The Art of Internet Struggle Rap
A while ago I read a forum post on Rap Genius about struggle rap (I tried finding the discussion, however for some unnecessary reason RG doesn't allow you to search through forum discussions, but I digress). In essence, this post discussed what are known today as struggle rappers, or rappers that push their music on innocent bystanders online. From Twitter to Youtube, they're everywhere. They follow you, the comment on videos, posts, and send you direct messages. They've gotten a pretty poor reputation online, and are avoided at all costs. But this forum discussion changed my mind on listening to struggle rappers (Again, sorry and can't find it).
Post on Twitter from a struggle rapper, via Complex.
If you think about it, At some point every one of your favorite rappers were unknown to most of the world, and had to be a bit obnoxious to get their music across. Especially during the internet age, where many rappers emailed their songs and mixtapes to popular blogs in order to get featured. They might not have been all in your mentions, promoting their Control Freestyles, but that time might've been spent flooding 2 Dope Boyz or Nah Right's email accounts (S/O to Tyler, The Creator).
And they had to. Record companies essentially don't do anything for rappers anymore: album promotion from a label is neither frequent nor worthwhile, considering album sales, and many rappers only get signed when they already have a pretty decent following. Today's rappers, well-known and otherwise, now have to take promotion into their own hands. This is now the dilemma we're in.
As consumers in the digital age, it is very easy to pick and choose what we listen to, for however long, however often we want. This makes me wonder how successful DMing potential fans really is. For a long time I always ignored it, tapped delete, and moved on with wasting more time on a social network. But it takes a lot of persistence when going the self-promo route as an artist, and that deserves even just a little of our attention.
I said all of that to say this: I no longer ignore a rapper, or an artist, when they send me an ask saying, "Check out my new track!" or DM me saying, "Thanks for the follow! Check out my new band!" I give it all a fair listen, and if I find that I like it, decide to continue keeping up with their music on whatever platform. I follow a few artists on Twitter because of situations like this. And because I'm a person who likes knowing the next big thing ahead of time, and because I'm obsessed with many kinds of music, it gives me satisfaction knowing that I heard of that artist first.
And If you're anything like me, I encourage you to do the same. And even if you aren't, giving struggle rappers a listen every now-and-then probably wouldn't kill you. Probably.
