10 Ways To Sound Smart Talking About Rap Beats

"Fire!" "This slaps!" "Banger!" Run out of words to describe a fire track? Let us show you the way.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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In rock criticism, there are words that have simply been ruined by overuse; you just can’t get away with referring to a guitar riff as “angular” anymore.

And as more and more writers—and bloggers, Twitter personalities, and message board loudmouths—join the ever-growing conversation about rap, there are more ways to talk about the sound of hip hop, and more clichés to avoid, or carefully avoid misusing.

Whether or not you've actually ever sat at a drum machine and made a beat, or interviewed a producer and learned about their craft firsthand, there's a baseline of knowledge every hip hop fan should at least try to be conversational in. 

Here are ten key terms that can help you sound smart while talking about rap beats…

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Nostalgic

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The Beach Boys emerged in the 1960s already sounding nostalgic for a simpler time that had just begun receding into the past. By the time they became a touchstone for indie rock decades later, that nostalgia had folded over and began to function on multiple levels. Something similar is at work when, say, Lupe Fiasco uses a sax sample from 1971 to remind hip hop fans of a 1992 song, Pete Rock & CL Smooth's "They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)," a song which itself contained a personal tale of nostalgia for a fallen friend. Hip hop always builds on memories of the past, but few have been so openly nostalgic for the good old days as a new generation of artists like Joey Bada$$ are, often for an era of the '90s that they barely remember themselves.

Ethereal

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A decade or more back, there wasn't much rap you could even conceivably call "ethereal"—a genre dominated by guys talking tough over drums tends not to evoke delicate, otherworldly beauty. But from the neo-new age sound beds Clams Casino has produced for Lil B to the haunting soundscapes of Noah "40" Shebib's work on Drake's albums, there's been a lot of celestial ambiance in the air for the last few years. Whether or not you're an avowed follower of Cloud Rap, or even know what it is, its wide reaching influence has probably seeped into your listening habits by now.

Expensive

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With the DIY revolution of bedroom laptop producers scoring huge hits, and with established multi-millionaire producers often sticking with the tools they started with back in the basement, it's harder than ever to really say how much a recording cost to make. In fact, the clout of a collaborator with name recognition remains probably the priciest component of most rap records—especially if Kanye is flying someone out to Hawaii or Paris just to work on a song instead of e-mailing their part in. But if something sounds shiny and opulent, if the beat is perfect for Rick Ross to lip sync to inside a giant mansion, then you can't go wrong describing the sound of the track as "expensive."

Fruity Loops

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When 9th Wonder went from producing underground hip-hop with Little Brother to landing a track on Jay-Z's The Black Album virtually overnight, there was a mild furor that a producer who uses FruityLoops had stormed the gates of professional hip-hop production. In the years since, producers with DIY backgrounds using every variety of cheap software have scored major label hits. And in any case FruityLoops (now FL Studio) is scarcely the culprit when an inexperienced producer creates a lousy track with paper-thin drums. But for sound snobs who privilege MPCs or ProTools, sneering at "FruityLoops producers" remains a reliable go-to insult.

AutoTune

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When T-Pain (and to a lesser degree, Cher) took the Antares AutoTune plugin to its logical extreme, pitch-correcting the human voice into stairstep intervals with robotic precision, everyone was suddenly aware of the possibilities. The listening public became more cynical than ever about technology's ability to prop up subpar singers, while actual recording artists, especially rappers, were more interested in exploring the sonic novelty of what it could do to their voices. The days when Lil Wayne, Kanye West and damn near everyone else used AutoTune on half their songs are over, but it remains a standard tool of contemporary hip hop, useful anytime a track could use a little melody, or a little strange, robotic texture. Of course, half the time when someone talks about AutoTune, they're really misidentifying a vocoder or some other vocal effect.

Screwed

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You can consider it the ultimate tribute to how DJ Screw irrevocably changed the sound of hip hop that his name has become a universally understood term for a production method as elemental as the slowing down of a sound or sample. Still, as Robert Davis's famous Screwed & Chopped method of manipulating vinyl has spread into the age of digital production, something of the spirit of his methods has been lost. Sure, a young artist like A$AP Rocky or Drake is paying homage to the originator when they rap in a voice that's been pitched down in ProTools to resemble the voices on a Screw tape, but it's not really the same thing.

Sampledelic

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In the days before Gilbert O'Sullivan put rappers with uncleared samples on notice and Bad Boy made the "one track jack" an acceptable form of hitmaking, sampling was quickly becoming the creative frontier of hip-hop. Late-'80s masterpieces like 3 Feet High & Rising by De La Soul, Paul's Boutique by the Beastie Boys, and It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back by Public Enemy stirred together dozens of appropriated sounds from older records into a dizzying, impressionistic whole that reminded some of the rock's ambitious psychedelic era of the late '60s. Unfortunately, so few current artists even attempt such a pricey method of beatmaking now that you're only going to need the phrase "sampledelic" when you're talking about those old classics.

Boom bap

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Hip hop is full of onomatopoeia, but there's perhaps none more evocative and concrete than boom bap—the boom is the kick drum and the bap is the snare, obviously. Considering how the overwhelming majority of popular music is drive by kick/snare rhythms, it's faintly ridiculous to attach the phrase to a particular stripe of breakbeat-driven rap music. But in the past decade, as DJ Premier and his disciples receded from the mainstream and post-Lil Jon producers favorite claps over snares, "boom bap" increasingly carries a very specific meaning about a very particular type of hip hop.

Trap

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The evolution of the word "trap" in popular music has been a long and strange journey. References to dealing dope out of "trap houses" began popping up in the Southern rap in the '90s, and trap rap started to become a subgenre unto itself in the years following T.I.'s 2003 breakthrough album Trap Muzik. And then, at some point in the last few years, a very specific variant of that sound—the Lex Luger-led parade of spastic hi-hats and blaring synths—not only became the universal sonic shorthand for "trap," but leapt straight over into dance music. Now, the T-word sits side by side with "dubstep" as a descriptor for lurching, hip hop-influenced EDM. Given the etymology of the term "trap," there's something odd about attaching a phrase that describes lyrical content to the sonics—it's a bit like if 20 years ago, hip-house had spun off into a subgenre that white European producers had no compunctions about referring to as "crack house."

Dystopian

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You can't make Dystopian fiction without actually depicting a bleak future, a world gone mad. But to make Dystopian music, you just have to make music that evokes the dreary mood and technologically advanced texture of a sci-fi movie – or just go ahead and bite the Blade Runner score. Sure, sometimes a Def Jux rapper might nod toward the dark direction society is headed in, but the reason their releases so often get the 'Dystopian' tag is because of the grinding machinery and harsh, metallic gleam of El-P's production. Just as some of the earliest innovators in drum machines and synthesizers were tagged as "industrial music," some of the more recent forward-thinking producers make what you might call post-industrial music.

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