Why are featured artists such a staple in Hip Hop while in other genres they seem to be much less common?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

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).

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