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Summer Of '96
Summer Of '96

The Summer Of '96: A High Point For Hip-Hop--Or The End Of The Golden Era?

Summer Of '96

There’s a bit that opens Stakes Is High, perfectly encapsulating the hand-off of hip-hop’s torch, generation to generation:

“When I first heard Criminal Minded…”

It’s the nostalgic glow of something truly monumental seeping into the light of a new day. Not necessarily replacing it, but reinforcing it. Making it whole in a way that was impossible without the appropriate context. This summer, we celebrate 20 laps around the sun for not one, two, three or four classic albums, but five. Which begs the question, what was in the water back in ’96? And was it the end of what we now consider to be the “Golden Era”?

Experts that have studied this culture and its trajectory far longer than I’ve been alive typically put hip-hop’s adolescence at a staggering 14-year-long stretch, commencing with Run DMC’s breakthrough and capping off right around the meat of Jay Z’s climb to fully-established mogul status at the turn of the century, providing an entirely new model of what was even possible for a hip-hop artist at the time. But for my money, sonically, and perhaps even culturally, the beginning of the end for what is considered to be the “Golden Era” falls on June 25th, 1996, twenty years to the day since Reasonable Doubt was released.

A week later, De La Souls junior record Stakes Is High would land and remind us just how far we’ve come since KRS-One & Scott La Rock dropped their ’87 opus. That same day, Nas released his sophomore album It Was Written, no slump in sight, though it arrived to mixed reviews. But let’s be honest here, it’s hard to stack anything up against Nasir’s debut, widely considered to be one of the single greatest albums ever assembled, regardless of genre.

It Was Written’s reception, however, speaks volumes to my point. That there is and always will be a reactionary pulse to hip-hop; one that jumps to digital when organix are getting played out, one that jumps to live drums when the MPC’s palette is getting too rigid. It’s the push and pull of all musical eras, really. It’s within these same parameters that we evaluate most bodies of music, hoping for more of the same when the prior has been good to us, pushing for something new when the well seems to be running dry.

Summer Of '96

Not a month later, A Tribe Called Quest and UGK each released albums that would go on to be acknowledged as heroic efforts, respectively.

Beats, Rhymes And Life, if anything, provided a blue print, built almost entirely over J Dilla’s newfound groove, a template for what left-leaning hip-hop would sound like for years to come. Tight, crisp snares hanging on the very edge of the one, impossibly swung, while live or sampled Rhodes chords and bass lines provide the fabric to a lush new tapestry.

For Bun B & Pimp C, it was almost the inverse of the new east coast equation. Drawing from the very westward and immutably funky catalogues that G-funk tapped into in the early-nineties, UGK had its sights set on establishing Houston as a hub for hip-hop, succeeding beyond measure with ripples that are still felt today from Atlanta to Toronto.

Which brings us to the cap of Summer ’96: Outkast’s sophomore excursion, ATLiens, where Andre 3000 and Big Boi proved to be the synthesis of all these disciplines. Lyricism as sharp as anything that was happening in the east or west, slurred to perfection (to this day.) Spacious, focused and funk-fueled production forever connecting them to the mothership from which they came.

Looking back, though each record is bound to its geography (and certainly bears the marks of those respective hometowns) the borders of these eras become crystalline.Prior to ’96, dusty soul and jazz chops were typically paired with big, gritty drums for rugged emcees to have their way with. But this new batch of brilliance was clean. Not in the biblical sense, but in its style, both in word and song. Suddenly, the crack and hum of old vinyl cuts is replaced by synths that buzzed, drum programs with live resonance. You can chalk it up to maturity or technological progression, but hip-hop’s evolution to what we now know it to be can be traced back to this very grip of era-defining titles, all released within weeks of one another.

Flash forward to 2016, and many of these very same textures are still at work. Look at the sheer density of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, instantly recognizable as a vestige of this bygone era. Each one of these releases is so crammed with lyrical barbs and sonic complexity that they demand repeated rotations, if only to catch that one turn of phrase from Hov, from Tip, from 3 Stacks from Bun, that slipped by in its inaugural run.

Look at Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo, a record so impossibly messy and seemingly incomplete, yet full of textures from east, west, north and south that span decades beyond the “Golden Era” in both directions. It’s a record that does what many could not (or would not, for that matter) building a landscape as brilliantly psychotic as its subject, where Nina Simone and Rihanna can join in unholy matrimony decades out of time.

The audacity to innovate on that level, to bring past, present and future under one groove, at least in hip-hop, brings us back to that pivotal summer just before we lost Pac, just after The Fugees evened the score. And just as The Daisy Age Trio proved the underscoring power of classic-ness.

There’s a bit that opens Stakes Is High, perfectly encapsulating the hand-off of hip-hop’s torch, generation to generation:

“When I first heard Criminal Minded…”