What happened to hip-hop? It seems like it just fell off the face of the Earth. Was it the world that changed? The rappers that changed? The optimization of dj equipment? Ego?The east vs. west coast battle? The impact of the music industry? The death of a fad? Or are we still creating hip-hop with an evolved sound I’m just not acclimated to yet?
Something is different. I wasn't even a thought at the inception of hip-hop and still, that electric feeling I got from hearing “I Ain’t No Joke” by Eric B and Rakim hasn’t flowed through my veins since the early 2000s at best.
There was no greater matrimony than the rapper-dj duo back then and their bond was stronger than at least half of these cracker jack box marriages in America right now. I remember watching Mos Def flow over beats like the spring in my hometown with the cleanest, best tasting water.
The lyricism had layers, the beats were laced with sultry vocals, dj scratches that screamed practice for hours finding the right notch in the record; the songs had soul.
I’m from the South so hip-hop took a while to enter my orbit but when I did I was fully vested; up all night learning how to keep cadence, beat boxing and evetually writing my own rhymes. It became more than a music genre for me.
It was my escape from the classical music world I excelled in, where I sat for hours learning to sight read or learning a new aria in some distant foreign language or learning how to harmonize with 56 other people.
Hip-hop to me was always so authentic, so real in ways the choir and theatre world simply could never be yet now as I sit here writing this I ponder on what hip-hop is now in 2026. I’m going to have a listen to some artists categorized as hip-hop right now and I will be back with my findings. Stay tuned.
Shoutout to Joel Muniz for this post’s stock photo image.
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