Why is rap music declining in popularity ?

[Thiletonomics]

Because people stereotype rap music extremely negatively because idiots driving clapped out Nissan Altimas and Infiniti G35s/G37s/Q50s blast that shitty ass music at full volume while they weave past you in traffic going over 100 MPH.

 

[Evil Whitey]

The world is healing, that's why

 

[Idiotron]

What you're talking about is record label produced mainstream rap.
That might be declining because no trend ever stays on top forever.
However, 99% of rap are unsigned artists who don't really get mentioned when talking about stuff like that.
I would even argue that real rap can't be corporate, it has to be independent, so stuff like whatever is topping the charts is just pop music pretending to be rap.

Also, let's be real.
The rap subgenres that got popular recently, such as mumble rap and whore rap, are doing serious damage to the genre.
All those songs do is promote illiteracy and hedonism.
When talking about your taste in music, you have to qualify your statements:
"Yeah, I like rap but none of that shit that is popular right now."

 

[pyrogon]

Rap isn't going anywhere but the mainstream is definitely slowing down. How are you supposed to care about the genre when big names literally dissappear as fast as they come? When you become a rock star or a country star people talk about you for years, even decades. With rap music it seems like they just show up out of nowhere and dissappear the next month never to be heard from again.

 

[Gay Vito]

Rap is the only genre of music where you're discouraged from knowing the classics. The rap community wants you to only listen to the current thing and nothing from before your time, or else you're a boomer, oldhead, etc. No other music community is like this. With jazz and classical, you're expected to know the standards. For rock, everyone knows who Elvis and The Beatles are. But for rap, if it was produced before 2016 it might as well not exist. They thought ignoring all this music and history would keep rap fresh and innovative, but instead it had the opposite result. Now everything sounds like a bad Blink 182 impersonation over trap beats, and people are rightfully jumping ship and looking for different things to listen to.

 

[pyrogon]

Rap is the only genre of music where you're discouraged from knowing the classics. The rap community wants you to only listen to the current thing and nothing from before your time, or else you're a boomer, oldhead, etc. No other music community is like this. With jazz and classical, you're expected to know the standards. For rock, everyone knows who Elvis and The Beatles are. But for rap, if it was produced before 2016 it might as well not exist. They thought ignoring all this music and history would keep rap fresh and innovative, but instead it had the opposite result. Now everything sounds like a bad Blink 182 impersonation over trap beats, and people are rightfully jumping ship and looking for different things to listen to.

Yeah that's a really good point! I specifically have a memory back in highschool where a kid was bullied for listening to Biggie Smalls. Despite Biggie being one of the most influencial figures in the genre there is no respect or regard for figures of that cultures past. I listen to genre's like death metal and while I might not find myself pulling up Black Sabbath I can still enjoy, understand, and respect their contribution to my genre's history. There isn't a single genre of music where people feel uncomfortable rolling back 30+ years to listen to their genres classics except rap music.

 

[Billy_Sama!]

It's hard to retain a demographic that is actively killing each other or going to prison

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

Gangsta rap ruined the genre’s image.

 

[Forever A Loner]

because it sucks.

 

[Disc]

One thing people haven't talked about is that memes like this are now increasingly common:

People are increasingly aware of the soundcloud rapper phenomenon of being absolute dogshit tier, and it's leaking out in memes like this.

Add on that rappers have basically always glorified edgy and self-destructive lifestyles, meaning all the copycats who didn't get tard-wrangled early on are probably doing shit that make sure they won't even get to 30.

There's also the fun combo of:

A: the hard left wing chipping away at the ghetto's potential for self reflection, encouraging them to externalise the perceived causes of all their problems - which creates a domino chain effect of said soundcloud rappers putting things up that even a tonedeaf howler monkey would be ashamed to have produced.
B: Everyone else looking at the results of A, both on soundcloud and in the real world, and realising bit by bit that this is creating some of the most obnoxious and repulsive people physically possible.

 

[Lovely Kin]

Same reason why kpop is declining. Too much of the same sounding shit gets released and oversaturation. At that point, people will move onto different genres or subgenres.

 

[Sho'nuff]

Rap/Hip-hop needs to find its new sound.

The grime and reality of the 90s gave way to the bling-bling of the 2000s which eventually gave way to the white guilt/dindu rap of today. People are tired of it, culturally and musically.

