, no fear about whether the album will sell enough, and no fear about keeping some false tough-guy image intact. Unfettered by the strings and limitations of the hip-hop genre, Albarn and his company of guests (of which a large portion are rappers) may have just created a hip-hop landmark.
Not unlike its sonic predecessor Three Feet High and Rising, Plastic Beach is characterized by creative abandon, a multi-genred approach and a mysterious overlying concept that unites a lengthy track-list.
Given these characteristics, Plastic Beach could easily lose the listener were it not for it’s fastidious attention to cohesion. The opening strains of violin on prologue “Orchestral Intro” slip effortlessly into the ominous Tuba rumble of “Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach,” which acts a bit like the first chapter of a grand novel. This approach to the album's construction works perfectly, mostly due to ever-transmuting nature of the album’s “chapters”: most songs here comprise several different ideas, never resting on one idea for too long, and have beginnings, middles and endings within themselves, as well as working within the album’s greater context. “Empire Ants,” for example, begins inconspicuously enough, with Albarn delivering barely more than a whisper over gently rolling chimes, before a thumping beat replaces the sweeping ambiance and synth stabs push the chimes into the song's background. The Mos Def-featuring “Sweepstakes” is similarly nomadic, beginning with an African-influenced rhythm that becomes suddenly celebratory when the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble enters the fray with latin-infused horn accents.
Plastic Beach’s success can also be attributed generously to the album’s guest-list. All too often, a guest-heavy album sacrifices its own cohesion and vision for watered down, stylized versions of songs the guest might have written in their sleep; on Plastic Beach, Albarn has cast his guests into the perfect roles to suit his purpose and as such, they sound great. Snoop Dogg has never sounded as genuinely vivified on a featuring track as he does on “Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach,” on which he intones the titular phrase perfectly: “Beach!” he emphasizes, as if there’s no better place on Earth. Musical collectives The Lebanese National Orchestra For Oriental Arabic Music and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble are used sparingly and effectively for emphasis, and the long list of hip-hop contributors all sound on point, especially De La Soul on the single-worthy “Superfast Jellyfish.” Hell, even Lou Reed is used to great effect, his weathered rasp lending “Some Kind of Nature” added poignancy.
But what are the album highlights, you ask? Wish I could tell you, but the thing’s too damn consistent. As a result, there are sure to be grumblings that Plastic Beach is meandering, that it contains no gems like “Feel Good, Inc.” or “Clint Eastwood,” but to assert that is to miss the point of this album: Plastic Beach is a journey, not a destination, and therein lies its importance to hip-hop as a genre.
After all, when was the last time you heard a hip-hop album called a “journey”? In this era of hip-hop, an album is typically a vessel by which a rappers gets their three or four singles out to the public, and the rest is filled with hollow guest performances and interludes. Plastic Beach “maximizes the hip-hop album as art,” to paraphrase the Roots’ 1999 masterpiece Things Fall Apart, and as such, stands as the first to do so in quite a few years. It values artistic achievement over the “dollar bills” and toys with so many different genres that haters will say it doesn’t even qualify as hip-hop. But if that, then what was hip-hop ever? Hip-hop was, from the beginning, based on the manipulation of the recorded music of others and old culture to make culture anew. Is that not exactly what Damon Albarn, with help from some hip-hop mainstays, has done?
Plastic Beach isn’t quite perfect, (its rating, based on quality alone, is 89/100) but its sheer relevance and what it might mean for the future of hip-hop earns it a solid 95 - only time can prove that wrong.
