HipHop in SL - Where is it?

[VooDoo Bamboo]

I have been in and out of SL since since 1. I have seen it at its highs and lows and for some reason even though my RL is much more busy these days, I still find time for it. It's just a way for me to get away from everything of the day and decompress. I have a love for music... A very deep love. I would say it's really what makes me... me. With that said, I love many types of music. Classic rock, rock, gothic, very little country, but a very strong love for hiphop. At my core, hiphop is what drives me, gets my creative juices running, brings out emotion, etc. 

One thing I have noticed for some time in SL is the HipHop scene is near impossible to find. Everything... And I mean EVERYTHING is rock, jazz, and country clubs with rock and jazz dominating it. There are about 2 key places I can think of that play hiphop, but nothing with that... Urban club feel to it.

Then you have all this techno, trance, house, etc. which really leaves me scratching my head because honestly... I just don't feel it. To each their own and I am sure it's just my personal style, I just don't get it. Again, I enjoy classic rock and today's rock as well so this is not a hit on that, just trying to figure out why the hiphop scene is just not here on the grid. 

So is it just me and I am just not finding these types of clubs in SL and hangouts or is it really like that and SL is just not a place where most people into hiphop go. Just curious as it is something I have observed. 

[Linda Reddevil]

HipHop is not my thing but if I was passionate about it and didn't find many DJ's or clubs playing it, I'd research the desire for it and if the desire and public response warranted it, I'd open my own club.  You can hire DJ's to play that type of music (and I use that term loosely here lol) and most will work for their own tips.  Your investment would be rent (unless you already own enough land to place a club), structures/furnishings and advertising.  It's just a suggestion to give some thought to.  

[cheesecurd]

Consider that SecondLifes userbase fits like 3 categories. 
- Clueless teenagers who can’t run VRchat or are really into casual e-dating

- 30 to 50 year old women who came here after yahoo chat rooms died

- early 2000’s internet culture types, weebs, oldschool furries and video game nerds

So your genres of music people like are mainly boomer rock and early 2000’s house and edm. Because the clueless noobs don’t really go to places with music because it’s just not something that subculture does.

Theres bound to be a few places with a hip hop atmosphere you enjoy but it’s gonna take a bit of digging through the mountain of classic rock and people who never left the rave scene circa 2001.

[Cinos Field]

The clubs do certainly exist, but I don't know if they're good or not. If you look through the music and DJ categories or search for "hip hop club" or the like, you get results. If they're good is up to you to determine!

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

My man, who's a DJ in world, did play hip hop songs in a club for a few weeks and had a good turnout, but the club imploded and that was it.  He just play the hip hop songs and didn't do live turntablism or anything like that.

Edited November 9, 2019 by Kimmi Zehetbauer
Fat fingerism.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Most of the hip hop venues I've been to in SL looked like some kinda 'blaxploitation flick' with very few actual active avatars in them.

For years there one an exception on the last western sim of G-rated Bay City, but it looks like it's gone now. Because the people there didn't "act black" it kept getting AR'd by various Becky types insisting it was a bot-farm... So I dunno the actual history, but maybe the owner got tired of Becky always hovering just off sim with an AR form 'in hand'...

 

[Selene Gregoire]

I thought hip hop had gone the way of the disco duck dodo bird.

[JanuarySwan]

On 11/9/2019 at 9:12 AM, cheesecurd said:

 

- 30 to 50 year old women who came here after yahoo chat rooms died

There were Yahoo chat rooms?  Like what?  Do tell.

Voodoo Bamboo what exactly is hip-hop?  Got a couple of favorite videos to share?  

[Janet Voxel]

They're out there, but there really aren't any permanent venues. 

There used to be Soul Vibrations, which was the jankiest sim ever, lasted for a loooong time. Wood prim dancefloor, Giant sized prim sign that said "Soul Vibrations" and that was it. Always full, till it wasn't.

That's because everyone moved to Soul Evolutions, which is on a nice sim. They have hip-hop and R&B DJs there or at least a Hip-Hop R&B station on when there's no DJ.

You basically have to friend Hip-Hop DJs and go where they go. There was a nice reggae club, played modern reggae, stuff you could wine to, but it closed down. For some reason, these types of venues don't last. So your best bet is to hook up with a couple of DJs and pop in when they send out an invite. 

