I prefer good lyrics over mumble rap, but music is entirely subjective. You think it's a step backwards, but young people think it's a step forwards.

Mumble rap is essentially just natural selection. Some random rapper started doing it, people liked it, and so it propagated. If people didn't like it, it would have died out quickly. You just aren't one of those people.

> It's samey as hell and stagnant and lacks innovation.

I've said the same thing about metal since the first time I heard it. Metal fans disagree. Who's right? Does it even matter?

I don’t know what mumble rap is, so I’m not commenting on that in particular.

But, something being selected for doesn’t imply that it isn’t a bad thing. Even if we assume that “how much the typical person likes it” or “how many people like to listen to it” or something along those lines is a good measure of goodness, those are not the only things involved in the selection pressure. Things like cost to produce, discoverability, etc. are all also things that influence the selection pressures. And if there are contributions to the pressures which aren’t entirely aligned with the direction of good, then it seems entirely possible that the selection could make something worse (as in, not as good, not as in, less successful)

Here is an accurate depiction of mumble rap by Snoop Dogg https://youtu.be/g0OdmRtuQew

Warning: lots of exercising 1st amendment in the above video.

The point of my comment wasn't that mumble rap is good, it's that music is subjective. There is no good or bad music. There is only music that is good to some, and bad to others. Mumble rap is good to enough people that it propagated.

re: mumble rap ~ have you heard trap?

I think once or twice, but I don’t remember what it is really.

Everything is natural selection, so that isn't necessarily very insightful.

An implicit premise here might be that music is good if people think it’s good.

If a genre is taken up through “natural selection,” that means a lot of people like it, and it is therefore good music to those people - regardless of what some critic might think.

A fairly significant amount of young people believe that modern American music is repetitive crap where most songs sound exactly like one another. (Because they are really are) Yet it is being pushed down their throats.

New Yorkers said the same thing about all southern rappers decades ago and now many of those artists and songs they panned are considered classics. Rap doesn't have to fit some narrowly defined category where all artists are doing the same style during a given period.

You can also like conscious rappers calling for social change and still enjoy a club banger asking women to shake their butts. They aren't diametrically opposed.

Ah, yes I remember the Great Laffy Taffy Debate that brought division between the North and the South

>Rap doesn't have to fit some narrowly defined category where all artists are doing the same style during a given period.

And yet thats where it's at right now, with some exception.

Hiphop used to have diversity of sound.

Now, as far as popular rap goes, it's all homogenized.

Same beats. Same cadence. Same flow. Voices indistinguishableffrom each other.

>Same beats. Same cadence. Same flow. Voices indistinguishableffrom each other.

This is how people used to talk about Hip Hop in the 90s. People familiar with Trap can easily distinguish between the different rappers and producers - just like people familiar with 90's Hip Hop could distinguish between Nas and Ghostface or DJ Premier and Pete Rock.

And, that's only Trap. There are still popular MC's and producers who operate outside of Trap.

>This is how people used to talk about Hip Hop in the 90s

This isn't true unless you're talking the bling Era of the late 90s.

Also, past criticisms existing doesn't invalidate new ones even if there's similarities in the complaint. So that's a side step.

Tribe, wu, west coast gfunk rappers, mobb deep, fu schnickens, onyx, bone thugs, cypress, busta, we're all wildly different. Even at the height of g-funk, I could have named 50 at least semi popular rappers who deviated from that style.

Now who deviates? Danny brown? He's like 40. RtJ? They're like 40 too. Kendrick tends to always be the modern exception to every hip hop criticism. So I consider him the exception that proves the rule.

>are still popular MC's and producers who operate outside of Trap.

And they're treated the same as Rhymesayers or DefJux rappers, Saul Williams or immortal tech were during the bling and Crunk eras. It's all "white" even if black, nerdy, back packing shit thats not considered part of the "culture". Thats the way most lyrical rappers are treated today. They're talked about like Atmosphere was in 2004.

So fuck the culture.

>This isn't true unless you're talking the bling Era of the late 90s.

You lived in a different 90s than I did then.

>Now who deviates? Danny brown? He's like 40. RtJ? They're like 40 too. Kendrick tends to always be the modern exception to every hip hop criticism. So I consider him the exception that proves the rule.

Who deviates from what?

>And they're treated the same as Rhymesayers or DefJux rappers, Saul Williams or immortal tech were during the bling and Crunk eras. It's all "white" even if black, nerdy, back packing shit thats not considered part of the "culture". Thats the way most lyrical rappers are treated today. They're talked about like Atmosphere was in 2004.

Not my experience. During that time, and a little before it, you had Blackstar, Common, Dead Prez, and a bunch of other underground acts who were respected - to the point Jay Z name dropped Talib Kweli and Common in the early 2000s. Freddie Gibbs and Big Krit both operate primarily outside the scope of Trap, are very talented, and respected. I don't like J Cole, but he's another one who is liked and respected.

>Tribe, wu, west coast gfunk rappers, mobb deep, fu schnickens, onyx, bone thugs, cypress, busta, we're all wildly different.

