Kellzz

6mo

Why @op acting like white rappers who are or portray themselves being affiliated don’t get clowned

Skinn Foley

6mo

Eminem got away with being a fake thug for the majority of the 2000s lol

Man went straight into "the white 50 Cent" by 2003 and people all over the world ate that s*** up really until he began making ROTC music in 2010 and forgot how to rap in 2017.

Skinn Foley

6mo

Eminem got away with being a fake thug for the majority of the 2000s lol

Man went straight into "the white 50 Cent" by 2003 and people all over the world ate that s*** up really until he began making ROTC music in 2010 and forgot how to rap in 2017.

Kellzz

6mo

The only exception and the nigga was rapping about outlandish s*** his whole career. He could get away with that.

Skinn Foley

6mo

Bubba Sparxxx got away with it too and that man is making MAGA Rap now. Kid Rock didn't get away with it but dude went Diamond twice and was working with Snoop Dogg and Eminem himself. YelaWolf repping the confederate flag and had some limited appeal as a "gangsta whiteboy" early in his career.

Plenty of non-street white dudes hop in the "gangsta" train and pull it off

Skinn Foley

6mo

I think the void that's slowly being filled is that aggressive, intimidating, raw conscious rap petered out of style in the mainstream beginning in the early 90s (if not the late 80s), so the only viable and largely known, modern ability for artists to be taken seriously as being "hard" in some capacity comes from the avenue of certain kinds of trap, drill, and "gangsta rap" in general.

Public Enemy for example could make unbelievably hard music that portrayed Chuck D in a tough and even intimidating light but did so without having to cater to vulgar masculine stereotypes and creating a facade for how his life was to seem "hood". Ironically enough, a lot of old PE records had a lot of respect in the "hood" that many modern wannabe trap artists/gangsta rappers lack despite trying to come across as either being "from the streets" or "in touch with the streets", Drake being one of many examples of this gap between public image and actual resonance in the communities and environments Drake tries to invoke to prove his "street cred".

At some point in the 2000s, "conscious rap" became associated with smooth, polite, and inoffensive music that had a "message", which largely extracted the most fundamental aspect about acts like Public Enemy, Paris, the political sides of Ice Cube, Dead Prez, KRS-One, etc, so gripping, in that the fury against injustice of some kind was missing from the music. It was seen as almost vulgar or "ignorant" to make aggressive rap music at all, especially by a lot of backpacker movements in the 2000s that thought such a sound was poorly representing "real hip hop", the vision for "real hip hop" in their eyes being an extremely narrow, polished, and one-sided perspective of the 90s jazz rap movement. Thus, the ability to make cathartic, "hard" music that could be taken seriously got squeezed out of the industry in a lot of ways, and made "real hip hop" perceived as this overly polite and in some cases whitewashed, tame style of music, that is largely alien to the grassroots of the abrasive, confrontational sound of hip hop in all its forms, whereas trap is obviously much more belligerent, cathartic, and raw sonically, at least outside of the times that it is co-opted into pop music of some kind.

There's a slow fomenting of "exciting" and "raw" conscious rap bubbling up in the underground but we still have a ways to go before we start getting s*** like "Fight the Power", "Sound of Da Police", "It's Bigger Than Hip Hop", "m.A.A.d City", etc, up to the forefront of the culture. Kendrick is basically the only big rapper who comes with that adrenaline pumping style of conscious rap in the mainstream and even in the underground itself, it's a rarity but has grown since the start of the 2020s. People need to see that anger and rage at something, be it systemic injustice or everyday life in poverty/crime can be expressed effectively and confrontationally outside of the context of trying to be "street", because a lot of modern street music doesn't even do a good job at illuminating the larger reality that "street life" is born out of to begin with. I blame Dre for that development frankly.

Kellzz

6mo

I thought we were talking about the top guys in rap music. I’ll bow out.

BRAVE

6mo

Yeah current conscious or you could say “thoughtful” rap lacks a necessary edge and sense of standing against something

Skinn Foley

6mo

Funnily enough too, if you talk to a lot of real oldheads, like people who were on the groundfloor during the mid-to-late 80s as rap's golden age began to take off, a lot of people from that era consider 1992 to be the end of the golden age and the beginning of hip hop being pimped out commercially.

saint dot edumist

6mo

that’s actually kinda crazy

ChrisRich

6mo

I think Ye did the GD thing because of the drill wave during the time - Pop Smoke , Lil Durk, Moneybagg Yo, Polo G , Fivio - hip hop was very street 2020/2021

insertcoolnamehere

6mo

Yeah extortion is legit I think ppl said that was the reason why Chris started tripping and @Nikedufflebag theory that Ye might’ve been going through the same thing.

The romanticization is crazy when you hear these little kids using the slang man

Jayson

6mo

I definitely think majority of KTT only knows black people through rap music

GoodbyeCarl

6mo

How do these guys get extorted though? Like don't they have enough money for security or just record in their home studios?

saint dot edumist

6mo

that’s actually kinda crazy