While music-industry sales have plummeted, no genre has fallen harder than rap. According to the music trade publication Billboard, rap sales have dropped 44% since 2000 and declined from 13% of all music sales to 10%. Artists who were once the tent poles at rap labels are posting disappointing numbers. Jay-Z’s return album, Kingdom Come, for instance, sold a gaudy 680,000 units in its first week, according to Billboard. But by the second week, its sales had declined some 80%. This year rap sales are down 33% so far.
Hip-hop now faces a generation that takes gangsta rap as just another mundane marker in the cultural scenery. “It’s collapsing because they can no longer fool the white kids,” says Nickels. “There’s only so much redundancy anyone can take.”
Before anyone accuses me of being an old fuddy duddy (which I am) I grew up with rap music. From the 80s through the 90s I listened to Run-DMC, Public Enemy, the Getto Boys, Cyprus Hill, to name a few. Eventually I got bored of the new stuff coming out. The music industry should realize that all genres of music will eventually become niche, mutate into something new, or die.
“The music industry should realize this. All genres of music eventually dies or mutates into something new.” You got that right, I grew up listening to the same music through the 80’s and 90’s and, like you, got bored or fed up with the genres. It is rare that I listen to music anymore but now at least understand my parents misunderstanding of the music I was listening to during those years.
Rap has become so indecent and destructive, even the naive find it a genre past its time.
I’ve always hated rap. Sam Kinison had it right back in the late 80’s:
“if you’re thinking of buying a rap album, take about $10 or $12 out of your wallet and wipe your ass with it.”
Maybe with the change of regimes in the next couple of years, the country’s mood will change and we’ll start getting some good crooners and composers cranking out some good stuff commercially.
It’s been a looonngg time.
[Duplicate post. – ed.]
When I started to see “keep it real” rappers like Common rapping for the Gap, I knew it was pretty much over. Rap has turned into disco. Even Gangster rappers don’t rap about guns or gang banging any more, it’s all about the club and dancing at the club and how fresh you look when you roll into the club.
Rap “music” is a contradiction in terms. Other than being another Stone Age artifact, culturally, it’s never been anything more than a chant reflecting frustration, foolishness, fear and teenage angst.
I’ve spent decades personally involved with every aspect of music from classical music to blues and jazz to traditional country music. There has always been something, someone to appreciate musically and lyrically. The tiny segment of talent in rap worth listening to – was in spite of the form.
Why did it last as long as it did? Maybe America produced a generation of dull, vapid losers? Look at the politics they produced – or let fall into place with their apathy.
Did I read that right? Dvorak listening to the Getto Boys????
Moss, you beat me to the punch. You’re absolutely right. Rap music is an oxymoron. It takes talent to do it well, but it should never have been anything more than a side curiosity, not a whole genre. I feel the same way about beat boxing. Not that the American Idol singers are really that good, but I had to actually give a thumbs up to the TV last year when one of the contestants actually said he was at a disadvantage because the others were singers and he was a rapper.
Then you’ve got the whole hip hop, gang banging culture. Personally I think society would be much better off if it became legal to shoot anyone who looks like a gangbanger on site. (Except on Halloween, of course).
Look at the latest product of hip hop: “don’t snitch”. Why would any civilized person want anything at all to do with a culture of savages?
don’t believe the hype
When you got Nelly Furtado and Timberland on stage together… Something IS definitely changing.
Rap music jumped the shark when (both) country and western adopted it.
#7 #8 i love when people who don’t like a genre tend to dismiss it as an invalid art form –let me try: most country music is just bubblegum pop with a southern accent and the rest is just repetitive twangy guitars and every lyric is either bad high-school notebook scrawls or cliches from dime-store greeting cards that any idiot could write? seriously i feel embarrassed for people who tell me that country music speaks to them because in my mind that would set their IQ just above Down’s Syndrome.
Thanks for the chuckle Grog … hehe.
#12. That was cold – I find most Down’s people much more interesting than Country music fans. Certainly smarter.
You can’t spell “crap” without “rap”…
On the same token, 75% of “crap” is “rap”.
I wonder if their target audience has taken the lyrics to heart and are a) stealing the music or b) wasting all their money on booze, drugs, and cheap floozies?
Maybe Jazz will make a comeback…. or Opera!
This is the best news I have heard all day!
Hip-Hop is not dead. As of now several artists and producers need to reevaluate their musical portfolios, but there is still plenty of talent out there. Speaking as a college student, Hip-Hop is probably the most listened to music on campus, and any dance club’s playlists will be composed of mainly Hip-Hop. However, 2006 was a subpar year for HIp-Hop, there were some mentionable songs, “White & Nerdy,” and it is not surprising that the genre is down. To say that because Kingdom Come didn’t sell well, than Rap is down is outrageous. The reason Kingdom Come didn’t sell is because the record was horrible, and rushed, but yet the Black Album sold 3.5 million. The Game’s debut album did very well, 50 Cent needs some redefinition, Kanye West has a new album coming out, Common, Talib, and Mos Def have strong followings but need work on their beats, The Detox will someday be released, and with CEO Jay-Z & Dr. Dre continuing to act as talent scouts for fresh talent the genre has plenty of life left in it.
