Good point with Whodini, but they didn’t make the "girl record" a staple in hip hop like LL did. They just did their own thing which always welcome in hip hop as long as you were dope. You don't hear Nelly and them say they were inspired by Whodini. Those other acts that got rejected was due to the rise of gangsta rap and in Hammer/Will's case, industry niggas hating behind the scenes.
As far as Kanye goes, he was damn near adopted by Native Tongues... I think he might even be an honorary member. There's a reason we call it the "old Kanye"... most of our core memories of Kanye go back to those first 3 albums and his early-mid 2000s production, no matter how much he tries to abandon it. As far as his current sound, I give more credit to Kid Cudi for that. He was the driving force behind the creative direction of 808s and was sitting on records like that for years. Him and Big Sean held Kanye down creatively and kept him relevant for the better part of that era. Kanye is SUPER important, but there's too many hands in the pot for me to give him that over LL.
I think LL Cool J is important in providing the blueprint of being a successful Hip Hop superstar.
I don't give him credit for anything sonically related but business model wise. Hip Hop came from dance, funk and R&B, so most Hip Hop acts were crews.
Run DMC and Whodini laid the groundwork sonically of what popular mainstream Hip Hop of the 80s should sound like. You combine both acts, you got street sound and the "girl record".
With the birth of the samplers and drum machines, they no longer needed bands and LL was the experiment of what a popular solo rapper should be.
I think of Kanye as a movie director. He started out indie, making small time Hip Hop Soul because that's all he had at his disposal and through making Hip Hop Soul, he narrowed down his production process. But he always wanted to make big expansive blockbusters. You couldn't do that in Hip Hop at the time. Shiny Suit rap was dead, there was only street, hardcore rap and conscious rap. Kanye picked being a conscious adjacent rap artist because that's the only way he could get in.
We also have to remember that the Black American Hip Hop listener was changing. It went from a more urban street audience to a college educated surbrban lower middle class audience and Kanye was a part of that. He was the avatar for that.
Kanye was a Black artist that chose Hip Hop has his medium because of was the most popular accessible artform to him. He knows he can't rap. He been told that his whole life. He doesn't have the musicianship to single handedly create his expansive works. What he can do is direct his vision of what his version of Hip Hop should sound like and come to find out, it isn't very Hip Hop sounding at all.
It is a call back to the foundations of dance music like Electro and Detroit Techno. It's Gospel. It's Pop.
But there's no Jazz, Soul or Funk. Even his version of Trap doesn't have bounce.
