Last year I had the privilege of participating in a couple of Freestyle Music award shows. I was thrilled to have been honored along with my old band-mates, and had a great time seeing old friends from the music industry again. The one question that kept popping up throughout those events were “Are you guys coming up with anything new”? I also heard conversation between producers and promoters about how to get Freestyle music on the radio again.
Erotic Exotic at the 2008 Freestyle Music Awards
The thing is folks as much as I loved the music we all did in the 80’s; I believe that Freestyle music never evolved enough to maintain a real foot hold with main-stream America. At least not as much as hip-hop, rap or even House music has done.
You can do a little searching on the internet and find some new Freestyle artists. Some are actually very good, but all the big concerts, and “limited” radio play are reserved mostly to the old school artists like Stevie B, Exposé, TKA and even our old group Erotic Exotic, as well as many others from the 80’s. The new Freestyle groups unfortunately don’t get the same exposure and usually only get shows when opening up for the older, better known artists. Radio play (even internet radio) is very limited for these new Artists, and any significant CD sales are almost non-existent.
Again the reason is not that these new Artists don’t have the same talent as its predecessors. The problem that they face is that Freestyle music is reserved primarily for the old school generation. While many folks might talk about weather or not Freestyle can make a come-back, you won’t see too many of them actually going out and buying it. The genre has made a permanent home in the “memories” and “hearts” of its fans but it’s not part of the soundtracks for their everyday lives today.
So why is it that this particular style of music never maintained its foot-hold within the music industry and the buying public the same way that hip-hop, rap or other dance music did? IMHO I believe that the genre never evolved according to its surroundings.
The first thing that you will always notice about Freestyle is the beats. They’re in your face and weather you know how to dance or not, those beats make you move. The second obvious feature is the hooks, primarily the keyboard hooks. Most of the hits from that era can be identified just by playing a couple of bars of the keyboard hooks. I remember people going to record stores in the 80’s and not knowing the name of the song, but they would simply hum the keyboard hook to the clerk and walk out with the record.
But most if not all of these features can also be found in the other genres of music that survived beyond the 80’s, so obviously there had to be something else that identified Freestyle music. That was the lyrics. And it’s in those lyrics that we can see where Freestyle did not evolve like other styles of music.
Freestyle lyrics were about 2 things; Love and dancing. Let’s face it, in the 80’s (for those of us old enough to remember) making love and dancing was all we wanted to do. Just about every hit song from that time was about those two subjects. Even hip-hop and rap when they first hit the scene mostly talked about these two same things, but while those styles of music evolved their lyrics into other social themes, like poverty, injustice, war, money, politics etc; Freestyle stayed talking about “Love & Dancing”.
Now I know many of us would much rather hear songs about making love and dancing rather than war, but you have to realize that throughout history, its been the younger generations that have dictated what types of music survive and what types fall by the way-side. And every so often there comes a generation that is more attuned to its social environment than others.
The Beatles went from “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah” to Sergeant Peppers. The 70’s saw Punk Rock take over Disco, and groups like Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots, made “Hair bands” obsolete. The same thing happened with Freestyle. While other dance music genres began to identify themselves in the late 80’s to a more social conscience youth, Freestyle was not providing the younger generation with things that they could relate to.
A great example of an Artist that survived that evolution was Janet Jackson with her “Rhythm Nation” album. Janet was deeply ingrained in the 80’s Freestyle scene with songs like “Nasty and “When I think of you”. But in 1989 she and her producer took a more socially conscience direction with songs like “State of the World” and “The Knowledge”. True that these songs did not get the exposure that “Love will never do” or “Black Cat” did, but she managed to plant a seed with that album that allowed her passage into the next generation.
Madonna is another Artist that always evolved not just with the times but a bit ahead of them, making her a super star for 3 decades.
So will Freestyle ever make a comeback? Maybe. It’s impossible to predict what will happen next week in music never mind in a few years, however I don’t believe that it will ever come back the same way. I don’t think it will even be recognizable as Freestyle. It will have some of the common features of Freestyle, and those of us who made love and danced to that music, will know where the new genre came from.
