If a Classic is Released & No One Notices, Did it Happen?

Masta Ace gave us what many of us loved about Hip-Hop when we fell in love with the genre to no fanfare. Why?

There’s an unwritten rule in rap music — rap is for young people. When one of my brothers met with record labels back in the early aughts, he was often asked, “aren’t you old to be a rapper?” He wasn’t even 30 yet.

Some people assert that if it hasn’t happened for you by that age (30) then it’s likely not going to happen.

That ageism is also applied to artists that had their moment in the sun in their teens and twenties, with the logic being that you’ve done all that you can do and your better years are behind you.

Often times, this is true. Older rappers simply rehash whatever tropes made them popular and feed it back to the fans as if it’s new. The extremely loyal, continue to follow the act but most people check out.

And I’d prefer that.

Because the other type of older rapper is far worse. We’re talking the older rapper who believes that they are still “that MC” — the one that’s under the sad impression that they still have “bars.” Woe to this rapper.

But what about the older rapper that still has skills? I’ll put Dres of Black Sheep lyrical dexterity against 90% of rappers old AND young. And what of the older rapper that still has something to say?

De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest saw their most recent albums supported lately with both groups briefly capturing that rare number one Billboard 200 spot. Thing is, both of these groups had intriguing stories — one with the crowdfunding, the other with the 18 year absence and loss of a group member.

Masta Ace had neither of those things and because of that, the May release of his fifth solo album, The Falling Season, came and went with little to no fanfare. If there was, it missed me. I just recently discovered the album and was set not to give it a chance…and that’s what this quick writing is about — do we even give older rap artists a fighting chance?

Yeah, Masta Ace has been around for a minute.

He’s been around long enough to have been a part of one of the first posse cuts, “The Symphony,” dropped his first solo album two years later, Take a Look Around, and reinvented himself on the comeback tip as Masta Ace Incorporated in 1993 with the prophetic Slaughtahouse.

That right there is three rap eras unto itself. Not many people made it out of one, never mind two eras as we discussed in Kool Moe Dee Did The Impossible. But this is where any comparison with Kool Mo Dee ends.

After Sittin on Chrome made a little bit of chart noise with it’s East Coast/West Coast blended sound, Masta Ace would go on to release five more projects between the years 2001 and 2012, some as a group like EMC, one with Boston legend Ed OG, and a few solo joints. None of them became commercial hits.

But the world of rap has changed drastically in that time. Masta Ace went from being considered “underground” to being a dinosaur.

We can’t talk about any rap releases between the year 2001 and 2012 without looking at the many ways that the industry morphed into a different beast than the one that dominated our youth.

Rap music in 2001 had become the de facto sound of the youth by 2001. This is the Everybody Goes Commercial and Platinum era; an era dominated by artists like Ja Rule who, in 2001, was riding high with the triple plat Rule 3:36.

That morphed into the Kanye/50 era. 50 and his G Unit crew’s light burned fast but it burned strong for a few years. While Kanye etched his style of music into the hearts of the youth who would go on to change the music into what we see today.

Sure, some underground acts were able to win over the hearts of the people, Lil Brother comes to mind, but with the popularity of rap flourishing and new rap acts popping up like Monsanto corn farms, it became more difficult to discern who one should listen to.

Magazines, once the cornerstone of curation for a little over a decade (91 to 01, roughly) by 2005 were no longer the taste makers and go to source for what was good and worthy of consideration. For every rap act that emerged, five blogs joined them. The internet began overflowing with “Hip-Hop” blogs — some with the aim of “sharing” music, and tons more making themselves critics.

Other tastemakers like Yo! MTV Raps and Rap City disappeared as rap found its way into the regular rotation of the (rare) MTV and BET video rotation.

Add to all of the above, the corporatization of radio and their Top 40 focused playlist, and you have a recipe for the over saturation of one type of rap music.

Earlier this year, Masta Ace shared his thoughts on this phenomenon after being asked to write about the topic “Has Hip-Hop Lost its Soul” for the Lisa Evers Street Soldiers program.

We know all too well the influence OUR music has on the next generation of young people. We notice the lack of balance in the music and messages being broadcasted to the masses of young influential fans. Masta Ace

Those are important points as we move towards our conclusion.

I mentioned that Masta Ace released X amount of albums above — I ain’t hear nare one of them.

Aside from hating 90% of the music that was subject of the public conversation and played on the radio, what was considered “underground” didn’t move me much either. I lumped all those recordings together as nostalgic rap — people either from an older era making the same music that they made when they were popular or younger people celebrating that time period by “bringing it back.”

I didn’t even give most of that music a chance. I could lie and say that I didn’t give any merit to critics but once you take in a negative thought that confirms your own prejudice you can definitely say that you are being somewhat influenced.

