As we creep up on Memorial Day Weekend, the Summer movie season is upon us. Between Captain America, Ghostbusters, Jason Bourne, The Conjuring 2, The Purge 3, Ben-Hur, Tarzan and Angry Birds, this year seems to be offering us even more sequels, reboots and reworked characters from other mediums. In other words, get ready for more of the same.
This is the crossroads that Hollywood finds itself at every year. As fans, many of us would enjoy original storylines, original characters and new creative movies. However, much like the music industry, the film industry is a business first. Even small indie films are multi-million dollar investments. Subsequently, it is only logical that these major production companies would look to established brands and bankable franchises to pour their money into, rather than original content which can be much riskier when it comes to producing a return on investment.
Enter Desiigner. The exuberant 19-year-old Bed-stuy/GOOD Music upstart (who sounds eerily familiar to you-know-who). While sounding like another rapper was considered a cardinal sin in hip-hop for years, the stigma that used to go with it seems to be fading away. Much in the same way that hip-hop did a collective “Kayne shrug” to last year’s ghostwriting fiasco, there is a younger breed of MC who seems to be directly taking from those that came before them. HHSR touched on this point last year in regards to Logic and him biting from Drake amongst others, but the issue seems to go much deeper than that. Whether it is the brooding yet melodic flows of Post Malone that sound reminiscent of “So Far Gone” Drake, Troy Ave. spitting alongside Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo in what sounds like outtakes from “Beg for Mercy”, or Action Bronson turning Ghostface Killah’s legendary one of a kind flow into ….well…. a 2 of a kind flow, the game has clearly changed.
The fine line that once stood between inspiration and down right theft that the gatekeepers of hip-hop once held sacred seemed to have fallen by the wayside (look no further than the running-man challenge). Despite the jeers from the haters, Desiigner seems largely un-phased by the comparisons to Atlanta’s codeine king, Future. It’s the same parasitic approach that helped Young Thug troll his way to the top of the charts last year as he lured listeners in with reports that he intended to release an album called “Tha Carter 6” before his idol, Lil’ Wayne could even get around to dropping the 5th installment in his series, Tha Carter 5 . After some legal injunction, Thugger’s project surfaced as a mixtape under the name Barter 6, but in the end, it didn’t matter what he called the album. Young Thug had click-baited his way onto millions of iPhones.
That’s not to say that biters are anything new. People early on criticized Shyne’s gravely lyricism for sounding like B.I.G. So many people mistook early Fabolous for Ma$e that he made sure we got his name right (F-A-B-O-L-O-U-S). Whether intentional or not, both Shyne and Fab worked to create identities for themselves in this game that stand totally independent to anyone who came before them. Furthermore, it’s not as if Drake and Future are without influence themselves. The slow tempo, syrupy roll that Drake adopted early in his career comes from Texas, the home state of Post Malone. One could argue that he has just as much right to that sound, (if not more) than the Canadian superstar. Meanwhile, Future has been auto-tuning our ears off since he came in the door after Roger Troutman, T-Pain, Yeezy’s 808s & Heartbreak, and after Jay Z put the whole style on life support, make that “D.O.A.”
It’s hard to say where the game goes from here. Copyright laws do prohibit artists from getting too close to the intellectual property of one another, but as the trend continues, it seems that the apples are falling closer than ever to the tree in hip-hop.
I would wrap this piece up by quoting Nas, “No idea’s original, there’s nothing new under the sun…”, but where would be the originality in that?