With the exception of more recent Contemporary R&B (as opposed to 50s and 60s R&B/Soul) and mainstream pop, Hip Hop seems to thrive on features in comparison with other genres, even other traditionally African American genres (which, by way of community, was my initial hypothesis on why it visibly features other artists, as opposed to just casually employing them in the more general liner note credits)
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The “feature” is usually an established artist, while the performer is a “rising talent”. Not always, but a good portion of the time. Seems like a way for an established artist to promote someone they may have an interest (financially) in with only a small amount of time and effort.
One significant thing is that often times these “featured” artists can easily not actually be involved in the production and no one knows any better. This is way easier in some forms of music than others.
For many rap and to a lesser degree some modern R&B, often songs are constructed in parts and they can just take an unrelated “featured” artists who has say a 30 second snippet of anything they made and just fit it into a track the original artist is making, without any collaboration needed (this doesn’t mean collabs don’t happen, just that its not required).
Usually the producer may go out to try to get featured people to sell or give them snippets of their content to use as marketing for the song/artist doing the full track. These generally take extremely minimal effort for a bigger name artist, who may already have recorded and stored dozens, if not hundreds of small unused clips of songs they just have sitting around that never made it anywhere. Maybe it was even the same producer
Part of it is definitely cultural (i.e. features are an established thing in hiphop culture) which provides an existing blueprint for it. Part of it, however, comes down to hiphop being more suited to that kind of collaboration in the first place due to the nature of rap as opposed to singing. Rappers are rapping over an existing beat, but unlike singing, they generally do not have to stick to a specific melody, because rapping is “just” words (which sounds reductive but bear with me).
When doing a hiphop feature, you can have the featuring rapper listen to the beat, then let them plug their own lyrics in. There’s a spontaneity, a “plug and play” nature. If the featuring artist is doing the hook (e.g. Juice WRLD on Godzilla), it’s less straightforward because the track is probably written with that particular hook in mind. It’s not really plug and play at that point.
I’m not hugely into hiphop, but I can’t think of a track with two different features doing two different hooks, whereas there are plenty of features with multiple rappers doing their own thing.
This also shows another thing, which is that many great rappers are bad singers (and they know it), so if they want singing they have to turn to a singer. The same goes for great singers being bad at rapping, but it’s a lot less common to see a pop or rock song with a rap section (apart from the period around 2010 where even Friday by Rebecca Black had some gratuitous hiphop thrown into the mix).
I think it has more to do with how performers are credited than actual practice.
Duets, as well as having other more or less well known singers or musicians perform on someone’s album, has been incredibly common across lots of genres since forever.
The difference is that in hip hop those artists are billed right in the name of the song rather than just credited in the liner notes among the personnel. This is a cultural difference, I suspect due largely to the fact that rappers are also usually their own lyricists. So their contribution goes beyond simply performing in someone else’s composition. Of course there is also a savvy marketing aspect as well — by putting both names on the song it expands the audience to fans of both artists.
I sure don’t like featured artists on some albums. Like, Rakim’s solo albums had these. He’s “The Master”, the album is titled “The Master”. I did not buy that album to hear other rappers.
They work pretty well on Ice-T stuff.
Didn’t seem right on Gang Starr either.
Yeah I dig 90s rap. 🙂
Some of has to do with contracts. Let’s say artist X is contracted to only do recordings first Sony while artist Y can only do recordings for Def Jam.
Now let’s say X wants to do a song and have Y do backup vocals. By contract this technically isn’t allowed. A lot of times the artists would just do the recording but wouldn’t mention that Y is on the recording. People would just kind of know or figure it out. In the 80s there was a song that obviously featured Michael Jackson on backup vocals but everyone involved denied it for years.
“Featuring” someone on your recording is a way of stepping around this contact issue, kind of. It’s a way of saying Y is performing on this song but is not the actual artist.
Talking with a beat is easier to implement than other kinds of music, its also more distinctive
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