Rock ‘n Roll Forever and Heavy Metal up to the limit!
rap is dead, rock is dead, has been dead for years. Everything now is just a formula that the record execs put together to make a few bucks…there isnt much real creativity in music anymore (a few exceptions of course)
They say that if you fill your thoughts with positivity you will be a positive person. I don’t want to come off as a tinkerbell, but what do you expect a society to be like if they have it hammered into their heads constantly that it’s cool to be in a gang and shoot people who you don’t like, and that all women are just nameless ho’s good for one thing only.
I miss the days of real music when the worst song spoke about love gone wrong. It is this positivity that is missing from music.
That’s why personally I like techno music. Besides having a ton of creativity in the way it is arranged and played, it is just such a happy and upbeat music (and no I don’t roll).
I also love Hip Hop, there are some seriously talented and beautiful songs out there.
You know when you get these suburban upper middle class white kids singing about urban oppression and gang warfare, it just makes you wonder what their mindset is. The funny thing is that these “oppressed” rappers are filthy rich and have sold out long ago, while advocating to the youth a lifestyle they would never revisit.
Rap is dead? Good riddance.
Rap is just doggerel, the lowest form of wit.
R.I.P.
#22 — I think what you’re referring to is the way singers like Frank Sinatra referred to casual sex using only innuendo —rock & roll, country music, r&b, jazz, blues all have many, many songs about sex –what kind of music are you talking about ? gospel?
i doth quote Chuck D
“you singers are spineless as you sing your senseless songs to the mindless, your general subject love is minimal, it’s sex for a profit”
#18, chickenhawk03
One of these days you will wake up and say to yourself, “Gee self, I should have listened to my elders because they are obviously so much smarter than I”.
What you just wrote in 18 helps explain why so many of your posts have an immature backing to them. Are any of those “artists” mentioned in your post a musician?
#15 um, elvis and john lennon were junkies, johnny cash was a whoremonger, how about alcoholic “no-show” george jones? bikers are huge meth traffickers, how about gene simmons bragging about his numbers? country singers sing of murder in many many songs and gratuitously glorify outlaws been to a rock concert lately? you can get high off pot just standing there — great role models one and all — try again.
>>Did I read that right? Dvorak listening to the Getto Boys????
Uh, no. You did NOT read that right. Try again.
btw, they’ve been declaring rock dead since i was a kid and well, there are no less than 4 rock stations in my market, so um, good luck with that.
#6 = FAIL.
http://files.samhart.net/humor/fail.jpg
#22
> I miss the days of real music when
> the worst song spoke about love
> gone wrong. It is this positivity
> that is missing from music.
What days were those? *Every* era of music has songs that talk about quite a bit more than just love. Off the top of my head, I can think of songs from the past forty years that speak about death while racing, early pregnancy, parental rejection, drugs, revolution, war, peace, and sexually transmitted diseases and that is just in the ten seconds I thought about it.
A former jazz musician and physicist I knew before he passed away once told me that the difference between a sophisticated music listener and an unsophisticated one was in the about of reptition in their music. The more sophisticated music listener will tend towards music with less repition and visa versa for an unsophisticated one.
Maybe now these kids ‘ll learn play instruments now.
Rap started to suck years ago and it only has itself to blame. The type of rap being produced 20 years ago was far more varied in both lyrical content and musical style. Anyone who thinks that the gangstas can reinvent themselves and start doing ballads to ‘save’ hip hop is nuts.
Don’t just blame the record companies either, it was the consumers themselves who guaranteed that we’d arrive here today… NWA sold a ton, A Tribe Called Quest didn’t. And it wasn’t suburban white kids who decided that sensitive/political rap wasn’t acceptable. The consumers might be the white boys in Ohio and New Jersey but the arbitrators of taste are the brothers in the ‘hood. Blacks felt that the ghetto rap was more authentic than the more creative or political stuff and the buzz for different acts was a reflection of how the music played on the streets.
Another thing that is often unspoken but is part of the problem of rap and ‘hip hop culture’ is that the rappers present their fantasy ghetto lives as ‘real’ and allude to the notion that all the raps are somehow autobiographical. Many a kid, black or white, has acted out in a thuggish fashion emulating rappers. The hip hop ‘culture’ never castigates its adherents for making it seem like carring guns and robbing people is a normal day to day activity for all black people.
Only a disturbed person would listen to Slayer and actually believe that the band really kills people or worships the devil. Rap fans don’t seem to have this facility to discern fact from fiction and the rappers constant talk of keeping it ‘real’ helps keep the facts obscured.
And just to clarify, I bought ‘it takes a nation of millions..’ and ‘reign in blood’ on vinyl when they came out back in the day.