Hip hop in 2020

We live in a very strange time in history. On one hand, I think benefactors that want to see hip hop grow in its purest form are a good thing. On the other hand, sponsoring bad music is potentially doing three things: making the audience less critical, purposefully poorly representing the culture, or training people to listen for authenticity over quality.

There are really good hood artists like Chief Keef and O.T. Genesis. And there are some bad intellectual artists. Music quality is not on a spectrum of complexity or sophistication.

The danger of poor representation is it is either making people less critical or fueling the under-estimation of the culture. Initially, the social dilemma was artists in rap in the early 10's were taste-making fans that only respected intellectual rappers in a society that still assumed that urban people were rarely intelligent.

Finally, there's a certain heritage vanity that spawned from the division and began to emphasize the hood dialect. A lot of new rappers are celebrated for their hood accent shamelessly above prowess. Although it's fair and maybe even a necessary thing in 2020, the battle to sound the hoodest is creating talentless one-dimensional acts that soothe egos. However, maybe that's we need.

The stars of today have a much smaller amount of hype than previous years. I think the gate keepers are aware of it and are purposefully facilitating the mediocrity. Heritage emphasis is a trend that I hope goes away as we mature over time and lengthen our influence.