Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.
I did not write about it when it happened, but last year there was a bit of a manufactured crisis in rap about the fact that no real rap song had made the Billboard Top 40 for the first time since 1990. The whole topic felt forced, like when ESPN comes up with ridiculously specific stats to fit whatever narrative they want to sell during that particular segment. Rap started as an outsider's genre, so it sounds like a good thing to me to not be a part of Top 40. There's also the fact that most of the biggest pop stars in rap had not dropped much that year: no Drake, no Kendrick, no Travis Scott. And if you look a little below the Top 40, you'll find Cardi B, Meg Thee Stallion, and NBA Youngboy. It's really not that big of a deal.
But some people, judging from my YouTube recommendations, seem to disagree. YouTube is awash with video essays about the death of rap, how audiences have moved on, and how, naturally, it's all rap's own fault. Opinions on rap, like everything else, are usually based on childhood nostalgia. If you grew up on popular rap radio in the 2000s, you're likely disappointed by popular rap radio today, and are more likely to consider today's rap stale, dying, and destroyed. But as has always been the case, the best rap is not played on the radio. The best rap lives out on the fringes, in the underground, at the nightclubs, blowing up in the streets and influencing what comes next on the radio. If you've only ever treated rap, or music in general, as a passive activity, then of course you'll be disappointed with what you're being fed. Pop music has always been music by algorithm, and finding the most interesting stuff has always required a willingness to dig for it.
Now, what might be cause for some concern is that rap is missing a next star generation. The biggest young rap star today is NBA Youngboy, who probably had the best year of his life with a sold-out tour across the country. Youngboy is not exactly Tupac but, amongst his fans, he has tapped into a kind of deity status that Pac had. He's the biggest artist in the world whose music never gets much radio play. He built his success gradually, through a combination of vulnerable melodic rap and headline-grabbing antics and controversies too numerous to recount here. Right behind him is probably Kodak Black, who occupies a similar space. Those two are pretty much the only rappers under 30 who've become big stars in recent years. There are some who feel eternally on the cusp of major stardom, like GloRilla and Latto, but haven't quite gotten over the hump. It doesn't help that what felt like an entire generation of young stars were taken in the middle of their ascent by drugs, murder, or prison. The underground has plenty of burgeoning talent, but today's industry offers fewer opportunities for them to translate that into a bigger fame. Rap, like Hollywood, has a star-making problem. And it was this problem that made me start thinking about the year 2011.
For whatever reason, I spent most of the recent holiday break revisiting the biggest rappers of 2011. That year, rap was in the midst of a major generational shift, the first one brought about by the internet, with its rap blogs and mixtape sites. It's also the first one I witnessed in real time, throughout my time in college. I remember around 2008 or 2009, when one of my best friends kept insisting to me that this Kid Cudi guy was the real deal. I never bought into the hype, but that didn't stop the Moon Man from invading my life through multiple people in the ensuing years. In 2009, I asked this girl on a lunch date at the student union (being broke used to be fun), and she kept going on and on about this new rapper she was obsessed with named Drake and his mixtape Comeback Season. In 2009, I was intrigued by this other guy—Nigerian like me, and hailing from D.C., where I was born—who dropped a mixtape based on Seinfeld. His name was Wale, and I went on to love him forever.
In 2010, it felt like everybody I talked to on campus was losing their mind with excitement about this new mixtape that was about to drop called Kush & Orange Juice by Wiz Khalifa. In 2010, I was driving all my friends to either laughter or absolute disgust by playing this new rapper I'd just found out about named Lil B. In 2010, when Big Sean got a Don Cannon tape, I could no longer ignore him. Also in 2010, that Drake guy had completely taken over our campus (and yours probably) with So Far Gone. But at that time all the guys who thought they were too cool were listening to J. Cole and his high school basketball star raps.
When it starts, you don't fully realize that a tectonic shift is underfoot. In those days we were still listening to Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane, and Rick Ross all the time; it's just that there were also other guys, closer to our age, who we all used to try to seem cool and hipper than everyone else by being up on. But by 2011, it was clear that things were changing. Wiz Khalifa ruined my last months in Tallahassee by dropping "Black and Yellow," which went diamond in every white bar. Big Sean ruined my last months in Tallahassee by dropping "Marvin & Chardonnay," which went platinum in every black establishment, and then again with "Dance (Ass)," which seemed to be the one song everyone could agree on. Drake's "Fancy" came out when people were still wearing Express shirts to the club, so I shouldn't have to tell you how annoying that got. Meanwhile, I spent that year mostly listening to Curren$y and Dom Kennedy's Yellow Album, which became the cool-kid tape of that summer, along with Section.80, my favorite rap tape of that year from some kid named Kendrick Lamar.
That's also the year I found out about these two hipster R&B records, one that sounded like Beach House called House of Balloons by The Weeknd (it wasn't clear if it was one guy or a band or group) and another one that was more intriguing because it sounded more druggy and eclectic, called Nostalgia, Ultra by Frank Ocean. Part of what drew me more to the latter was that I downloaded it off Odd Future's blog, which I had only known at that time to be a bunch of insane, feral children rapping about rape and murder. Anyway, I listened to those two albums constantly that summer, mostly because I got my girlfriend at the time into them and she couldn't stop listening to it.
And then there was this guy who called himself Future, who made some of the best trap records of that year. But he was still a year away from what really sold me on him, which was his penchant for writing the best gangsta love records of anyone I'd ever heard.
That era was the last organic uprising of young talent who managed to fully take over the rap game. Rap has produced new stars in fits and starts since then, especially from Atlanta, the city that remains the genre's driving force. And obviously there have been plenty of less popular but no less great artists to emerge from all over but haven't crossed over. Still, pop rap is crying out for a 2011-like infusion of fresh blood. To be honest, though, I don't know how that might happen today. Music's biggest star machine right now is TikTok, which alone shows that music's place in the culture is much different than before. And the ecosystem of streaming is designed in a way that protects the dominance of the industry's few big stars while making it nearly impossible for anyone new to amass a similar following. Hell, we're so far away from 2011 now that songs from then have become good nostalgia/sampling fodder for a new era of rappers.
But even in the example of 2011, I don't particularly enjoy thinking about how big most of those guys became. In most cases, 2011 was the last time they were interesting. And while I have other, more nostalgic reasons for feeling that way, it doesn't seem like becoming chart-topping mainstays made any of them better rappers. That's the thing about being assimilated into pop stardom: fame will shave the grimier, more distinctive, rap-specific aesthetics off of you. It'll make you presentable. In light of that, it might not be the worst thing in the world for rap to escape the Billboard charts for awhile.
Best Non-Rap Song Of The Moment
If you would like to contribute something or ask a question for future installments, email me at israel@defector.com.
