The Onion's interview with producer Rick Rubin is a nice combination of nostaligia and state-of-the-industry commentary.

I found this insight to be very interesting:

I never made beats to make beats; I only made them when there was a record to make them for. That's one of the things that has changed in hip-hop that's made me like it less. It feels much more like it's a producer-driven medium, where there are all these tracks that are completely interchangeable. A Neptunes track could have Usher on it, or Jay-Z on it, or any one of these different people, but the track is still the same.

I couldn't quite put my finger on it before, but that's probably what bothers me about a lot of otherwise-good rap today. Snoop, Eminem, Jay-Z all have skills on the mic — great flow, entertaining lyrics — but their music doesn't have a distinct sound. As recently as ten years ago, you could hear the beat kick in and know it was a Black Moon or Pharcyde or A Tribe Called Quest track, before even hearing any rhymes. There is too much of a disconnect between the MC and the music; Snoop doesn't sound like his own artist, so much as a guest MC on a Dr. Dre or Neputunes song.

They also touch on what was so appealing about early-to-mid 80's hip-hop:

RR: At the time, I was listening to a lot of punk-rock music, and it felt like an alternative to punk rock. It felt like black punk rock.

O: You mean the newness of it, the rebellion?

RR: Yeah, and in the way that punk rock took the music out of Madison Square Garden and brought it back to this kind of naive street level where anyone could do it, even those who are not really musicians. Hip-hop did the same thing ... you could just be a guy with an idea. That was enough for you to make a record.

O: It seems like it was sort of being invented as it went along. Rock music had a history and traditions, whereas rap and punk could be whatever you wanted.

RR: True. But in both cases, it was often derivative of itself ... [r]appers talking about the same types of things: Bragging and dissing are kind of the main themes on early hip-hop records.

The novelty of early hip-hop, replete with its "Rappin' Duke" and "Pee Wee Dance" one-hit-wonders, is well-known — there was so much new ground to break. Paradoxically, so much early rap was confined to a very narrow ethos — young black men from New York City rapping about their prowess with the mic and the ladies.

Oddly, they omit another commonality, something that I think endeared so many fans to early rap and early punk: the energy. Against the backdrop of disco, synth-pop and the like, the young genres were just so damn unpretentous, loud and simple. They had energy.

Also funny is the anecode of a 21-year old Chuck D saying that "he was too old, and hip-hop was a young man's game. LL was really popular at that time, and he was 16."

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