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What It Is
Hip hop songs as a general rule are a two-man job. They consist of two elements: an instrumental track (the "beat") and a vocal track (the "rap"). The artist who crafts the beat is the DJ or the producer, and the one who crafts the rap is the emcee. In this format, the rap is almost always the primary focus of the song, providing most of the complexity and variation over a more or less repetitive beat.
Instrumental Hip Hop is the work of DJs and producers who create music without emcee accompaniment. This format affords them the flexibility to create more complex, richly detailed and varied instrumentals, since they don't need to worry about accomodating a vocal track. Songs of this genre may wander off in different musical directions and end up completely different than how they started, a virtual impossibility in mainstream hip hop.
History
This style of music was first popularized in 1996 with the release of DJ Shadow's debut album Endtroducing.... Relying on a combination of sampled funk, hip hop and film score, DJ Shadow chose to decribe his music as "cinematic hip hop."
Instrumental Hip Hop has yet to be fully recognized as a genre unto itself, and is often mistakenly lumped in with trip hop or electronica.
Instrumental Hip Hop Artists
DJ Shadow (http://www.djshadow.com)
RJD2 (http://www.rjd2site.com/)
Dan the Automator (http://launch.yahoo.com/ar-301265----Dan-The-Automator)
The Herbalizer (http://www.herbaliser.com/herbaliser/home.shtml)
Blockhead (http://www.ninjatune.net/blockhead/)
Alias (http://www.anticon.com/alias.html)
Tomfoolio (http://www.tomfoolio.com)
Prefuse 73 (http://www.prefuse73.com/home.shtml)
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