So what does vying for supremacy in hip-hop mean? Unfortunately, palatability. To be truly universal, art has to be accessible to as many people as possible. The themes of early hip-hop were based on extreme cultural specificity. Tales from inner city, Black and Hispanic working class urban youth, which didn’t reflect the experiences of a predominantly white United States. Middle America’s fascination with Blackness has always been superficial. Based on titillation, exploitation and projection. Art that critically engages with the oppressive role whiteness and institutions play in creating Black culture is of less interest. Consider the unparalleled success of Drake. Can you confidently say his music conveys strong convictions about anything outside of his interpersonal relationships and experiences? His catalogue is an appropriate soundtrack to frat houses and cookouts alike. Being the most popular isn’t about being the best, its about the most people liking what you do. In a fractious world its hard to achieve that if you have strong convictions anyone might disagree with.

None of this is to say hip-hop lost its revolutionary themes, far from it. There is no shortage of rappers making music in the same vein of hip-hop’s origins. Earlier this year I saw Noname perform to a packed out crowd in London and her recent album Sundial embodies all the emancipatory potential the genre once stood for. What has changed is the space artists like her occupy. Conscious rappers are niche and at the margins of a broader rap tapestry that no longer requires a critical framework. I don’t think this is an entirely bad thing. I cannot explain what a single Playboi Carti song is “about” but I listen to him avidly and love every second of it. It can also be argued that the forefathers of hip-hop, via rap, created a language that Black youth of all subjectivities can express themselves in. What is saddening is seeing how capitalism always manages to strip away radical motifs for mass appeal. The same can be said of punk and grunge’s dilution into dad rock, or funk and soul being replaced with rnb then eventually just sultry pop.

The financial crash of 2008, ensuing recessions and the dawn of streaming contributed to a huge shake-up in the music industry and by extension, hip-hop. A landscape where album sales are less contingent on moving physical copies (which people have less disposable income to buy) and a greater focus on streaming has impacted all music, including rap. For example: going to a record store to buy a new album is a communal experience. Even if you ventured alone, chances are you’d be in the company of fellow fanatical fans. This made the experience of music buying communal, which fosters a more collectivist outlook. Streaming a new project alone does not. In terms of the music itself, if streaming numbers are the barometer of a successful project, padding out albums with more short songs is a safer bet than crafting a lesser number of longer songs. Its functionally harder to explore complex topics in a shorter song runtime, or make 20+ songs thematically cohesive. So what we get is tenuously long, lower quality projects. 

Another factor in the shift of hip-hop was the unique brand of commodifiable Blackness, exacerbated by the election of Barack Obama. As touched on before, the appropriation of Black culture dates back to the emergence of mass entertainment. Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, Usher and Justin Timberlake, the method of putting Black culture onto a white body for white audiences is tried and tested. The hyper-visibility of Black issues brought to the forefront of Western discourse (completely superficially) as a byproduct of having a mixed race president, meant that the general public were beginning to critique cultural appropriation more. Macklemore’s Best Rap Album Grammy win (for an album I don’t know the name of and don’t care enough to Google) beating out Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid M.a.a.D City was another watershed moment in making blatant stealing of Black culture less viable. 

But capitalism is always one step ahead of social progress and what followed was artists selling the idea of revolution in response to these newly mainstreamed social debates. Jay-Z giving us lines like “My president is black, my Maybach too / And I'll be goddamned if my diamonds ain't blue”, the admittedly heartfelt and brilliant pro-Black Kendrick anthems Alright and i (Love myself) and Kanye West repeatedly conflating his struggles to be taken seriously as a fashion designer with the more serious manifestation of systemic racism. These all typified an era which successfully hoodwinked people into thinking buying into things, whether it be certain music or clothes, equated to genuinely radical action. 

Against this backdrop of seemingly revitalised political thought, you might expect the bigger artists in hip-hop would be more vocal about America’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which at present has killed a reported over 33’000 people. But what needs to be considered is that there is no profit incentive in doing that. We can’t see into the hearts of rappers we don’t personally know to condemn their pro-Blackness as wholly disingenuous. After all, most of them are raised in conditions that typify the harshest realities of American racism. But it also has to be acknowledged that for “the big 3” certain topics are only touched on when its time to drop an album and only in the form of base level liberalism that will placate mainstream Western audiences. It is not contentious to point out the police shouldn’t murder civilians. Criticising American foreign policy might have actual consequences. 

Being the world's top rapper is a huge accolade and it's fun to debate anything that doesn't have a definitive answer. But now that the mechanisms for ascending to the summit actively require compromising artistically and ethically, being top dog is not a measure of skill or cultural importance. It doesn’t matter who’s top 1 or top 3 in getting to that position means throwing away everything the genre was founded on.

Article by Martyn Ewoma