What is Realness in Hip-Hop?
7 min readAug 12, 2020
Often times, I’ve found people are transfixed on the concept of realness in hip-hop. Most times, it’s a very specific sound from the 90s, that Golden era where rap was still fleshing itself out in what it was going to be. The multiple dimensions of how rap could coexist were beginning to form, varying from the conscious, jazzy stuff to the boom-bap NY raps to its West Coast contemporaries in the G-Funk gangsta rap sound. On the outside…