 

[Mollymews]

for anyone interested in the history of hiphop then this vid is pretty good

like OP i find that most SL clubs play more mainstream rock, jazz, danceband, blues and country. Even with SL EDM clubs is mostly mainstream vocal trance, and less melbourne/dnb

because of this I mostly just listen to hiphop/rap, numetal/alt rock and melbourne/dnb on my parcel radio stream

Edited November 12, 2019 by Mollymews
my

[cheesecurd]

8 hours ago, JanuarySwan said:

There were Yahoo chat rooms?  Like what?  Do tell.

Pre social media sites taking over, in the late 90’s and early 2000’s companies like AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo all had messengers. Respectively AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger.

Yahoo was the last of them to really centralize their internet experience. Everything was yahoo, your news was yahoo, your mail was yahoo, your games were yahoo and your chat was yahoo. You talked to other people on yahoo. Kinda like a little yahoo cult. So yahoo for a long time still had chat rooms. Selectable from a public list of a bunch of different topics where anyone could go talk. 
As compared to adding your friends on AIM and talking to them, or searching out user hosted AOL chat rooms, yahoo had these premade chat rooms on a variety of topics for you to use. 

They were super popular, with some of the more popular topics having a dozen or more chat rooms with the largest having 100 user slots, usually filled.

But when yahoo decentralized and people started using early social media and breaking off to other email providers and basically just using other parts of the internet instead of just yahoo like a bunch of weirdos, the chat rooms slowly died. And everyone went everywhere. SL being a similar social experience in concept and other games like Habbo Hotel took a lot of those people who left the yahoo, Microsoft or AOL ecosystems.

And I say 30 to 50 year old women because that’s who was most interested in this kind of stuff, stay at home moms and teenage girls. Who are now empty nesters and new stay at home moms. Mostly, of course this is an exaggeration, generalization and simplification, but it’s a key part of internet culture at that time.

Anyway, so THAT is why SL today has this surprisingly large population of middle aged women. It’s a social experience they know well and enjoy. In the same sense that today’s youngins enjoy the likes of Instagram and Twitter as their social outlet of choice.

[Beth Macbain]

1 hour ago, cheesecurd said:

And I say 30 to 50 year old women because that’s who was most interested in this kind of stuff, stay at home moms and teenage girls. Who are now empty nesters and new stay at home moms. Mostly, of course this is an exaggeration, generalization and simplification, but it’s a key part of internet culture at that time.

I'm going to have to disagree with you here. During the peak days of Yahoo chat rooms (and AOL, and Prodigy, and Compuserve) everyone was interested because it was so new. I was in my early 20s, still going out every night partying, and freaking loved those bloody chat rooms. For the general public, this was our first experience with being able to chat like this to anyone all over the world. Teenagers loved it - this was before MySpace, and Facebook, and everyone having a cell phone and texting. 

And since teenagers loved it, so did nasty old men. Chris Hansen built his career on it. I have no data to back it up, and I'm too lazy to go looking, but in addition to better options and better technology bringing about the downfall of chat rooms, the child molesters also played a huge part. The chat rooms all became suspicious, and it was generally assumed that anyone claiming to be a teenager was actually an old man pretending to be a teen or the FBI. 

SL isn't anything like the chat rooms of old. Those were the wild, untamed days of the internet. There was no visual, or virtual, aspect to chat rooms like there is with SL. We didn't have avatars. Hell, back then we couldn't even upload a picture of ourselves unless we wanted to sit there for 3 hours on a dial up connection, hoping that someone else in the house wouldn't pick up the phone and cause us to lose that connection 2 hours and 53 minutes into it.  

The struggle was real. 

 

[Pussycat Catnap]

11 hours ago, janetosilio said:

They're out there, but there really aren't any permanent venues. 

There used to be Soul Vibrations, which was the jankiest sim ever, lasted for a loooong time. Wood prim dancefloor, Giant sized prim sign that said "Soul Vibrations" and that was it. Always full, till it wasn't.

Yes, that was the one I was trying to remember the name of, it used to be in Bay City - Sconset. Good to know it's closure wasn't about an AR. In the Bay City community group I used to see constant abuse thrown at the place from an assortment of 'Becky types' that couldn't get people at the venue to 'answer for themselves' about what they were doing there, with a tone that implied severe ethno-judgementalism.

Frequently members would complain about their AR's not resulting in the place being closed...

