Rap fails to innovate, and it seems to be permanently stuck in an endless loop of empty energy that means nothing, and a bravado that is a mere caricature of its capabilities.
Few musical genres in modern history have disrupted popular culture and imprinted themselves into the social fabric quite like hip-hop and rap. What started as a stripped-down, rebellious folk art in the Bronx has morphed into a multi-billion-dollar cultural empire spanning the globe.
Yet, for all its undeniable commercial dominance and evolving production styles over the past four decades, rap fails. Its fuller artistic and topical range continues to be stunted. The genre is trapped in a cycle of rehashing the same limited subject matter rather than monumentally expanding its archetypal territory.
I’m very familiar with the counter-argument: that it was born in the streets. But that doesn’t mean it has to die there.
Rock n’ roll and pop music, too, had awkward beginnings. But they have artistically evolved to things bigger than mating calls over electric guitars. Whether embracing the singer-songwriter archetype or anthemic expressions of teenage angst and hormonal yearning, these genres tapped into universal human experiences and emotions in fresh, resonant ways during the 20th and 21st century’s seismic cultural shifts.
And this is where rap fails, blinged out in a smoke of fake jewelry.
And it’s something of an anticlimax that rap turned out this way. When they burst into the scenes in the late 80s, rap certainly subverted and expanded upon conventional musical approaches in a way that seldom happens in the progression of any art form. It was raw and alive! It introduced new rhythmic and vocal delivery stylings while infusing raw expressionism from the urban underclass experience.
But it has since ossified into its reiterative formula rather than transcending the brick walls of the Bronx. The best rappers have been killed by bullets, bling, and banality.
Consider the overwhelming subject matter that still dominates mainstream rap albums and hits in the streaming era: hyper-materialism (cars, whores, and bars), violence (“look at all my guns that I am gonna shoot you with”), superficial hedonism (usually circling the female derriere), rampant misogyny-for-misogyny’s-sake, regional chest-puffing (“My friends will beat up your friends”), and self-aggrandizing, awkward gangsta posturing. You know the type: loud as a motorbike but wouldn’t bust a grape in a fruit fight.
There are indeed exceptions (somewhat), but by and large, these narrow narcotized themes continue to be rap’s comfortably inhabited turf. Rap fails by being stuck in the byways of a culture that it has itself illuminated.
It’s mostly become an art form where dullards expound on idiocy wrapped in delusions. And it’s mostly cringe!
One could argue this creative paralysis stems from hip-hop’s insular culture developed as an insurrectionary reaction against societal oppression – leading to an art form heavily rooted in braggadocious boundary-pushing and ritualized disses/feuds. While understandable, such restrictive introspection hits a creative ceiling when overdone ad-nauseum. And come on, it is oppressing to keep digging up oppression as a subject matter.
Or perhaps rap’s imaginative limits derive from its crasser commercial incentives and being intertwined with the music industry’s bottom-line industrial motives – where executives simply aim to sate perceived mainstream demands like any other cynical consumer product. It’s almost like a high school fight, goaded on by the school’s principals. In that sense, rap fails because there really is no incentive to win.
Someone has to pay for all that bling, you know.
Of course, there have been illuminating rap artists who’ve stretched beyond autobiographical tales of the street and flexing bravado – Kendrick Lamar, Lupe Fiasco, Outkast, Common, and others who’ve infused powerful sociopolitical commentaries, conceptual storytelling prowess, and more expansive introspection into the musical framework. No one can deny the lyrical complexity in the best raps of Eminem and Biggie or the sheer emotional urgency of Tupac. These rappers have proven the genre’s malleability as a conduit for multiple perspectives and profound ideation when steered in that direction.
And it is indeed a complex art, no diggity about that. But these examples still feel like the exception rather than the emergent norm.
This begs the question – when will rap undergo its archetypal shift into even grander thematic domains? A seismic creative evolution akin to rock’s integration of conceptual artistry, prog-rock’s introduction of compositional complexity, or punk’s transgression into anti-establishment abstraction?
I don’t harbor the thought that music needs to always say something to be beautiful. But as an art form, it must evolve – or it becomes a frozen frame where the same thing is said over and over again with differing blings.
Can rap transcend into a vehicle for communicating radically new textures of the human condition we’ve yet to experience through music? Channels for enhanced actualization, metaphysical inquiries, intellectual discourse, spiritual upliftment (why not?), or surreal artistic experimentation?
An instrument for the creative avant-garde rather than something still tethered to the streets that birthed it?
Perhaps it’s already slowly heading there, with rap’s maturation into an aging genre spawning more lyrical overtures into webbed realms of consciousness, emotionality, and social dimensions. As new generational rappers come of age (presumably, because I have yet to be introduced to one), it’s plausible they’ll push hip-hop into entirely transformative conceptual spaces and exalted songwriting heights.
All this doesn’t mean that we need a new crop of rappers talking about climate change or the beauty of the cosmos – the so-called “conscious rap” is just as empty and embarrassing. The genre should evolve into better arenas while maintaining the life-affirming beauty of its soul.
But for now, rap’s commercial monoliths still revolve within a caged creative arena limited by its restrictive mythological boundaries erected from the margin. Its explosive power is captured, yet its seismic shift into archetypal metamorphosis is still pent up and anticipating catalytic release from the underground.
Hip-hop’s ultimate creative transcendence may still be ahead. Till then we’ll have to put up with Kendrick and J. Cole, and that weird Canadian guy.
