Why I Keep Going Back to Hip Hop

You don't stop

By Rafi Mercer

I did not wake up wanting to listen to hip hop.

There was no plan to revisit old records, no carefully assembled playlist, no thought that today required drums, loops or bass. I went to the gym believing I could listen to almost anything. Something atmospheric, perhaps. Jazz if I wanted movement. Soul if I wanted warmth. Maybe one of those records I have been meaning to understand properly.

But somewhere between arriving and beginning, I found my way back to beats.

Not deliberately. That is the important part.

I did not decide that hip hop was the correct music for the occasion. My body seemed to reach for it before my mind had formed an opinion. A beat arrived, settled into place, and suddenly everything made more sense. The repetition, the physical effort, the next movement and the one after that. Nothing needed explaining.

Hip hop gives you forward motion.

Other forms of music may ask you to listen closely, to follow the harmony, to notice what the drummer is doing behind the soloist or to understand how a piece slowly changes shape. Hip hop can do all of those things too, of course, but its first offer is often simpler.

Here is the beat.

Stand inside it.

Keep going.

There is something reassuring about music that establishes its ground so firmly. A good beat does not hover at the edge of the room. It occupies it. It gives the body something dependable to return to, four counts at a time. Even the slowest records understand this. Kruder & Dorfmeister's The K&D Sessions spends two and a half hours doing almost nothing quickly, and still never loses the floor beneath it.

Perhaps that is why the gym led me back there.

Exercise removes some of the intellectual distance we normally place between ourselves and music. You are no longer sitting in the correct chair, wondering about production choices or historical context. You are breathing, lifting, moving and enduring. The body becomes the primary listener.

And the body has a long memory.

I sometimes think we misunderstand what our musical foundations really are. We imagine they are simply the records we admire most, the albums we would place on a carefully curated shelf or the artists we would mention when asked what we listen to.

But our foundations may be something more instinctive.

They may be the sounds that taught us how to move through the world.

For me, beats are part of that original wiring. However far I travel into jazz, classical music, soul, ambient music or the strange corners of recorded sound, rhythm remains underneath it all. Miles understood this at the very end. Doo-Bop is not a jazz musician borrowing from hip hop. It is a jazz musician recognising where the rhythmic language had moved and stepping inside it rather than watching from a distance.

Returning to hip hop is not going backwards.

It is going back to the source.

There is another reason it works, particularly on certain days. Hip hop frequently carries a confidence that is useful when your own confidence has become uncertain. It enters without apologising. It takes up space. It does not pause to ask whether everyone in the room approves of its presence. Raising Hell still sounds like that forty years on: dry, tight, unfussy, entirely uninterested in being liked.

That can be medicinal.

There are days when the mind becomes crowded with judgement: what is working, what is failing, who believes in you, who does not, what should happen next and whether you have somehow misunderstood the whole thing.

A beat does not answer those questions.

It makes them temporarily irrelevant.

For three or four minutes, there is only timing. The foot lands. The weight rises. The breath returns. The next bar begins. You are no longer examining your life from the outside. You are physically present inside it.

This may be why we often discover the music we need before we understand why we need it.

We like to believe listening is a conscious act. We choose an artist, select an album and press play. Yet some of the most important listening decisions appear to happen somewhere below conscious thought. We reach for a record without knowing what has drawn us toward it. Only later do we realise it contained exactly the quality that was missing from the day.

Energy.

Defiance.

Repetition.

Memory.

Movement.

Perhaps I did need hip hop today. I simply did not need it intellectually.

My body knew before I did.

Until next time

Rafi

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does hip hop work so well during exercise?

Hip hop often uses strong, repeated rhythmic structures that give movement a clear pace. The beat becomes a dependable framework, helping the body maintain momentum without requiring constant conscious attention.

Why do we return to music from earlier periods of our lives?

Music becomes attached not only to memories but to earlier versions of ourselves. Returning to it can reconnect us with a particular energy, confidence or physical feeling that remains stored beneath conscious recollection.

Is familiar music better for motivation?

Not always, but familiarity reduces uncertainty. When the body already understands the rhythm and emotional character of a piece of music, it can respond immediately rather than first having to interpret what it hears.

Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters.
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