 

 

The ethnic composition of SL is extremely narrow - dramatically more Caucasian than almost any urban region in the US and likely even also western Europe (I am extremely ignorant of the demographics of Eastern Europe so... I won't even try to wonder without looking it up first). And the age range tends towards boomers.

Actually the mere fact that other forms of music in this thread have been called mainstream points to that.

Modern mainstream music IS hip-hop.

It has been for almost a decade.

SL is way out of sync with modern global urban life.

 

As SL is more of a boomer thing; it's trendlines are maybe 40 years out of date... something you can see in a lot of other threads as well if you're NOT a boomer AND not Caucasian - as it's pretty jarring to 'the rest of us' just how specifically 'ethnic' and 'generational' SL is... 😮

So mainstream music... has a lower presence here.

Look at something like the thread for Frank's Place - a venue that my grandparents probably would have said plays music for old people...

 

 

 

Edited November 12, 2019 by Pussycat Catnap

[Janet Voxel]

6 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Yes, that was the one I was trying to remember the name of, it used to be in Bay City - Sconset. Good to know it's closure wasn't about an AR. In the Bay City community group I used to see constant abuse thrown at the place from an assortment of 'Becky types' that couldn't get people at the venue to 'answer for themselves' about what they were doing there, with a tone that implied severe ethno-judgementalism.

Frequently members would complain about their AR's not resulting in the place being closed...

 

Pretty sure, someone just decided to spin off and do their own thing. Took the entire crowd with them.

Thats the nice reason, I won’t get into the other possible reasons. None of them were AR’able though.

[Cinos Field]

1 hour ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Actually the mere fact that other forms of music in this thread have been called mainstream points to that.

Modern mainstream music IS hip-hop.

It has been for almost a decade.

SL is way out of sync with modern global urban life.

Ten years ago, maybe. Nowadays you barely hear any hip hop on the radio (which is probably still the best way to define "mainstream", I think). See, it's happening to you too! You're getting old and out of sync!

Edited November 12, 2019 by Cinos Field

[cheesecurd]

1 minute ago, Cinos Field said:

Ten years ago, maybe. Nowadays you barely hear any hip hop on the radio. See, it's happening to you too! You're getting old and out of sync!

I think it just depends on what circles you’re in.

Comventional rock and sub genres related to it are pretty backburnered. It’s a good time for hiphop and rap, alternative rock and top 100 pop kinda music.

It can be kind of hard to pin down what music is and isn’t relevant and popular, just remember europop and you’ll realize there is definitely a hard ending point for some music genres.

That also ended about the time clear plastic electronics, round cars and UV reactive computers went out of style.

[Maryanne Solo]

Sansar 🧐

[Tari Landar]

According to the international music summit pop is the most popular followed by rock and EDM-and that is worldwide, versus a singular region. According to others like business insider, hip-hop surpassed them all in 2018 (for the first time ever, so, definitely not a decades old thing-this is a new thing for that genre, lol) and also remained there-barely-in 2019. While others profess that rap overtook them all in 2018 and is still teetering there. But in either case, it's only in the US. The US is a very undecided country when it comes to just about everything, though, we are too big of a melting pot to really have any true, valid, accurate consensus of anything, lol.  Mainstream and popular aren't necessarily mutually inclusive or exclusive-which only lends to the problem, lol.  I'm also not convinced that everyone actually knows the difference between certain genres which are often similar, and that makes things even more confusing. 

Worldwide, hip-hop has never and will never be the most popular or mainstream, primarily because there are regions of the world which are far more decisive and have one genre that outshines them all (pop, in most of them) and those regions are massive in comparison. Rock would likely always come in as a second mainstream-if only due to its age and longevity, and being more universally known worldwide All other genres probably pull in very close to one another, and niches will of course never be mainstream-hence why they're niches lol

As for where to find it in sl., you likely won't. Even if you find places that say they play it primarily, or mostly, odds are good that they don't, they mix it with other genres (or they simply don't know the difference between genres). It's not AS popular a genre in sl as it might be in places in rl, that's why you don't see it as much-clubs that cater to it primarily sit mostly empty, and they don't last long. In sl, rock is mainstream and has always been so, probably will always be so, because it's a more universally mainstream than any other genre (not just for djs but also general streams places play), easier to cater to, and can almost guarantee an audience. 