Rap will find another sound, look around SoundCloud or in some artists deep cuts and it will be there already. I have a feeling it's going to be a rise of the 90s style grit and realism again. There are a lot of new guys out there that keep this sound going and rappers like Nas who released 4 or 5 albums in the last few years that all did extremely well.
Plus gen alpha is a bit more based than young millenial/gen-z who are all fucking retards, gen alpha is going to appreciate that sound more, telling it observational and not through a woke lens.

 

[Disc]

Rap will find another sound, look around SoundCloud or in some artists deep cuts and it will be there already. I have a feeling it's going to be a rise of the 90s style grit and realism again. There are a lot of new guys out there that keep this sound going and rappers like Nas who released 4 or 5 albums in the last few years that all did extremely well.
Plus gen alpha is a bit more based than young millenial/gen-z who are all fucking retards, gen alpha is going to appreciate that sound more, telling it observational and not through a woke lens.

It might have already found it. Have you heard about that hip new song from Kanye?

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

I look at the mentality of hip hop culture and it’s always the same. It’s always about the struggle, the hustle, the thug life, racism, the cops, starting from the bottom. It’s like hip hop is stuck in 1994 while the world is keeps changing.

I remember reading an article about a hip hop producer (Archive) in 2014 where they talked about the future of the subculture.

Hip-hop is two generations younger than jazz, and it has at least a few years of innovation left. Still, it is beginning to look backward as much as forward. In recent years, the rapper Bun B, whose resonant baritone is recognizable from his guest verse on Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin’,” has been a Distinguished Lecturer at Rice University, where he co-taught a course on rap and religion. At Harvard, the Hip-Hop Archive and Research Institute recently accepted applications for the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship. Rosenberg’s concerts still draw diverse, youthful crowds; but what proportion of the audience will be young and black when Jay Z plays the Barclays Center in 2024?

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

Rap may be declining in popularity, but a subgenre could become popular with a niche community in the future. Like, for instance, jazz declined in popularity in the 1960’s, but in the 1990’s smooth jazz became popular in the elevator and on the Weather Channel.

 

[Plumber's Crack]

nigger fatigue

 

[pyrinyx]

The problem is that it is not dying enough. Based on those numbers and percentages, it is only just declining, not dying. It has potential to get back up and again. But, something tells me that when Dr.Dre, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Busta Rhymes and all of the other rap artists that basically served as the foundation for hip-hop/rap to be what it is die. Then we'll see that decline go downhill faster because the inspiration will be lost.

All of the newcomer rappers are glorified nigger gangsters who pride in ghetto-fying the genre when there had been attempts in the rap genre to 'clean its act' by deriving away from those kinds of topics to rap about. And with all of the inspiration lost and nobody to turn to as a directive as to how to make their genre prosper again, Rap/Hip-Hop as we knew it will die and it'll strictly just be a thing shitty ghetto niggers will blast as a symbol of trashiness.

 

[YautjaWeeb]

Rap and underground metal have this weird relationship both built out of tape-trading and controversy both extraordinarily and viscerally upsetting to boomer tards in their day.

Underground metal going through same thing, there's only so much that can be done over a few decades. The youth is not super interested and even the ones who don't have ADHD robot brains still have Spotify and Youtube dictating what's popular, who gets to be who and who is listening to what now.

You make a new song or a new sound and you are not competing with your peer groups you are competing against the entirety of all recorded music in one big library people can listen to at any moment for free or for a few shekels a month. It's going to have be stellar, you're going to have to have a killer image that can top any icon before you and if you can't be pretty to a female demographic (which most actual musicians are not) you'll be more popular and musically appreciated as a sissy hypno maker or discord gooner cult leader.

 

[Doublefrag]

After dozens of hours of listening I think black-owned rap is good. It's an interesting look into the psychology of supposed humans who are so similar, yet so different from us. Most people who dislike it are hipsters who also dislike any music that is not 1960s progrock. Rap is as good a genre of music as any other out there. If you have your own life that doesn't revolve around what music you listen to, you don't spend your time ragging on Lana Del Rey and Kanye West (both of whom impacted music more than any of your obscure jam session KEXP bands), you just move on and enjoy whatever you like.

 

[ZealotCrustacean101]

People are rapping always about the same shit (Sex drugs cars, the usual narcissism self fellatio) and its getting boring, the Kendrick vs Drake showed that, artists tend to forget that music is a form of expression not a way to show off what you've got.