![]() Of all the rappers who attained prominence in that weird fallow period between 2017-18 when trap gained prominence, Kodak Black is probably the one whose continued success has mystified me, because he typifies that era so well that it’s hard to really imagine him existing outside of it. Because this isn’t the first time he’s bounced back after I initially thought his career was dead. ![]() It’s weird to see Kodak Black’s name on the charts again, considering the roller-coaster ride he’s been on since he first broke out. So as I reconnected with the hip-hop world, I found myself more able to wade through the discourse and sift the good from the bad… and this happened just as the tides began to turn and actual upbeat pop music began returning to the airwaves by 2019. After that I did my due diligence and was able to trace the origins of trap to some pretty unexpected sources, acts like Chief Keef and Rich Gang who I’d initially dismissed as mushmouth drivel, but who I’m able to listen to with more appreciative ears given that they foreshadowed the landscape we currently live in. I was never truly cognizant of the difference until the late 2010s forced me to notice. One big reason why I wasn’t able to really adapt to the trend wasn’t just my lack of knowledge about the more underground forms of hip-hop–it was also just a feeling of having been disconnected with all forms of hip-hop besides the pop-rap stuff that usually got big. I still don’t like Juice WRLD, but I’m pretty sure my scathing review of ‘Lucid Dreams’ from that time will be hard to read considering his untimely death, an event which admittedly softened my own opinion on him as well.īut I’d like to think that I got better about it as I gained more familiarity with the genre. ![]() ![]() I felt pretty much out of my depth, and I’m not sure that my takes from that era have aged all that well. But I admit it was still a difficult time to write about music. It’s why I feel so much nostalgia for this time period, honestly it was a wild ride for me. None of this stuff would be considered “pop” by any sane listener, as evidenced by the fact that radio refused to touch Soundcloud rap at all, thus further widening the divide between the radio and streaming worlds.Īs a budding critic making his way in the world, I had to adapt to this strange, unfamiliar landscape and really stretch my critical faculties in order to allow me to effectively analyze this type of music. The strange thing about the streaming era is that it provided a platform for even the most unconventional, non-mainstream music to gain a platform, and because of the platinum-selling successes of acts like Drake, Post Malone, Young Thug and Travis Scott in the mid-2010s, hip-hop quickly trended toward sleepy, lethargic beats delivered by mushmouthed rappers who sounded like they’d ingested too much novocaine at the dentist’s office. And not the easily-digestible kind that often crossed over into the pop sphere, either this wasn’t no Nelly or Flo Rida or Pitbull. Well, tough luck for me, because 2018 proved to be a year dominated entirely by hip-hop. And if that identity wasn’t a part of me, it would be weird if I actually tried to add my voice to that conversation. Hip-hop is more than just a genre, after all it’s an identity. I’d listened to hip-hop, sure, but I wasn’t enough of an expert in the genre to actually effectively review it. In my world, pop music sounded a certain way, and that was my cultural reference point when it came to forming my own musical opinions. See, I came of age in the early 2010s, the era of giant candy-coated smash pop hits by the likes of Katy Perry. I began reviewing music right around the fallow period between 2017-2018 when Soundcloud rap was emerging as a global trend, and let me tell you, it was a miserable time to be a pop music reviewer. “Feeling like a boss, and / Staring at the stars, it / Doesn’t matter the cost, ’cause / Everybody wants to be famous”
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