Rappers aren’t rapping anymore. That’s not the grumble of an old-school fan or knee-jerk disappointment upon hearing say the Kanye/Lil Wayne/Jay-Z/T.I track “Swagger Like Us” or the rap-less “Love Lockdown”, it’s just a fact. Most of radio’s rappers are doing as much singing or club-ready chanting as rapping, and the few guys still rapping are layover from the late 90s/early 2000s or are named Lil Wayne and Kanye West-and the “talents” of those two are for some reason, still up to debate.
Sure, there’s plenty of rapping in the “underground”–which at this point, just means, not one of the like 12 artists that can still get rap radio support–and the so-called “hipster rap” trend/sub-genre offers some genuine rapping, but really, rappers just aren’t rapping anymore and it’s a bummer, but it also just makes sense.
The height of rap “lyricism” (a term that means nothing but everyone reading this knows its meaning) was during the early-to-mid-90s when hyper-poetic rappers like Wu-Tang and Nas and Biggie ruled the radio. Since then, every rapper’s tried to occupy that same space and failed, not for a lack of talent, but because it’s a pretty much perfect era that was able to function at a pretty high-level of visibility with a relative lack of corporate interruption…and then it ended. The death of Biggie and Tupac, Wu-Tang’s dissolution, enter the era of Puffy–all the stuff you’ll one day read about in a music textbook on the history of rap– but most importantly (and word to Dart Adams) The Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Nas’ story of never being able to truly top his classic Illmatic is also the story of every rapper to pick up a mic and get influenced by Nas or any of those 92-96 classics, constantly looking back to the shadow of that 90s era and never being able to top it. In the world of smart people books and stuff, it’s considered “the anxiety of influence”; basically, the weird tension of wanting to respect and also transcend your influences takes on a kinda fucked-up father/son relationship.
Many of the trends of recent rap, stuff like, rhyming words with the same words, non-sequitur similes, contempt for metaphors, increasingly out-there pop culture references, a bounds-less sense of free association, and a tendency to mix and merge musical influences outside of hip-hop, are often cited for the “decline” of “lyricism” and that may be true, but it’s also a bunch of artists finally, formally rejecting what I’ll call, “the Nas formula”.
And the word “formula” is used advisedly because at this point, it’s nothing more than that. This is not about Nas’ lyrical brilliance or lack thereof–many songs on the recent Untitled maintain Nas’ energy and verbal brilliance–but about the way that like most things, it got reduced to a messy series of verbal signs, signifiers, and cliches that connote “lyrical” to an audience of both ignorant and well-informed rap fans. Wander into any college rap show or arrive really early for the first act of say, a GZA show and you’ll see the “Nas formula” at-hand: Rap with lots of feigned passion, use some big words, eschew a lot of broads talk, vaguely invoke politics and you’re there.
Kanye West and Lil Wayne are both post-lyrical, understanding and well-informed by 90s rap but increasingly disinterested in overtly having much to do with it. This is hard for older rap fans whose ears have been accustomed to the “Nas formula” to accept. The artistic choices, some of them strange and ill-advised, sound more like a lack of talent than an attempt to forge some new, interesting way to rap. Joke punchlines and wordplay puns stretched so far that the joke is just how far it was taken, hold as much clout as solid metaphors and to-the-point storytelling.
One of the roots of the post-lyrical phase is Dipset’s “No Homo”. The “No homo” line is as much about hyper-making sure you didn’t say some gay stuff as it was about bending the meanings of phrases into every conceivable direction and finding something gay in even the most innocuous phrases. “No Homo” was a word game created by a bunch of rappers obsessed with word-games. There’s a clear connection between “no homo” and something like Wayne saying “they cannot see me/Like Hitler”. Kanye’s a rapper that on College Dropout was pretty much rapping like it was 1992–the “De La Soul” formula if you will, something oddly enough, Pharrell pretty much lives by every time he raps–but has made a decision to fall into the weirdo word games and purposefully groan-inducing punchline goofiness of post-lyrical rap. These guys are painfully aware that the “Nas formula” cannot be improved upon and instead, take a little from it here and there but try to do something else. This is the same thing that has happened in the history of every art-form.
While the argument could be made that generally art does not “devolve”, there’s a sense in which an end-run is made around complexity or maxmalism because it’s sort of come to a head. The history of 20th century art is a series of artists trying really weird and different stuff–”make it new” being the motto of Modernism–with less and less interest in tradition. How painting got from beautiful well-rendered landscapes, to weirdo scribbles and splatter on canvas has been well-documented, and it’s sort of the same thing as rap’s 90s era, a sort of peak of verbal complexity that inevitably had to be cut-down and fucked around with or completely drown.
The logical extension of the “Nas formula” is the Grad school wordplay jerk-off party of Anticon or El-P at his most verbose and didactic, which you know, worked fine as an alternative but simply couldn’t and shouldn’t function at anything resembling “popular” music, which Wu-Tang, Nas, etc really were for a few years ago (the falling-out in popularity of lyrical rap must also be in part, the fault of the artists who seemingly forgot how to make catchy hooks to accompany their lyric-driven verses).
Southern rap’s infiltration has a lot to do with this too. As the Golden era gets a little further away, reconsideration and re-canonization has come along and part of that has been a fairly radical re-focusing of who and what influenced whom. The latest generation of rappers are younger than me and so, Jay-Z–who is a kind of of a different generation than Nas, Wu, etc.–is one of the benchmarks of lyricism. Wu Tang’s post-Forever fall-out coincides with Ghostface’s reinvention and there’s kinda a generation more influenced by the weirdo, almost post-lyrical insanity of Ghost than Wu’s hard-edged rhymes as a whole. Wayne and Kanye too, find as much to like in weirdo-rappers like Kool Keith and Grand Puba or even the garbled goofiness of Ma$e as do they those rappers’ more stalwart peers.
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