I would argue that they all sound the same when compared to any southern rappers that came after them. You keep referring to the bling and crunk era like they are sneers but I would argue that if New Yorkers had gotten their way and got to be the gate keepers of hip hop and you were only allowed to rap in a style like Wu Tang and rappers like Outkast, The Hot Boys, and just the dozens of ATL rappers were not allowed on the air ways that the art form would have gone the way of disco and died. Sure its cool when a song has a multilevel meaning and deep metaphors spread through out the song, but its not a necessity to make a good hip hop song.

My hot take is that if you can only appreciate NY State of Mind, I Got a Story To Tell, 1st of The Month, but can't appreciate Back That Azz Up, Crank Dat, and XO TOUR Llif3 then you don't actually appreciate hip-hop. Just a very narrow subset of it.

You said wu and outkast are somehow the same and then defended juvenile?

And then gatekept who's "really appreciates hip hop?"

Freaking lol

It was a typo, I was grouping Outkast with the Hot Boys

> we ended up with mumble rap

> It's samey as hell and stagnant

I don't follow rap, but these two claims seem contradictory. Is the first not evidence of evolution in the genre, if in a direction you don't like?

If anything mumble rap is a devolution. Add auto-tune to this and you are left with a worthless corpus of shitty rap, hip-hop and also pop music.

It is samey, because everybody does the same thing. You can’t really differentiate music by different performers anymore. Each song is the same.

There used to be a cost to producing music; you needed a studio, producer, physical copies of the samples you wanted to use (in case of most rap), etc. Now you can just boot your computer and use one of the many digital studios.

It is a blessing in some ways, but a curse in most I think. Quality is by no means the element by which (popular) music is judged. It is all about presentation, which somehow means the most deplorable people get the most praise.

Note: I am talking about what is mainstream and played on still high quality radio. I don’t listen to rap stations and luckily there are stations that have a good selection of older music and only play some of the new stuff. The new stuff there is already worse than music from the past though.

If you look at the rap and hip-hop scene however, the quality has plummeted even more. It is just one homogeneous soup of crappy, lazy music. In no way like the music of 2Pac, Notorious B.I.G and Outkast but still all the same as the other new crap.

You’re just saying the same things older people have been saying about new music since time immemorial.

Generalizing criticisms as the same as past criticisms is a sidestep rather than a point.

Perhaps, yet: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/what-these-grammy...

How about from other established rappers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0OdmRtuQew

Admittedly they are now "older" :)

You say they're older as a joke, but it's very much relevant. Old artists dismissing the developments and approaches of their younger colleagues is a tale as old as time.

And yet - dismissing criticisms of older people by younger people as "you're just old" rather than answering the criticism is just as old.

Older gens hated rap when I was a kid and I was thirsty to defend it with supported reasons

Kids today just say OK boomer and move on. Bc they have no defense .

Established older musicians hated The Beatles.

Generalizing criticisms as the same as past criticisms is a sidestep rather than a point.

That's true and yet the decreasing revenue, monetization, and relentless cost-cutting is real as well.

Concerns about making money are not going to destroy art. Almost all art through history has been made by people trying to make a living, not trying to express for its own sake.

We don't have a thousand years of portraiture of the elite because artists were just absolutely convinced that was the ultimate expression of the medium.

The lack of discoverability and gatekeeping (to some extent) ensures that unpromoted art will not be known. When did the last non-supported musician hit it big? Artist support and development is important as well.

You should say mainstream art in any era.

Andre 3000 is a big fan of Future fwiw.

I think the claim is that mumble rap dominates this new ecosystem, that this ecosystem is less diverse, and that this ecosystem does not seem to be changing significantly.

I have no idea about Spotify or mumble rap but that's how they might not contradict.

It doesn't matter. Just listen to what you like.

Even Mozart and Bach made crap music on a bad day.

I think in our time we are very fortunate to have the ability to discover music so easily. Personally I never listen to mainstream music but there is a lot more to discover.

Music generally lacks innovation for the same reason why phones and men's clothing lack innovation. Most of the easy low-effort ways to be appealingly different have been discovered already. Music's creativity has been spurred by a series of technological innovations, the invention of the electric guitar, then the invention of synths, multitrack recording, drum machines, then computers with sampling, loops and DSP. It's been artistically transformed by blues, country, jazz, rock and roll, urban, dance and rap. Each one had its own series of innovations driven by creativity (doo-wop? math rock? new jack swing?) but the genres have settled into their mature phases. Probably some entirely new genre needs to come along and shake things up, but that's hard. Until then we'll continue to get the artistic equivalent of a new coat of paint every few years.

Which is the sad reality. There are definitely talented rappers that work their tails off to produce great lyrics, in some cases their own beats / tracks and are being overshadowed by what I call pop rap (you can throw mumble rap under than umbrella). I can only imagine the same is happening in other genres. The one decent thing about rap was always all the mixtapes on the other hand.

That's just how popular music and pop culture works. Internet and streaming did enable long-tail though. Its way easier to listen to and find those underground rappers compared to 20 years ago.

I think "pop" music ( which now very much includes hip hop) by it's very nature has been this way. I can't think of a the when it wasn't.