Rap’s Fourth Turning

The day has come.

For the first time since 1990, not a single rap song was in the Top 40 of Billboard’s Hot 100, snapping a streak of over 35 years (1,800+ weeks).

I can’t say I’m THAT surprised though, as the writing has been on the wall for a while now and there really hasn’t been a new wave of "next generation" artists in the last few years to take up the mantle.

Every 5 years or so, going back to the 90’s, new classes of artists and producers would arrive on the scene with a fresh sound, look and appeal that really captured the energy of the times and represented the generation that was coming of age. The rugged and gangster 90’s (Pac, Big, Mobb Deep, Death Row) gave way to the early 2000’s commercial dominance era (DMX, Missy Elliot, Jay-Z, Kanye, Em, 50 Cent) …which gradually transitioned to the trap era with the Jeezys and Waynes, T.Is and Gucci Manes...which morphed into the Drake, J.Cole, Kendrick, Wale, Big Sean timeline. From there we moved into the mid-2010’s with a new crop of artists like Migos, Cardi B, Lil' Uzi, Young Thug, XXX, Travis Scott and Juice Wrld taking the torch (as well as a foray into Drill music).

The main takeaway here is that it wasn't just one ascendent artist carrying the genre, it was huge handfuls of them, coming in waves and setting up shop on the charts for literal decades.

But since that 2015-2020ish era it’s pretty much been crickets as far as breakthrough rap artists go. Just look at Spotify's Rap Caviar playlist - most of the artists on there have been around for 5-7+ years now and there really isn't a whole lot of fresh blood being represented on there. I guess you could maybe put guys like Yeat or BigXthaPlug in the mix as "newer" artists but even they have already been around for a few years.

To accentuate my point, I could name TONS of acts from each of those other eras that all experienced notable commercial success - Snoop, Master P, DipSet, Ludacris, Ja Rule, Wiz Khalifa, Nelly, 21 Savage, Rick Ross, Future, Ice Cube, Mase, Mac Miller, Lil’ Baby, A-Boogie, Nicki Minaj, DaBaby, Roddy Richh, NLE Choppa etc. - but I can't even think of ONE single new rapper in the last couple of years that has delivered a bonafide, chart-topping smash hit while maintaining an extended run of mainstream visibility. Not one. They're essentially non-existent.

But why? I have a couple ideas...

1. Artist development is dead

   Once upon a time, a label would find an artist and sink millions into their development in hopes of making money off of them for decades. They built brands, stories and narratives around these acts and invested heavily into building actual careers while collecting their ROI on the backend via a fanbase of dedicated legacy fans. Nowadays the labels just watch the data and algorithms to snipe a hit single here and there without needing to invest heavily into an artist’s “career” - they can just wait for something to catch a spark (with the artist doing all of the early legwork) and then dogpile in on it and throw a little gas on the fire. Once these labels are done with the song they just discard it and move on to the next one while the artist is usually forgotten a year or two later (if that).

2. Soundpacks and the ease of production

   Similar to how “social media" connected us and brought people together while simultaneously dividing and isolating us, soundpacks and apps like Splice allowed more people to be creative while at the same time boxing us in sonically.

   
   

   In the heyday of rap production you could immediately identify a signature sound, no producer tag necessary. You just listened and immediately knew if the song was produced by Timbo or Just Blaze, Swizz Beatz or DJ Premier - and while everybody having easy access to DAW's like FL Studio and Ableton allowed more people to mess around with production, it also made it too “easy” to make beats. The result was the development of a homogeneous sound and playlists filled with the same loops, samples, drums and soundpacks. At a certain point your ears just get fatigued.

3. The draining impact of drug music

   Over the last 40+ years, rap went from “I sell drugs to feed my family” to “I sell drugs cuz I'm a hustler" to "Now I just DO a ton of drugs" to “I’ve done all the drugs and now I’m depressed”. It was one generation influencing the next and we can’t really be all that surprised that an entire generation of artists ended up as depressed young adults when they came up listening to artists platforming percs, molly and lean ad nauseam. I’m not even trying to be preachy here, it's just the logical sequence of what it is: the cycle of music influencing culture influencing music influencing culture influencing music, and the cycle just goes on.

