The beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake absorbed a great deal of oxygen this year, and from a distance it might appear that all the stakes for hip-hop in 2024 boiled down to this war of titans. But if anything, that battle was a head fake — the genre was innovating and mutating at a rapid clip in smaller scenes, and it began to feel as if the biggest stars were largely preoccupied with each other, not with what’s transpiring down below.
JOE COSCARELLI Last year, rap was dead, at least according to the Billboard charts and the health-of-the-genre hand-wringers obsessed with them. This year, thanks to big singles and albums from artists like Future (with Metro Boomin), Kendrick Lamar, Eminem and Tyler, the Creator, there were signs of life commercially, and some more substantial material to chew on.
But nothing skews perception about a genre’s vitality like two of its biggest stars — in this case, Lamar and Drake — trying repeatedly to ruin one another’s lives via extremely personal and vitriolic music, leading to endless headlines, IRL arguments and a chart-topping checkmate in Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”
Jon, is rap in a better place than it was this time last year? Or did a noisy run by the (aging!) members of the hip-hop 1 Percent — most of whom have been around for a decade-plus, if not longer — only mask the chaos and confusion of the other 99 percent, exacerbating the growing pains of a genre that is increasingly top-heavy?
JON CARAMANICA What was lost among the callous accusations, the memes and meta-memes, and the lightly acrid smell hanging over the Drake-Kendrick beef is the last-gaspness of it all.
Drake is 38, Lamar is 37. Drake has been a genre titan for well over a decade, an improbably long run. Lamar remains the connoisseur’s choice, as he’s been for almost as long. Hip-hop regenerates constantly, and yet there has been an almost despotic grip on the throne(s) for some time.
That’s meant a couple of things: first, an emerging sense of resentment and fatigue among listeners, who responded to this year’s beef with an outpouring of blood lust (mostly in Drake’s direction). Second, younger artists who’ve seen that the throne wasn’t grabbable have forged a new path to smaller but just as intensely devoted audiences — in essence, they’ve become cult leaders. That goes for Travis Scott, Playboi Carti, Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Yachty.
It’s something different than playing for second place. It’s deciding to recalibrate the game so that only you can win.
COSCARELLI I thought Alphonse Pierre of Pitchfork, in his year-end list of rap albums, put it perfectly when he wrote that “the mainstream and underground rap landscapes feel more disconnected than ever.” For those willing to dig a little deeper than Spotify’s Rap Caviar, there’s no shortage of vital and surprising music being made in regional scenes from Philadelphia to Chicago to Orlando. But watching the niche become mainstream has always been a value proposition of life as a curious rap fan and these days, it feels like the niche is staying niche. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — it’s just different.
CARAMANICA One of my most memorable moments of the year (actually, very late last year) came at a show for YhapoJJ. Well, not exactly a show. He’d booked the Mercury Lounge for a free concert, which I understood to be an attention-grabbing shtick before I pulled up to the venue to find 300 or so fans on the street outside, addled.
People inside the room told me no concert was happening, because of what was happening outside, which was getting more unhinged with each passing moment. A rush on the door proved fruitless, and so fans began lashing out — eventually, some of them pulled the metal detector out of the venue and threw it into the middle of Houston Street, jumping and stomping on it until it shattered into pieces. It was clear that no show was going to transpire, but still fans lingered — one even tried scaling the front of the building.
This is the long tail of the SoundCloud rap agitations of the 2010s, and this scene’s young stars inspire a fervor that reminds me of the earliest shows I went to in that world. There’s a sense of abandon meshed with a quite organized fan worship — that’s the stuff emergent hip-hop celebrity is now made of. It was there at the Nettspend show at the Knitting Factory in June, which also featured an appearance from Xaviersobased. At the end of both this show and the YhapoJJ non-show, the artist ended up pulling up outside the venue in the passenger seat of a car, opening the window to survey the damage, literal or metaphorical. Making music is fun, but making myth might matter more these days.
COSCARELLI Which brings us to Playboi Carti, maybe the only rap headliner of the moment with a foothold in — or chokehold on — the underground via his Opium label roster. He feigned a mainstream metamorphosis for a minute in late 2023 and early 2024. Guest appearances on songs like “Fein” by Travis Scott and “Carnival” by Kanye West were some of the most visible scene-stealing of his career. And his would-be crossover moment on “I Luv It” by Camila Cabello may have been a commercial dud but it is still my verse of the year.
