Classical music was the standard, and then there was Rock and Roll. Rock and Roll was the predominant music genre for all of it's lifetime. Now, however, Rock and Roll is being overeclipsed by Hip Hop. Look at a Top 40 list, go to a Frat party, or walk down Easton Avenue (or your college campus' equivalent street), and you will hear hip hop.
But go to any other generation, and there won't be much of a prevalence there. Gen X, Baby Boomers, there won't be much of a hip hop presence there. Therefore, it's safe to say Hip Hop is becoming canonized by Millennials. With such a phenomenon at stake, I wanted to raise a few questions. Why the change? Okay, well maybe just one question, at least one general question. But for that one question, I do have a few theories.
Rebellion From Older Generations
The phrase "Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll" has been lost upon millennials. Yes, sex has become more culturally tolerated, and drugs are...well, we're getting there, but rock and roll, specifically, seems to be safe to millennials. They had heard it growing up from their parents and are numb to the actual revolutionary political, sexual force that it was in its proliferation. It was going against the status quo. Now, it is the status quo.
So it's no surprise that millennials reached for a different genre altogether to rebel with, and, hip hop, at it's core, is very rebellious. While the rebellious content of rock and roll, as I would like to call "white rebelliousness", has been adopted into the national psyche, several topics in hip hop, such as police accountability, along with the steadfast content of sex and drugs, are still taboo in society, even in 2016. Being known for their progressiveness, it only makes sense that hip hop would be brought in with this generation.
Proliferation of the Genre Itself
This could be considered a chicken-or-egg argument, whether hip hop garnered more artists because it got popular or vice versa. Then again, it might have gotten popular, and then the market opened up the opportunity for more artists that were trying to make it. Regardless, the genre has proliferated to different artists and styles. A practical rationale is the ease to make a rap mix tape as opposed to a rock album, especially in the computer age. You can simply find a beat on YouTube, rap over it to a recording, and put it on Soundcloud.
This consumer-accessible revolution is akin to the Independent Film wave of the 1990s when film was accessible. Of course, Independent film is now seen everywhere. Even the directors of your favorite superhero films started off as Independent film directors. Likewise, rap has actually proliferated to other genres, including dubstep, pop, and, interestingly enough, country.
Accessibility
Hip hop was founded on it's accessibility. It's like how Quentin Tarantino said that theaters should only charge five dollars for movies, being a play for the middle class. Hip hop is an outlet for the middle and lower classes, different from the high technicality that classical and even some rock and roll entails. This accessibility is being used for the millennials, a generation that is all about efficiency and instant gratification.
Any artistic risks can actually be found in the lyrics, giving a happy medium. You can have a song that you can think about one day and then part to that night. Speaking of which...
Party Potential
Millennials reward themselves on rewards, trying to get pleasure out of everything, and parties are the epicenter of that search. Therefore, songs of that generation have tended to be geared toward parties, and hip hop has slid in as the default genre for that very thing. Even within the genre of hip hop, there's a disparity. Try Drake versus Kendrick Lamar. Kendrick gives a quick, ferocious vocal delivery, but his "party" songs are limited to "King Kunta" and "Swimming Pools" which is, ironically an anti-drinking song (but, then again, Ronald Reagan loved "Born In The U.S.A.") On the other hand, Drake has some nice performances and occasionally gives deep lyrics, but he's so popular because he can consistently come up with songs to play at parties. My friends and I often joke that his song, "Trumpets", was made for frats to play at parties. It's because of this that Drake has over 35 million likes on Facebook while Kendrick has only eight million.
With this in mind, once can only wonder what genre the next generation (Generation Z?) will adopt as theirs. One can say the pop-house-LSD-dance hodge podge of groups like The Chainsmokers can lead to prominence, and, while it does have the three of four qualifications I put before, it doesn't have what I think is the most important one: rebellion from what came before. The Chainsmokers are just an evolution (or devolution) of top 40 pop that came before it. It's apolitical, something everyone will agree with but no one will believe in. There will come another genre, either pre-existing or new, that people will believe in, and only then can they take it as their own.