   
   

   In the end, I think people are simply getting tired of listening to sad and depressing shit. There’s definitely a place for the expression of pain and darker music, for sure, but it started permeating through an entire generation of artists and I think people have a limit to how much time they want to hang around in the darkness voluntarily. As a result, people literally just stopped listening because there really wasn't much to listen to.

4. The culture has been milked, exploited and left for dead by corporate executives

   Twenty years ago you could walk into any mall, in any city, and find clothing stores stocked floor to ceiling with hip-hop brands. Enyce, Sean John, Akademiks, Phat Farm - most of them sprouting from the humble roots of the culture, inspired by the energy of the streets and the prospects of the hustle. They were authentic and tapped-in.

   
   

   However, as the commercialization of the culture reached an apex in the mid-2000’s - with artists getting their own clothing lines and shoe deals, rap tours selling out arenas regularly and megacorps like Viacom controlling nationally-syndicated BET programming - the full integration into the mainstream meant that the culture was also being diluted by corporate interests. Smaller independent companies would eventually get swallowed up by private equity and bigger fish, Gucci and Louis Vuitton started replacing Ecko and Rocawear and somewhere along the line hip-hop lost some of its soul. The culture was (and is) still very much alive if you care to look, but the fruitless trees of today’s mainstream rap scene are the barren yields of the seeds that were planted by Corporate America in the early-2000's.

5. Changing social dynamics

   The temperature of mainstream culture has always been driven by the young; their ideals, their passions and whatever challenges they were being confronted with at their time of self-discovery. This has always been the case whether we’re talking about the hippies in the late 60’s or a bunch of angsty teenagers listening to Nirvana in the 90's. Equipped with their slaphappy hubris and swaggering (but naive) bravado, young people question traditional norms self-assuredly while pushing boundaries, setting trends and coming up with new slang and new styles. In many ways they propel us all forward, for better or worse.

   
   

   For the previous 30+ years, rap and hip-hop was intimately connected with the younger generation who was dancing and partying in the clubs, watching MTV, calling into radio stations to request their favourite song and buying up physical albums and merch. The artists they supported and listened to reflected something back to them that they could connect with. They shared a world and the music was the soundtrack. But nowadays the younger demographics aren't partying at the club (nor can they afford to), they're not drinking as much and MTV and BET don't exist as the same influential "clubhouses" they once were. The younger generation has also been raised in front of screens, forced to isolate during their formative years through government-imposed pandemic restrictions - and they have unsurprisingly become more sequestered than their generational predecessors. As a result, they live in the algorithm and the newer artists of today are tasked with double duty, often having to wear the hat of "content creator" instead of just making inspiring music.

We could obviously dig a lot deeper into all of the elements above, but the fact of the matter is that rap and hip-hop is already in it's Fourth Turning. For those not familiar with the Strauss-Howe generational theory, the Fourth Turning is the erosion of the old world and the desolate winter of the saeculum where we say goodbye to how things once were. It's here, in this final season of decay, that we are forced to acknowledge limits and shortcomings and meet the challenges head-on. The good news is that winter is always followed by spring and dark Fourth Turnings are always followed by fresh First Turnings - where clarity, reinvigourated energy and renewed vitality burst forth.

Speaking from an artistic standpoint, there is no denying that rap and hip-hop has also evolved and that the artform itself is in a good place, at least technically speaking. If you look at rap music in 1992, for example, and compare it to today's rap, there is no question that the flows are more intricate, the melodies are better, the breath control is improved and that artists are experimenting with tones and adlibs more than they ever have before. The problem is that it has no soul, no fire, no passion. The subject matter is ho-hum and disinterested and it simply sounds uninspired - but at least the technical skill of rapping is still in a good place.

I'm not really sure where it'll all go but I feel like the social conditions are ripe for the right voices to come out and stir things up. There is much work to be done and budding genres like afrobeats and hyperpop will obviously have an impact on rap's marketshare - but if the right kind of young artists can emerge from the ashes and shake their generation from their doom-scrolling-induced slumbers, than maybe rap and hip-hop can rediscover its soul.