Hip-Hop and Trap
Harmony here is scenery rather than engine. That is a choice with a reason: if the chords do not push forward, attention can go to the rhythm and to the voice, which is where the composition actually is.
- loop-based
- 85 to 100 bpm
- the rap is the rhythm
In which styles
- Hip hop
- Trap
- Lo-fi
- R&B
In short
Boom bap sits around eighty-five to a hundred beats per minute in four four, with a hard kick and snare and a sampled loop that does not develop. Trap runs at half-time feels with rapid hi-hat subdivisions, which is a different rhythmic world built on the same principle of a harmony that stays put.
Spacious and heavy at once. The beat leaves room deliberately, because the voice needs somewhere to sit.
How the style works
The most important melodic material uses no scale at all. The rap is rhythm, and that rhythm is the composition: flow is the whole set of rhythmic and articulatory choices a rapper makes against the grid.
Where you run into this
- A two-bar loop that carries an entire track
- Hi-hats subdividing into thirty-seconds while everything else stays still
- A vocal whose interest is entirely in placement
What you leave out
A chord change every bar. As soon as the harmony moves faster than the loop, attention shifts from the groove to the chords and it sounds like pop with rapping over it. Also a real cadence, which closes a loop that is supposed to keep turning.