By Justin Kim and Tatiana Díaz de León
E
veryone has a personal preference for the kind of music they listen to often. For some, it’s hip hop-centric and for others it might be mostly country. The thing about music is that is that at its core, it’s categorized, so it’s no surprise that people have the urge to choose one thing or another. What’s interesting is that some of us publicly rave about our favorite artists and genres of music as a way to define the kind of person we are, while also hiding our guilty pleasure behind closed doors. We feel like our music taste plays a huge part in how we portray and define ourselves to the world. But the thing is-- we forget that we all don’t like to be crammed and generalized into one particular box; we don’t want to be known for just one thing. We want to be different, we want to be changing and evolving- and that’s exactly what music does. So why do some people refuse to open themselves up to unfamiliar genres of music and only seem to put other artists, genres, and listeners down? Who knows. But despite some people’s undying, narrow loyalty to solely hip hop or solely R&B music (for example), we have still seen refreshing genre crossovers in the past decade that have brought artists and fandoms together, whether its through artist features and collaborations or just using a sample of someone else’s songs. There’s the meshing of indie with modern hip hop as seen in Travis Scott’s song “Don’t Play” that features indie-rock band The 1975 (and fellow rap artist Big Sean).
24 | Duality and Music
There’s the wide-ranged fusing of EDM with nearly every genre. Famously, DJ Calvin Harris produced Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1, an album entirely made up of collaborations with hip-hop and R&B artists such as Frank Ocean, Migos, ScHoolBoy Q, Kehlani, and more. Last year, we saw Post Malone release “Take What You Want” on his newest album, a hip-hop-meets-metal song featuring one of today’s most influential hip hop artists, Travis Scott, and one of rock and metal’s most influential artists of all time, Ozzy Osbourne. And of course, last year there was conflict around music charts and genres when Lil Nas X release his infamous song “Old Town Road” that was arguably both country and hip-hop-- especially when the Billy Ray Cyrus remix version was released. The most glaring genre crossover as of late is simply the fact that most modern pop songs incorporate various trap beats that are also heard in mainstream hip-hop songs, like Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings.” Even if you look at Spotify’s “Today’s Top Hits” playlist under “Pop” music, more than half of the songs and artists on there would be considered hip-hop by many people, especially by fans of these songs and artists. Collaborations within music also help in elevating the experience of music. Many artists collaborate to release full projects together, sometimes under a moniker which rebrands the two as a collective. Having collaborated frequently in the past, Jhené Aiko and Big Sean came together to form the duo TWENTY88. The two strived to create music to