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Rap Isn’t Out of Touch With Hip Hop…Hip Hop Is Out of Touch With Reality

By on May 22, 2017
Onyx Contributor:  H.T. (@517NightHawk), Podcast:  Lansing Anti-Hero

It seems like everyday a new rapper has to complain that the Lil Yahtys of the day are taking over and ruining rap while rappers like Logic and J Cole are getting ignored.  But what all these rappity rap dudes don’t get is that this is the nature of the beast.

I think Royce The 5’9 is the greatest rapper that ever touched the mic.  I also know that dude ghost wrote for Dr. Dre.  Hell, a lot of ghost writers today are the guys who couldn’t make it in modern hip hop because skills aren’t enough but sadly sometimes image is.  I don’t like it, you probably don’t like it, but c’est la vie.

Fact is (as cruel as it is) because we live in the age of social media, success for this generation is based more on popularity than actual meritocracy.  I’ve seen guys graduating from college with a lucrative degree get less likes for pics of doing that than some dude with no job posting a video of him dancing or freestyling.  Badly I might add.  So it’s no shock that music overall is viewed this way.

Rappers that talk a lot about “the culture” and how the industry is wrecking shit don’t understand that this is happening not necessarily at their design.  The labels put out artists and market them in a way that makes them money as they’re a business.  By record label standards, what makes money is good, so if someone literally made music where they farted on the mic for a whole album and it went platinum, labels would keep selling their records.

Fact is, if all these rappity rap dudes wanna be mad at ANYONE, be mad at the people buying records.  If hip hop never wanted said culture to go down this path, then it should have been left to die in the 80s the second major record labels took over, this was bound to happen.  Remember, hip hop is being sold to the same people who buy Taylor Swift albums, so eventually the streams will cross.

My only advice for these people is that you have to kind of chock this one up to the nature of the beast.  Sure, I know a lot of Tech N9ne fans, I’m SURROUNDED by Juggalos.  But I respect ICP and Tech on the grounds that they have accepted their station and make the best of the fact they’ll never have the commercial success of the household name artists out here but stay playing to those who love them.  It’s also inversely why dudes like Wale keep failing as he doesn’t appreciate the fans he has and complains how he’s not as respected as bigger name artists.

In short, let it go.  And somebody tell Talib Kwali to stop being moist on twitter.

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