Hip-Hop is dead. “Rappers” like Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert, 21 Savage, and Future have come into the game like a bull in a China shop and ruined everything. They suck. They can’t rap. They aren’t lyrical. They all sound the same. They are killing hip-hop. They aren’t taking it seriously.
How was that? That was my “common opinions about rap” impression. Needless to say a lot of people aren’t huge fans of some of the newer rappers coming out, but, to be honest I don’t really get why. Before people flood my comments calling me bad names that’ll make my mommy sad, please let me explain.
A common knock against these rappers is that they aren’t lyrical. And I’m not even going to attempt to deny that a lot of their vocabularies lack depth. But, I don’t necessarily think that’s the end of the world.
Many fans say that lyrics are a part of hip-hop’s roots and they are, but, especially in the early days of rap, the flow a person had with a beat was a lot more valued than the words they used. The DJ was the main event for early hip-hop, so the rapper, and by extension the lyrics, weren’t polished. I know that since the birth of hip-hop we’ve seen excellent, polished lyricists like Nas and Tupac, but the newer artists are exercising a different kind of hip-hop. One in which lyrics will, a lot of the time, take a backseat to how a song sounds.
Another common knock against these new artists is that they all sound the same.
After some thought I have to say that a lot of similarities really do fall to the surface level. Although these artists do have some commonalities among them, a lot of them are distinct in their use of them. Lil Uzi Vert’s upbeat, digitalized autotune does have distinct difference from Lil Yachty’s relaxed, playful autotune.
Are these artists in the same building?
Yes. But, are they on different floors? Absolutely.
This one is going to be quick. People say these artists aren’t taking it seriously, but why should they? It’s music, it’s art and not all art is serious. A lot of these artists shy away from problems that affect society, something that has come to be expected from hip hop, and that’s fine.
Not everyone has to do the same thing. If you feel like listening to something lyrical then go do that, but no artist has to do anything with their music…aside from maybe making it sound good.
Speaking of sounding good that’s the core this entire issue. At the end of the day if you don’t like how something sounds that’s fine. Everything isn’t for everybody. If you don’t like how something sounds then nothing I or anyone else can say will make you like it. That’s fine. This is music and if something sounds bad to you why would you want to keep listening to it?
But, a lot of people do enjoy how these new guys sound. They didn’t get popular because no one likes them. I have seen people adamantly convinced that this new wave of rap is garbage, but will still dance to it when it comes on. If something hits your ears right and sounds good everything else wont seem to matter as much.
Time, as it so often does, will tell if these new guys will stick around.Maybe they’re signaling a new wave in hip hop that will dominate for a long time. Maybe they’re a passing fad that will fade as quickly as they rose to prominence. But, either way let’s try to give them a fair shot. To say that all of it sounds bad is an oversimplification and when oversimplifying things you miss details.Like when you label Lil Uzi as too simple and not lyrical enough you miss how his sound really does give you a sense of how he’s feeling.
At the end of the day rap is just like any other art form.
It’s going to change and evolve because the artists that make it are going to change and evolve. Somethings are going to work really well, some things will fail, and some things will just be plain average. But, art will always grow and change and to suggest that its’ a bad thing is against what hip-hop stands for.
