Recently, Erykah Badu blasted the urban community for its newfound affinity for music of a more electronic variety. If the movement continues, some may find that the origins of the trend begin with Akon. The Senegalese singer/Hip-Hop artist noticed the talents of one Lady Gaga and signed her to his KonLive imprint, a subsidiary of Interscope Records. Aside from being able to retire, the music industry has seen the GaGa affect come to Hip-Hop and R&B, to the chagrin of folks like Badu.
AllHipHop asked Akon…is pop music is the final frontier to Hip-Hop?
Akon: I doubt it… absolutely not. One thing about Hip-Hop is that it is like a virus. It’ll eat up anything that get in front of it and take it over. Hip-Hop, it’ll begin to stand alone, a movement by itself. It was just a hardcore drum beat bass line and that’s all you saw. Then, it started to slowly travel into the funk era, and it took over that whole funk era, and that’s when the West Coast came and brought that whole vibe to it so it just slowly came in effect at that part of it. Then as you started to realize that the West Coast was being effected by hip hop and started bring the whole funk feel to it, back on the east coast it was completely now starting to be slowly accepted by the Jamaicans, and before you know it the traditional reggae one drop started becoming dancehall, and Jamaicans was really rappin’. It influenced that because dancehall didn’t come about until Hip-Hop. So it ejected itself into that. Then as all that was combined, then it started to become more musical.
Then slowly before you know it, you had hip hop ejected itself into R&B. Then R&B started flourishing because now you couldn’t hear a R&B song without a hip hop artist on it. So now time is starting to go, then before you know it is like whoa, you couldn’t even understand the difference between hip hop and R&B. Now when you look at it you gotta say Hip-Hop and R&B; you can’t even say Hip-Hop and you can’t say R&B because it is the same thing. That is how effective Hip-Hop is. Now is it starting to go into electro dance, ‘cause now when I get on a record, even my artist ‘til this day call me a hip hop artist; they don’t know the difference. You ask a White guy or a little White kid “Who’s your favorite hip hop star?” they’ll say Akon. I’m like; I never kicked a verse in my life. But, it’s the way it actually walked in. Now we are going into the dance era and we are going to take that over eventually too. So once this world’s over, I promise you, it’ll find something else. We even infected a little bit of the rock. When you stop and look at these clashes, you got a lot of these rock bands that’s actually rapping over these hardcore heavy metal tracks. As long as there is music playing, Hip-Hop is going to find it’s way into it. So I don’t think it’s going no where or going anywhere no time soon. It’s literally a virus, it’ll effect that you put in front of it.
