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Recently, YouTube has been showing me a spate of videos talking about the decline of rap music. The entire discussion started off as a result of a rather unusual phenomenon: for the first time in ages, not a single hip hop song made the top of the Top 100 charts.
For those of us who were heavily influenced by hip hop, the news is absolutely jarring — to say the least. Hip hop has been a majorly uplifting cultural movement, sparking incredible debates on topics running from misogyny to racial tensions.
To see a music chart with no hip hop or rap anywhere is…kinda striking. Hip hop has been a part of the mainstream for decades. It’s everywhere, and yet, so many of us have started to drift away from the musical genre.
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So, uh, what gives?
Introducing “Rap Fatigue.”
Rap fatigue is the term people are using to explain the boredom, the ennui, and the frustration they have with modern hip hop music. Contrary to what you may think, it’s not just getting tired from a music genre.
We’ve all had moments where we got tired of listening to a specific genre, whether it’s heavy metal, nu jazz, or even country. This isn’t the case with rap fatigue.
Everywhere I’ve looked, I’ve seen commentators saying the exact same things:
Rap has become predictable and too uniform. Everything from the topics (sex, drugs, crime, who’s the best, occasionally parties) to the way the rappers look seems to have blended in together. It’s hard to see new rappers who don’t fit the mold.
The music stopped being relatable to most people. Here’s the thing that most rappers seem to have forgotten: rapping about having crazy money is kind of a slap in the face when you’re dealing with a mega-recession like what we have. People like music they can connect with. Most of us are a far cry away from rap.
Women, in particular, have started to back away due to all the misogyny and right-wing gateways. There is a solid rap-to-MAGA pipeline that’s growing, mostly due to misogynistic lyrics but also due to the growing number of rappers who went full MAGA. (Remember Forgiato Blow? Or hearing that Snoop Dogg, once on trial in a murder case, decided he loved Trump enough to tout crypto?) The statements make a lot of people back away — and most of those people are women.
The music is affecting people’s mental health in a bad way. To a point, I get this. I’ve heard quite a few people say they find rap to be depressing or that they feel rap encourages them to overspend. A lot of that music just isn’t positive.
Some people also quit rap as a result of the hyper-sexualization of it all. This is one thing people don’t get. Talking about sex and sexuality used to be empowering because it was about embracing a part of yourself society said was wrong. It was about reclaiming sex. Now? It doesn’t hit the same. Sex positivity became a thing and now it just sounds trashy to talk about how you’re a good lay. Like, who needs to hear what someone else’s coochie is doing?
Basically, it’s a perfect storm of mental health, bad messaging, and uniformity. Rap just lost its veneer, and while there are people in the rap industry who are trying to turn rap into an empowering, left-leaning thing, it’s just not what radios are picking up.
The end result is rap fatigue — and it’s quickly killing the industry.
Why is rap fatigue spreading so fast?
Honestly, everything in our cultural zeitgeist is spreading fast. However, rap fatigue is a sign that hip hop is going out of style because it no longer stands for what it once did.
People don’t understand how uplifting rap could be to someone who was struggling with socioeconomic problems. It was one of those music genres that got big because it meant something.
It doesn’t have that same punch right now. It feels, for lack of a better word, “declawed.” All the music sounds the same, the performers are starting to turn into a blur, and for many of us, the entire experience feels like it’s designed by algorithms, for algorithms.
It’s gone into a further awakening of the collective soul of the world.
I’ve heard more than one person call modern rap an asset for indoctrination and subjugation because of the topics played on the radio. So, maybe people have also realized that the gangster rap of today doesn’t reflect the kind of things they want their kids to grow up with, too.
When you start seeing the problems that modern mainstream rap brings, it’s hard not to get tired of it. It’s often heavily misogynistic. When it’s not talking about keeping women down or using them, it’s talking about the “gangster life.”
After a while, those same topics get boring.
A Lipstick Alley user talks about rap fatigue before it even had a name.
The funny thing about rap fatigue is that it’s a legitimate complaint about the mainstream rap industry. Between the way it exploits artists, the boring lyrics, and the overall malaise growing in the industry, it’s hard to ignore. Once you see the problems, it’s very hard to actually ignore it.
Ironically, there are plenty of rappers who don’t talk about these topics and focus on greater equality for all. (You can find a couple of examples here or here.) But yeah, basically most of them don’t get the credit they deserve because executives don’t want that to hit airwaves.
It’s not just the actual people, either.
Part of the reason for the rap fatigue we’re seeing deals with streaming platforms like Spotify. Take a look at how Spotify rewards its artists. Spotify is impossible to make a living off of, because every play is quite literally a percent of a single penny.
But, Spotify is still a major pulse point of the music industry — bots and all. The problem is that letting electronics act as the chooser tends to have its own issues. I’ll just leave what KnightWriters wrote here:
“ Algorithms that reward short, attention-grabbing snippets have encouraged artists to produce music that prioritizes immediacy over depth. This has resulted in a glut of tracks that, while sonically appealing, lack the narrative substance and emotional resonance of earlier rap music.”
In other words, it’s like selling small bumps of musical cocaine. The “high” you get is temporary at best. There’s no long-term satisfaction because the music that scores high on an algorithm is hollow.
Yet, because it works with the algorithm, artists get rewarded and the pattern toward the exact same types of bars gets pushed forward. So, it kind of spirals toward insignificance in its own way.
Is it any wonder, then, that there’s a noticeably weakening connection between rap and the communities that birthed it?
So what happens now?
It’s simple: rap dies. Not with a roar, but with a whimper. It stopped being relevant in its current incarnation, so people stopped listening to it. It began, once again, to show us that the customer is always right — at least when it comes to purchases.
If once-diehard fans have lost their interest in a music genre, that’s a major klaxon. That’s the canary in the coalmine that tells the establishment to wake up, fix their shit, or face extinction.
When the music meant to empower puts people down, no one wins. It’s just that simple.
Beep
