Do popstars have a lot of integrity?

Or maybe they wouldn't have popped off,if P.E. NT were in their positions,we'll never know. I do think the art started taking a spiral,beginning with Death Row,but lets be honest,its about how you present the product and the product was presented well to an urban/Hip Hop audience.

If the culture is not only buying your product,but respecting it and holding it in regard,what can you really do but say "success"?

Y'all can choose stardom or you can choose art but you can't choose both. Not everyone is going to be Pac, Ye, or OutKast.

They are but where we are at is an end result lol

A bunch of 2000’s kids who idolized the after effects of rap stardom but not the actual fundamentals lol.

Most kids today probably would call Carter 3 (which was considered too pop or at least worst than the other two when it came out) dusty lol. It got to a place where the fandom doesn’t actually revolve around hip hop lol.

It is,but two of those albums (BP2/Rebirth) did ok commercially and were received poorly. The culture was smart enough to see through the bs then. The culture now could care less,their trying to hustle labels by playing their game cause they don't know anything else.(with fans not caring about how the art geys distributed now due to ease of streaming)

Damn when did hip hop sell out??

Its f***ed up indeed,it was gonna be done one way or the other though. Idk if this is a good thing or bad thing on his part,but maybe he thought "if i can't beat these guys,I may as well join them,maybe I'll have a voice in things" instead of being an outsider trying to be outspoken.

Until rappers see the genre as a competition it won’t get any better.

It shows the state it’s in where not a single rapper has taken the crown from Kendrick/drake/j cole. We are literally still having the same debates 10 plus years into there careers.

How does this change the scenario for the black men he has helped enslave to the criminal justice system for nonviolent offenses?

They don't 99% of the time

We get generational icons every once in a while with a boatload of horseshit and sellouts in between.

imo op has a good point. when i was watching @YoungNastyShawty video on rap music being horrible i couldn't help but think of the ringtone app era. tiktok is basically the same s*** right now. eventually something will change.

i think labels and tiktok stop playing so nice with each other and there winds up being some serious ip disputes causing tiktok to be incapable of using songs without getting copyright flagged. this probably forces labels to find a fresh sound and 2016 happens all over again.

Not gonna lie,at this point,I think alot of these projects and businesses allow a Jay-Z to join them,just so he can be a figure for all the bad things surrounding said projects. The mans a celebrity,one of the most famous in the world,he's the first person to shoutout and point at with this stuff.

Doesn't make his involvement with certain things any better but Jay is barely a minority investor in alot of this stuff.

At the end of the day he has $3b to his name, the glaring majority of which is blood money

Oh nah,ringtone rap had its place in Hip Hop. You couldn't be the king in rap off ringtones

So rap was supposed to remain underground, overlooked, and under-appreciated forever. Got it.

No

It wasn't supposed to produce s***ty video games, NFTs, bad rock albums, ghostwriters, DNC shilling, and reality TV shows

I believe it,Lyor Cohen/Def Jam during 2000s was shady af.

that’s kinda the angle im at too

like yeah, Wayne, JAY, Em and company definitely commodified the genre, commercialized it whatever, but they were all undeniably skilled and put out fantastic bodies of work

nowadays these dudes are just bleeding the genre dry of its consumers attentions, money, etc. while not making anything artistically meaningful nor engaging

i can see that it’s the “end-result” but i kinda have my reservations on how responsible some of the big players were for these dudes to s*** out horribly monotonous and generic music, and showing little to no depth in any of their music at that too

How'd we go from "Me Against the World" to "The Massacre"? Here's how:

go listen to nickleback. I really hate yts who s*** on rap for fun

The older I get the more I realized gatekeeping ain’t a bad thing.

Wayne inspire a boatload of these cornballs today and Em paved the way for equally insufferable, cheap crap like Token, Joyner Lucas, Logic, etc. Jay made it cool to prioritize sales over artistic integrity, Drake's content dump strategy comes from Jay's double disc fiascos during the 2000s

Other than Carters 1-3 and 5 all of Wayne's studio albums are mid or trash

Birdman had him second to the bottom only ahead of f***in Turk in the Hot Boys lol. Wayne is talented but dude has put out some seriously bad music too and Em even more so.

Tha Block is Hot erasure