mvuent
Void Dweller
Heres what might be the quintessential boom bap beat. The stairway to heaven of freestyle circles. It begins around the 30 second mark.
You can feel the accents and swing. It makes the Head Nod. You got the kick drum couplet that snaps your head down on the first beat, and a hi hat on the off beat before the third that brings your head up and primes for the incoming snare, making it hit all the harder. The loops are short and feel like they're just floating there. When we do hear new sounds, they're of the same simple, looping style. The beat 'changes' by adding and dropping the piano loop, the drum loop, and the siren loop, little else.
I typed 'trap' into youtube and this is an early result
Completely different sound pallet, but similar rhythmic tricks. We've got an open high hat on the off beat before your snare on the third, two off beat snare/claps following that first hit and a detuned hi-hat beneath the primary that hits on off beats as well. Its these syncopated sounds that give both boom bap and trap music the Head Nod- where the head snapping up is as essential, if not more, than the head snapping down. The way trap beats use melody is similar as well, the circular arpeggios and and droning pads create the same hypnotic feel that tight boom bap loops bring, the melody doesn't progress through a serious of chords but rather hangs out generally in the melodic center, and likewise the beat remains largely the same throughout the entire song.
i think it's hard to attribute many specific rhythmic innovations to 90s hip hop since its so rhythmically simple (specifically, again, the beats). but yeah i know what you mean, there is a hypnotic, often heavily swung, classic "head nod feel" that came out of 90s beats, and to your point it's still strongly associated with hip hop. but to me that increasingly feels like backpacker territory. conservative and old fashioned. the early 808 drum machine logic has sort of come back in a changed, upgraded form.
anyways what i was talking about in the post you seemingly took issue with wasn't exact patterns of syncopation. i'm more getting at the densely pointillistic, machinic quality of the beats. busy yet mechanically precise. you have to sort of unfocus your ears and pay attention to rapid changes in information across the lows, mids, and highs in order to get how it all flexes together into a groove. in my experience it's a different game than the beats (e.g. extremely static and predictable hi hats) on illmatic et al. both in terms of listening and making. so that's what i meant by rhythmic language. and maybe some would be skeptical of that kind of abstraction, fair enough. but it's how i hear things.
songs like this don't have the same rhythms as mantronix, but they have the feel that i'm talking about:
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