2017 saw a slew of big pop and hip-hop records, a number of breakout female singer-songwriters and all-girl bands, and the return of beloved '60s soul artist Don Bryant and pop star Kesha.
I am a pop and R&B singer. I'm not necessarily an Indian singer or musician. I sing in English, and the music I do blends hip hop, pop, R&B, and soul.
I keep my hip-hop as hip-hop, my R&B as R&B and my pop as pop. The ability to cross those boundaries and do all these things effectively is not commonly done.
I'm not a pop rapper. That's nothing against pop music - I love pop music. I've jumped on pop records for people and still will, but I'm not a pop artist. I didn't start from there. I started in underground music. I consider myself an underground artist, as well as a producer.
I think hip hop is dead. It's all pop now. If you call it hip hop, then you need to stop. Hip hop was a movement. Hip hop was a culture. Hip hop was a way of life. It's all commercial now.
Hip-Hop got turned into Hit Pop,
The second a record was number one on the pop charts.
But don't skip on the heart, it gotta start in the ghetto,
Let no one forget about the hard part.
When I was 16, I had a really big hit in the K-pop world. It was a hip-hop/R&B/pop song. I kinda strayed from that because of the writers I was hanging out with.
When hip-hop was new and raw, it was all about being an MC. You wanted to be respected as a lyricist. But as the years passed and hip-hop became big business, hip-hop became like country, rock and pop. And so you now have people who write the songs for rappers.
This is the thing about hip-hop music and where people get it most misconstrued: It's all hip-hop. You can't say that just what I do is hip-hop, because hip-hop is all energies. James Brown can get on the track and mumble all day. But guess what? You felt his soul on those records.
Maybe I'm not a typical pop star, but I don't think there's a mould for a pop star or singer. You can do whatever you want.
My definition of hip hop is taking elements from many other spheres of music to make hip hop. Whether it be breakbeat, whether it be the groove and grunt of James Brown or the pickle-pop sounds of Kraftwerk or Yellow Magic Orchestra, hip hop is also part of what they call hip-house now, or trip hop, or even parts of drum n' bass.
In the little rural town I grew up in, I missed out on the pop music of the time, the '80s, and now enjoy in retrospect. It's as an adult that I've opened it up to dance, hip-hop, R&B, and even big pop songs.
I lived in Italy for a number of years and I was really digging around trying to get my hands dirty, trying to learn about Italian music. And what I ended up gravitating towards was this stuff from the '50s and '60s and maybe early '70s, where there were these incredibly talented pop singers that weren't using pop bands.
For a long time I wasn't actually listening to pop. But when I got back into electronic and hip-hop stuff, I rediscovered my passion for pop music.
There's a need for pop. There's a need for radio. There's also a need to understand the brilliance and the depth of jazz and soul - and what hip-hop can be at its most brilliant and what hip-hop can be at its most simplistic.
There needs to be structures in place to do something about misrepresentation about hip hop. When awards are given out and the media talk about hip hop, they're confused because they haven't done their homework on it so you have a case where there's an award for the most pop song in the world and it's called 'hip hop'.
Rock'n'roll as a genre is different from pop and hip hop: it is about bands, and that for me suggests brotherhood, family, friendship and community.