Who killed HipHop?
Recently Cardi B spoke during a livestream about the lack of “club music” being played in the club, and instead of songs made with the intention to party and have fun, it is instead filled with “depressing music and saying, “they all wanna die”. Whether she is referring to emo rap or street rap we can unfortunately agree that in recent years there has been a wave of rappers rapping about death in one way or another. We went from rappers like Juice wrld and xxxtentacion rapping about their declining mental health and need to self-medicate, to rappers like lil Durk and NBA YoungBoy rapping about street violence and their unending cycle of retaliation for their “dead homies”. One thing both have in common is an overarching theme of depression on a lively beat.
Growing up in the south in the 2000s most of the rap I heard was party music, listening to rappers like Trick daddy, Plies, Ludacris, and the Ying Yang twins, you could see that outside of a “thug holiday” and “100 years” the music I actively listened to were club songs. Songs that made you want to “throw it back” but now as a woman in her early twenties most of those songs are one, made by women like Cardi B, Megan thee stallion, and the City girls, and two ridiculed for not being “real rap”. When I think about all of the “hottest rappers” now they are pretty much all street rap. Which makes me question, why are they so popular?
I believe it is because a lot of people only like music that perpetuates aesthetics that feature a lifestyle they want to live but don’t for one reason or another. Like the great Andre 3000 once famously said “y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance”. Look at albums by popular rappers that “flopped” to see how it’s a true statement. Two years after releasing what non cole fans dubbed as the “best cole album” 2014 Forest Hills Drive, J. cole released 4 Your Eyes Only. This album featured slow melodies with thought provoking and heartfelt/ sincere lyrics, and it was seen by casual cole fans as the worst album ever and coles “fall off”, while also saying it didn’t have that signature “cole sound”. What I think made them hate it so much, no trap beat. The most streamed song from 2014 FHD was “No Role Modelz” with over a billion streams, the next with 700 million is “Wet Dreamz” and “G.O.M.D” with over 400 million. While the other songs have somewhere between 40 to 200 million, you can tell when people go to the album they only want to hear the “lit” songs. Even J. cole himself knew, in the song “G.O.M.D” during the second verse he says “this is the part that the thugs skip” before talking about the love he’s never felt before.
You could also see this in the height of the “clout rap/ soundcloud rap” era, where it felt like all of these “lil” whatevers were popping up out of nowhere to rap about how sad they were and their drug codependency. Once their audiences grew out of their “xanny” phase these rappers, if they hadn’t overdosed yet, watched as they were discarded by casual rap fans for the next trendy rap style, which was street rap. But these cycles will always continue. A style of rap will become mainstream, people who don’t lose anything from these dangerous lifestyles will instigate (see random people in lil durks comments telling him to avenge king von or a fan giving lil peep drugs that would ultimately kill him), and when something unfortunate happens like prison or worse death. These fans are able to move on because they realistically lost nothing. Personally, I believe this is also why R&B is “dead”. Artist singing about pain in strife to a beat that would force you to listen to the lyrics, people hate that. When you sit back and listen to these songs, they’re sad.
Another rapper relentlessly criticized for his change in sound is Chance the rapper, who has “fans” saying things like they miss when he was on drugs because “his music was better”. To any normal person seeing someone sober, alive and happy, would be celebrated, but not within art. There was a popular post on tumblr about Van Gogh that said ““if van gogh had antidepressants, we wouldn’t have his artwo-” we’d have a lot more of his work, karen, and who the f**k cares about what we get from him he deserved to be well, karen”. This quote really hits my point home, fans have removed the rappers from their humanity. They see them as objects for their viewing pleasure and that’s it. If they die or get locked up, it means nothing to them to move on to the next rapper and the rapper after that. So, no I don’t blame the rappers for using art as a medium to speak about their struggles and their lives, I blame casual viewers who use their pain to get their fill of drama or material to cosplay.
Fans killed hip hop.
