And the best of them might be Brooklyn’s Ka, a frequent Roc Marciano collaborator. They’ve taken this heavy, concussive old music and turned it into something blunted and psychedelic, a sound you can get lost in. More importantly, though, Marciano has inspired a whole wave of bent, idiosyncratic underground rappers, all of whom are twisting that classic New York sound in their own weird directions. ![]() On Marcberg, Marciano sounds like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven: a haggard old gunslinger looking for peace but finding more violence anyway. It’s a record soaked in musty atmosphere: intricately worded monotonal tough-talk, ambient movie-soundtrack loops, nothing as tasteless as a sung chorus anywhere. But Marcberg was the moment Marciano found his voice. Before Marcberg, Marciano had been kicking around the New York rap world for years, spending time with Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad crew and forming his own underground unit the U.N. ![]() One of the decade’s most quietly influential rap albums is Marcberg, the 2010 solo debut from Long Island rapper and producer Roc Marciano. And yet that hoodies-and-Tims ‘90s New York rap has survived and evolved, thriving in a few underground pockets. And rap music has had rebirth after rebirth, to the point where today’s young SoundCloud-rap vandals routinely and performatively claim that they’ve never even heard of their ‘90s forebears. Truthfully, it didn’t sound like that much anymore in 1997, when Puff Daddy brought the shiny suit era in. Rap music doesn’t sound like that anymore. Others (Biggie, Prodigy, Guru) are no longer with us. Some of them (Jay-Z, Nas, the extended Wu-Tang family) entered the canon, the world agreeing en masse on their genius. But most of the architects of that sound have moved on, chasing pop stardom or moguldom or comfortable semi-retirements. The rap music that came out of the greater New York area in the ‘90s-the grimy, wordy, obsessive boom-bap-remains some of the most evocative and cinematic popular music that this world has ever given us. ![]() There’s something about a hard neck-crack snare, a lazy trumpet sample, a rugged voice muttering about fur coats and boxcutters.
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