Flavor Flav and the lost art of the hype man: Where are hip-hop's supporting actors?
What do Team USA and rappers have in common? They need a hype man, a person who champions the main talent through their vibrancy.
Flavor Flav, hype man extraordinaire, is doing what he does best at the 2024 Summer Olympics – bringing the utmost energy (and funding) to Team USA’s women’s water polo team to help them secure their fourth gold medal.
As Flav, who got his start as a founding member and hype man of Public Enemy, reminds us just how much a catalyst the support role can be to success, he's also a reminder there are fewer and fewer of his kind in contemporary hip-hop.
“This is definitely becoming a dying art,” says rapper Blxst, who released new album “I’ll Always Come Find You” July 19.
On his latest project, he channeled his “childhood and all the things that made me fall in love with music in the first place.” That included employing revered Grammy-winning hype man Fatman Scoop for song “Too Many Friday Nights.”
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“I just needed a nostalgic moment,” he says of getting the legendary entertainer on his project.
What is a hype man?
Millennial, Gen Z and Gen Alpha artists have had a sharp decline in using one of hip-hop’s biggest gems during live performances – an art Flavor Flav perfected under Chuck D.
“Flavor Flav basically defined what a hype man is in Public Enemy’s first album ‘Yo! Bum Rush The Show.’ You had this guy who was basically doing all of these wild, crazy antics, but it would balance out the radical message coming from Chuck D,” hip-hop historian and “Microphone Check” documentarian Tariq Nasheed says.
As a hype man, the job is simple: Use your talents to generate buzz from the crowd and direct their attention to the star. Over the years, it’s taken shape in different ways from being the person to emphasize lines to dancing alongside the main act like Spliff Star does with Busta Rhymes.
“Mainly you want your hype man to have some microphones skills, which means they probably know how to rap too, but they just decided to take that role on of being the extra energy for the crowd,” says Too $hort.
Why has the hype man all but disappeared from hip-hop?
Chuck D. had Flavor Flav. MC Hammer had 2 Bigg MC. Busta Rhymes has Spliff Star. Jaz-O and Big Daddy Q had Jay-Z. 50 Cent has Tony Yayo. Nicki Minaj had her ex-boyfriend Safaree. Tech N9ne had Kendrick Lamar. Lamar had ScHoolboy Q.
The once-lauded position has dwindled largely due to the change in performances becoming more reliant on DJ tracks than live vocals and the music industry only investing to make the “star” artist, experts say.
“If your guy is the hype man then obviously you’re Batman, he’s Robin. In today’s hip-hop culture, nobody wants to be the entourage. Everybody wants to be the main guy,” Too $hort, who once utilized dancing hype man Too Clean, says.
The “Blow the Whistle” rapper, 58, adds, “(With) social media, everything’s instant gratification. Some people don’t even wanna put in the work. … I think being the sidekick in 2024 is not too honorable, but some people know how to play that part. It's a good job.”
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Hype men aren’t viewed as ‘the person that is important.’ Hip-hop devotees disagree.
The changing landscape of live performances and social media stardom has fed into the culture of a one-man band, but rap’s devoted fans long for the hype man.
“Hip-hop has changed so much in 50 years. The advent of social media and also the influx of people trying to make hip-hop and rap stars. … People might not view the hype man as the star or the person that is important,” says Nadirah Simmons, author and founder of The Gumbo, a platform for Black women who love hip-hop.
Simmons, 29, recalls seeing Busta and Spliff in Brooklyn last year, calling it “the best experience ever” because of the “clarity” and “tone” both the artists had. “Oftentimes when we talk about our rappers from the ’90s … we don't need any backing vocals.”
The author says having a hype man onstage helps makes ticketholders feel like participants in the show. “The art of performing is something that has been lost and that's why we love seeing our legacy rappers,” she says.
“The hype man was really created for the live show,” Nasheed, 50, adds. “It's important to have that energy on stage, because sometimes a rapper, when you're performing, especially you're doing an hour show, your voice is going to go out. Sometimes your energy runs out and you need somebody there pumping you up and pumping the audience up.”
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Are hype men a thing of the past?
There are several theories as to why the hype man has left the group chat. The biggest being that “clarity and music is is not really a thing, especially in hip-hop with the young generation,” says Blxst, 31.
“I don't even think the the art of using your live vocals is as popular as it used to be,” he adds. “I use a background singer more so in a hype man perspective. Her vocals are level with mine to where she catches some of my ad-libs.”
Compounding onto the fact that live vocals are less popular among young rappers, Simmons says it’s an industrywide issue that stems from a lack of investment in artist development and supporting acts.
“When I wrote my book (‘First Things First: Hip-Hop Ladies Who Changed the Game’), there is a chapter about MC Lyte (where) she talked about kind of the training that she got when it came to her voice and making sure she had the right tone and she had the right clarity and she was paced the right way,” Simmons notes.
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A hype man isn’t necessary for every artist, but when the key star isn’t carrying the whole performance there needs to be support. Vocal training is just as imperative for rap as it is for singers, Simmons and Too $hort argue.
The Oakland performer once rapped, “I must have super powers / Rap 225,000” in “Blow the Whistle.”
“That 225,000 hours was like 20 years ago – it’s about a half-million hours (now),” he says, adding that he’s been able to continue being on stage in his twilight years because “longevity is literally working more than everybody else (and) working harder than everybody else.”
Will there be a hype man resurgence?
We may never have another hype man in the same way Flavor Flav, Fatman Scoop, Jay-Z and more interpreted the role, but rap fans doubt they’ll be extinct in the next 50 years of hip-hop. If anything, they’ve evolved into new roles.
“The DJ is now the new hype man,” Blxst says. “They run a track and they catch the energy for the crowd.”
Others counter that the hype man has morphed into the hype crew.
“A lot of younger rappers, they have a whole stage full of hype men. … They have whole crews now,” says Nasheed says. “Sometimes you go to a Coachella concert or rap concert and it's 10 guys in the back of the rapper and all of the guys have a mic and they're ad-libbing. … Hip-hop is a very transformative culture and it adapts to certain environments and contemporary times.”
Too $hort adds, “Young artists bring half the neighborhood with them. … There's like 15 guys on stage and out of those 15 guys, five of them have microphones. The gang in that sense is the hype men.”
The influx of nostalgia and Y2K-aesthetics may be the thing that brings the traditional hype man back to the stage. Flava Flav’s presence in Paris has shown that the role can be both the supporting act and star.
“Everything is so cyclical. We see a lot of stuff returning and coming back,” says Simmons. “I don't know if the hype man is going to go completely extinct.”
The author concludes: “My optimism tells me that people are going to come across a performance video from the ’90s or 2000s. … They're going to hear a song with Jazze Pha in the background hyping up Ciara. They're going to watch Spliff and Busta and be like, ‘I want to bring this back.’”
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