[Mollymews]

i think that that music genres and sub-genres are also influenced by identity and location. Like in the hiphop vid I posted, there are quite distinctive differences in hiphop that came out of Brooklyn, West Bronx and South Bronx. Same with East and West Coast rap. Southern rap has its own unique ways as well, different to East and West. Blues the same, lots of differences between Chicago style and Southern blues, Swamp blues being different again. Country music is not Western music, yet there is lots of crossover. And so on

rock is the same, major differences between British and US rock for example. Then when look at the identity/regional differences in Britain then is also quite pronounced

in NZ, maori and pasifika peoples massively influence all kinds of music. Same in non-english speaking countries. K-Pop is lots different from J-Pop for example. Then we get into Latin and Hispanic influences, Continental South America, Europe, Africa and Middle East

also too, music can have dance styles which when combined create the genre. Like EDM Hardstyle is both a music sound and a dance style. A blend which came out of the Melbourne style shuffle. A style of shuffling which came out of Thailand, brought to Australia by people who had visited Thailand, who then added in their own moves when they got home. Where from Australia it spread to Europe where it merged with local developed moves, and moves from the USA, to become what europeans call hardstyle

so while it can sometimes be difficult for people outside of a location to identity a sub-genre, the people in the location pretty much recognise it as their own from home.  For example, i know these following are from home. I grew up with these sounds, I know the sound and style of playing the instruments are mine. I can hear a song played in these ways without even knowing the song or who is performing it, and I just know they are from home, even when sometimes the song itself has been imported from elsewhere

examples of of my home sub-genre

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4dCXo1HqQU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ6kMt-E2wo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE82oke8BWM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yowvrEHGGFk

[Pussycat Catnap]

The thing about saying 'pop' is above hip-hop or rap or rap is above the other two... is that all 3 have kinda hit a point where they're semi-merged and music moves seamlessly between them... and not just in the English language parts of the world. Many local genres of music are just subgenres of some blend of these 3 with local influences.

Rock... rock has been dead since the 80s except among boomers still playing old tunes - and there are enough boomers still alive that that registers.

 

 

[Lyssa Greymoon]

Boomers, or millennial hipsters who are all nostalgic for other people’s pasts.

[Mollymews]

36 minutes ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Rock... rock has been dead since the 80s except among boomers still playing old tunes - and there are enough boomers still alive that that registers.

in SL maybe true.  In RL then not so much true

Billboard Rock Top 10 this week is

10. Of Monsters and Men - "Alligator"
9. Green Day - "Father of All"
8. twenty one pilots - "The Hype"
7. Matt Maeson - "Cringe"
6. Tool - "Pneuma"
5. Tool = "Fear Inoculum"
4. Machine Gun Kelly - "I Think I'm OKAY"
3. John Mayer - "Carry Me Away"
2. Panic! At The Disco - "Hey Look Ma, I Made It"
1. Panic! At The Disco - "High Hopes"

of these the oldest band is Green Day which formed in 1986. Tool in 1990. Panic! in 2004. twenty one in 2009. Monsters in 2010. Machine Gun Kelly is 29 years old. John Mayer is 42. Matt Maeson is 26

edit ps.

agree that progressive rock heyday died in the 80s. Hairband rock heyday died in the 90s. But rock like all other genres continues to evolve

 

Edited November 13, 2019 by Mollymews

[Janet Voxel]

She’s right about genre blending though. The number 1 song on the US Billboard top 100 was Old Town Road, a country song....by a rapper. Broke records at 17 weeks at #1.

Also Rap has blended so much with R&B, they’re almost indistinguishable. A lot of rappers sing and their songs sound very R&Bish.

Youre not going to find a straight hip-hop club for the simple reason, people go to clubs to dance. R&B has to be in there, and like I said before, they exist and I even named one where there is always someone there.

Could SL do with more of them? Absolutely. All it takes is a certain amount of stick to itness. I talk to would be club owners all the time. They put something up, it’s going to be different, it’s going to be great. Then it’s gone in a couple of months.

[Janet Voxel]

[XxGucciQueenlover2themaX]

Billionaire's Lifestyle Hangout  Sim   , Feya II Islands (219, 211, 29) - Adult is the place to be, its now the new pleace of hip hop and soul soul & r/b hiphop music for all wth live djs daily open 24/hours

Edited May 26, 2020 by XxGucciQueenlover2themaX