And Pater Tosiello highlights a handful of retrospectives rolled out for the 20th anniversary:
Chief among the honorees has been Nas’s Illmatic, a debut whose 20th birthday has been celebrated with a two-disc reissue, accompanying tour, three-part Fuse special, and feature-length documentary. The two-decade anniversary of Outkast’s debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik brought about the long-awaited onstage reunion of members Big Boi and Andre 3000. Elsewhere, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony has embarked upon a tour commemorating the 20th anniversary of their debut EP Creepin on ah Come Up, and Warren G announced plans for a follow up to his multi-platinum selling 1994 debut Regulate…G Funk Era. Mobb Deep’s new release The Infamous Mobb Deep confusingly shares a title with their breakthrough album and includes a second disc of outtakes from 1994 studio sessions. A few months late to the party, Onyx released their first album in a decade, Wakedafucup, with a title inspired by their debut Bacdafucup, and The Wu-Tang Clan has reported internal strife around their already-delayed album planned for the 20th anniversary of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).
But Tosiello finds the anniversary “insanely awkward”:
For each tour and retrospective, middle-aged musicians must assume the personae of their teens and early 20s, overlooking two decades worth of artistic output.
Nas has been beckoned to recite Illmatic’s 10 tracks dozens of times this year at venues ranging from the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra to the Preakness Stakes’ InfieldFest. If these performances have highlighted Illmatic’s timelessness, they’ve also reasserted the consensus that Nas has yet to surpass his debut. In selecting Coachella for their reunion, Outkast joined a bill mostly composed of electronica artists and a young audience in part predated by Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. Of the new Mobb Deep record, Pitchfork’s Jayson Greene wrote, “the album is exactly the sort of hastily tossed-off, forgettable project that legacy acts will sometimes tack onto can’t-miss releases.”
The focus on 1994 also highlights rap’s precarious position today. Hip-hop sales swelled corresponding with the pre-Napster boom at the turn of the century, but in the intervening years rap lost a significant market share. Forty-three of Billboard’s year-end Top 200 Albums were rap records in 2004, but in 2013 only 25 cracked the Top 200. Last fall the 10th annual Rock the Bells Tour, a hip-hop specific concert series that saw the reunions of ’90s icons the Fugees and A Tribe Called Quest, was cancelled due to slow ticket sales. Upon the cancellation, planned performer Kid Cudi tweeted, “Hip hop shows aren’t exciting… People wanna smile and dance.”
“It’s like remaking the same classic movies over and over,” J-Zone says of the recent nostalgia wave. “People are running out of ideas and instead revisiting stuff for interesting content.”
The Dish 