Nah I can’t say that it has devolved and I think you still have clear regional sounds and scenes.

I think the music game in general is just different than it was like 7-8 years ago

A FELLOW 1997 KING

I can kinda get where your coming from when you say regional sounds but everyone,everywhere is reaching for the same goals right now. Rap game has never felt so stagnant to me,and a lot of weirder/hipster acts that made it in the past,can’t make it now,not because their not good enough but because there’s an obvious alienation and dumbing down on an artistic level within the industry.

I feel like rap right now is in a mix of the early -mid 2000s and the late 80s-very early 90s where no one is really taking Hip Hop serious and think it’s dying when looking in from the outside but everyone on the inside thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world with the commercial side of it only focusing on teens/partying. Imo,that’s a sign of the game devolving,especially when you had a dude who sold a million records first week that barely even did hooks in Lil Wayne.

In a sense yeah which is why I’m not really trying to say that music sucks now or was the best in the 2010s

Of course life was “better,” as in l had less responsibilities and more time to devote to following new music, when I was a teen

What made the 2010s a good time, in my opinion, to have the free time and disposable energy to track the evolution of music was the specific way in which communication technology shaped all of society and its art + music during the 2010s

I acknowledge that if I was born in 2007, I would think I was stupid for having any sort of nostalgia for torrenting albums and posting in KTT leak threads

my little bro who was born around that time and only remembers the streaming era of music fandom has no sense that a totally frictionless music listening experience is impoverished in any way, even if in my opinion everything being funneled through the same streaming services ended up reducing the diversity of popping hip-hop styles

Indeed I see that argument, and I also see the argument that the era of CDs and bootleg mixtapes bought off the street corner was better than the torrenting era

Or that pre-social media rap fandom was more satisfying than, say, the experience of everyone tweeting about Kendrick’s control verse when it came out

And it is of course impossible for me to disentangle my enjoyment of the transitional era from the fact that it shaped my taste

But, well, I had a lot of fun, and I’m glad I was there

Yeezus dropped before my freshman year of college. S*** hit different

2010 kids represent

What weird hipster acts from the past would you say can’t make it today?

How is nobody taking hip hop serious? Pretty sure for 2021 hip hop had the most acts on all the top streaming lists.

And bro you can’t say only the commercial side focuses on teens and partying. That’s just not true

i miss when commercial rap wasn’t just aimed at teens and partying

Ok aæoomer

I don’t think acts like The Cool Kids,Asher Roth,Das Racist etc (in their OG form)can make it today(these acts got played on MTV).Rap is way less accepting then it use to be,I’m sure it’s a label thing but it was like that for most of the 2000s tbh,so it’s not new.

I’ll say on the rest of the argument that,you win,cause I go by what I see,I’m not an enthusiast of this rap s*** anymore. It’s just the vibe I’m picking up throughout my day to day environment.

Blog era was really goated

Didn’t say rappers didn’t have singles for parties/clubs. I’m saying that you didn’t get crowned “best rapper” because of commercialism alone. KTT2 would’ve had Nelly the best rapper alive if the site was around that time

we really blessed to have grown up with papi

With regards to rap being allegedly stagnant, the thing about pretty much any art form that is distributed as a commodity is that there is a cycle where a new avenue for putting art out that (sorry to use this term) “disrupts” the industry status quo — like SoundCloud, or the internet in general before it — emerges, creates an underground or shadow industry, then has that underground absorbed into the mainstream

We saw this twice in the 2010s. first, blog favorites either became major label players (Kendrick!) or just fell off (Charles Hamilton :( no shade). then the SoundCloud scene blew up but had its leading artists become mainstream in due course.

What troubles me about the 2020s is that I don’t know where this new avenue for putting out music that can carve into the stranglehold streaming has on releasing music will come from

But I’m sure it will come in the end, and after all, if I knew what it would be, I would be a lot richer than I am

wearing ymcmb merch to high school (beginning of era) is my “if I could be young (but not too young) in any time” …

so true nice!