And the critique of most supposed underground music was the same in blogs and “established” media.

With so much music out there, taking my great hate stance, saved time and energy that was better used listening to Radiohead, grime, and my tried and true classics of rap and R&B.

But I had my Saul to Paul, scale removing experience these last couple of years — which was the source of most of these writings and the driving force behind me revisiting many albums that I had overlooked.

I listened to Black Sheep’s sophomore release, Non Fiction, last year this time and was blown away. The album was good. But I remember reading the reviews of that time period and no one had anything good to say about it. Why? Non Fiction was a victim of a changing era.

I began to wonder how many albums had I overlooked and spent the past year going over tons of music that I completely ignored or vehemently hated. Many of the albums that I vehemently hated, I only marginally hate and much of the music I ignored, deserved it. But I made up my mind to give music the benefit of the doubt.

A few years back, Masta Ace made two announcements, one was extremely important and the other I only half paid attention to. After being diagnosed back in 2000, Ace was finally making it public that he had Multiple Sclerosis. This is a brave thing to do, especially for a Black man. We tend to take our health, physical and mental, for a joke until it’s too late and that grim reaping sickle carrying death figure is at our door.

In the course of talking about MS, Masta Ace mentioned that he was putting out an album soon. At the time, it was an afterthought. I had no intention on listening to that or any past recording that came after Slaughtahouse.

Years passed by, and I completely forgot about a Masta Ace release. But this year, I’ve been consuming music the way that I once did when the music was new and exciting to me. I got on, GASP, a streaming service to facilitate listening to albums the day of their release and I started combing the future releases on iTunes the way I once checked for new albums at the back of magazines.

But still, The Falling Season got by me.

After the Smoke DZA/Pete Rock project had me open, I had a discussion with my brother Isma’il Latif where he brought up the return of the DJ/Producer driven project. Ruminating on that thought, I considered all of the one producer per album releases of the past year from No Panty (Salaam Remi) to Mickey Factz (Nottz). In that list was Masta Ace’s The Falling Season (KIC Beats).

I went to Apple Music. They had it. Put on my headphones for what I thought was going to be a quick listen. Ended up listening to the project from beginning to end — that’s an hour and fifteen minutes worth of music. Then I listened to it again.

This is a project that gave me what I used to love about rap in the first place. The beats knocked, weren’t dated, and Masta Ace’s lyrics made me think and reflect. The Falling Season is a concept album that follows Ace from the end of 8th Grade through High School. It includes skits that tie the songs and concept together. That alone, the fact that it was well-thought out wouldn’t be enough to win me over had it not been done correctly. But it is.

I posted an image of the album on IG, wanting to share with my minuscule following this discovery. Then I read one review, HipHopDX…that and a comment by my brother Bashir Allah on that IG post compelled me to write this.

In Forbes recently released Highest-Paid Musicians of 2016, coming in at number 4 is 58 year old Madonna. Her latest album, Rebel Heart, was released in 2014…yet there she is. Madonna also rides high in the top ten list of Billboard’s Highest Grossing Tours, a list that is led by Bruce Springsteen, 67, and the Rolling Stones (average age 73).

While the fans of middle-aged and senior citizen rock acts continue to support them to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, rap fans rush musicians, often their peers, into the retirement home of music long before they reach middle age. Sure, if they go on an “Old School” revival tour with like 40 other acts, we MIGHT show up…but we’re not buying their new music if they have it…and most of the time, we’re not even giving it a chance.

In all my years of being in and following rap music, I have yet to see a year quite like 2016. The generational bickering is at an all time high, Gen X’ers looking down on Millennials, Millennials dismissing Gen X’ers.

This pettiness is fueled by social media and numerous “Hip-Hop” blogs with barely a day going by without some stupid headline of this young person disrespecting this legend and that older artist “clapping back.”

But this feud also exists within generations. Older Millennials are confounded by the music made by younger Millennials and Gen X’ers often don’t want to hear anything made by their peers.

With R&B all bout gone, our only popular music is rap or rap oriented music. And we don’t support 85% of the artists putting music out. When I say support I mean the type of support that will keep an act on the road and performing like Frankie Beverly and Maze. (I know you’re thinking De La & PE…sorry Black peoples…white folk are feeding them).

We whine and complain about the state of “the culture,” but never even consider that classic music is still being made by people over 30. I’ve grown to listen to and love much of the new music being released by the 30 and under crowd, I think Travis Scott’s Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight is one of the best albums this year, but I would be remiss in my so-called love of music if I didn’t include The Falling Season on that list too.

I took up nine minutes of your time to simply say this — just give it a chance. You never know, you might like it. I know I’m going to go back and revisit Masta Ace’s older projects, might be another classic laying in my wake.

The Falling Season can be purchased at Bandcamp or on iTunes.