Still, he balked again at actually releasing an album (although there’s once again buzz in the air; “Whole Lotta Red,” his last full-length release, did come out on Christmas in 2020). As progressive as the music can be, this version of mythmaking, where leaked songs and live mayhem are the coin of the realm, might actually be his greatest strength: People can’t get tired of you if they can’t catch you in the first place.
CARAMANICA Maybe the new rap stardom is … not wanting to be a star? Something happened during the pandemic, which sent certain kinds of performers into overdrive in a desperate claw for attention, and others into ghosts who ended up fomenting an intense parasocial connection with growing numbers of fans to whom they provided little. Carti is now best known for not releasing albums, which means that there is constant discourse around his career from his still-growing faithful. But musically that’s a shame, because no one has done more than he has for the reimagination of what flow can be since Young Thug.
COSCARELLI One unfortunate subplot in the story of rap in 2024, for generations past and present, is that much of the action took place in various courtroom settings. Even as the racketeering trial against Young Thug’s YSL limped its way to a conclusion in Atlanta — with Thug, surprisingly, opting to lie low since his plea deal saw him released from jail — other A-list rappers were ensnared in ugly cases, both criminal and civil.
Sean Combs, or Diddy, is facing a federal sex trafficking trial in the spring, causing a re-evaluation of an entire golden age. Jay-Z, who might have quiet-retired, has been accused of sexual abuse in a related lawsuit that he is vigorously pushing back against. Drake, per the drama referenced above, is threatening to sue his own record label over its push for “Not Like Us,” which branded him a pedophile. And the in-between generation — like Lil Durk (who faces murder-for-hire charges) and YoungBoy Never Broke Again (who is serving 23 months on federal gun charges) — have also been hamstrung, if not taken out completely, by the legal system.
CARAMANICA This, too, is part of what’s hampering the genre’s ability to mint generational superstars. There is a pervasive sense of precarity — careers can be interrupted at any moment, by people whose motives may be pure, or not. For decades the insistence on the truth value of rap lyrics was of paramount importance; now, that has run headlong into the literalism of law enforcement interpretation. It is a brutal state of affairs and it has imperiled rappers at several career phases. The anxiety has felt even more pressing as hip-hop has moved from emphatic subculture to the center of American (and global) pop. The cultural and financial stakes are higher than ever.
It also casts a different light on the generational elders who are still releasing new music — there were sturdy albums this year from Common and LL Cool J and also Snoop Dogg, who has become, in his 50s, a beloved elder, a relentless commercial pitchman and one of the voices of NBC’s Olympics coverage. Hip-hop is becoming what it always promised — a foundational replacement of rock music as the dominant creative force in pop music. But there are still entities who wish that weren’t the case, and are leveraging resources to push back.
COSCARELLI As a listener, I did find occasional solace but also a jolt in the blown-out fits that were Lazer Dim 700’s 90-second music videos, along with the “South Park”-ian Auto-Tune provocations of Dave Blunts and the reliability of the Atlanta also-ran-turned-folk hero SahBabii, whose album “Saaheem” filled the Young Thug-sized hole in my playlists. Sexxy Redd’s mixtape from the spring, “In Sexxy We Trust,” was another highlight with staying power and her Southern alliance with GloRilla, who released the solid album “Glorious” in October, has the chance to make up for the rupture between Gunna and Lil Baby.
Any other bright spots for you, Jon?
CARAMANICA All those beats from Cash Cobain (and not from YouTube). This year’s breakout sounds were about sensuality and also humor. Things might be fraught elsewhere in the world, but much of this year’s best emergent hip-hop found a path to lightness. That means the wild Dionysian boasts of BossMan Dlow, the last-call chants of Shaboozey, the theatrical come-ons of NLE Choppa, the arched-eyebrow sass of GloRilla. (R.I.P. to the Houston producer Beatking, one of the great comic hip-hop presences of the last decade.)
And then there were the memorable On the Radar and From the Block freestyles from 1900Rugrat, Cortisa Star and others — those loose clips connote lightness even when the subject matter is serious. Plenty of great hip-hop this year had a more ominous tinge — it was a solid year for the New York drill crew 41 — but something breezier might be emerging and potentially growing into a dominant sound for the future.
Also some of the best underground rap music released this year was by … Kim Gordon? Everything is going to be fine.
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