That's that shit I don't like

Why popular rap music is boring now and how it could get its swagger back

In 2023, the supposed arbiters of taste began ringing knells for popular rap music. And, to be fair, the hand-wringing was somewhat warranted. For the first time since 1993, no rap artist claimed the top spot on either the Hot 100 or Billboard 200 during the first half of the year. Meanwhile, the genre's market share, once a towering 28.2% in 2020, slid to 25.8% by 2023. While numbers rarely tell the full story, these declines were at least somewhat indicative of a palpable mainstream fatigue with the rap game. Even industry stalwart Juicy J voiced alarm, lamenting to Complex that rap sales had plummeted a whopping 40%. “Check the charts. Check the math…What are we, as rappers, producers, composers, going to do about this shit?”

Fortunately, The Checkwriter’s concerns proved unnecessary, as—predictably and almost comically—the doomsayers’ dire predictions fell flat just one year later in 2024. Not only did rap reclaim its throne, but it did so with big-time force, making up 38% of all top 10 hits and delivering three number-one albums in the first three months alone. What’s most striking to me about this rebound, however, isn’t the fact that it happened but that very few people seem to care about it. Aside from a lone Complex article and a few tepid blog posts from minor rags like Word Is Bond, the mainstream conversation has largely overlooked the genre’s comeback story. 2023’s dip inspired a media shitstorm, so why hasn’t the comeback generated similar hype? I would think content farms like Complex would be chomping at the bit to get in on the action.

Bro is not going back home

The muted response to rap’s resurgence isn’t just a little hangover from 2023—it suggests that the exhaustion never truly faded. People are listening, as the numbers suggest, but nobody’s really talking. I suspect what’s happening here is that popular rap has simply become too big to fail, its momentum restarted not by artistic invention but by a steady churn of formulaic hits engineered for maxed-out algorithmic viability. There are songs, of course, but there are no songs. No longer driven by genuine aesthetic urgency, rap now sustains itself on spectacle, institutional backing, and the inertia of its own dominance. Its creative pulse has been dulled by predictive economic models that prioritize mass consumption through calculated repetition, optimizing for engagement metrics rather than ingenuity. Our indifferent fanfare isn’t merely audience fatigue—it’s the logical endpoint of a genre that has traded risk for reliability. Mass entertainment thrives not on innovation but on iteration, repackaging culture into sleek, frictionless commodities. Nobody is celebrating rap’s comeback because it never left. It’s everywhere, all the time.

I imagine some of you might now be fastening your boxing gloves, so I’ll anticipate a potential counterargument and say, no, it hasn’t always been this way. Popular rap music has always fascinated me because it once seemed like the last viable avenue for engaging normie audiences with genuinely transgressive ideas and challenging sounds. In other words, it was potentially our last effective pop cultural Trojan horse. (BTW, whether any of this was actually subversive, I’ll leave to people with PhDs to decide.)

I want to better articulate my point by offering a crude history of mainstream rap from 2010 and beyond. The early 2010s were defined by albums that didn’t just dominate charts but actively shaped what the heads and hypebeasts call the culture. Albums like Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Chief Keef’s Finally Rich pushed sonic and lyrical boundaries while still commanding the attention of wine moms, frat kids, and hustlers alike. These weren’t just hits; they were cultural events, provocations that blurred the line between high/street art and mass entertainment.

Kanye, ever the architect, turned maximalist rap excess into a kind of highbrow theater, fusing Wagnerian grandeur with messy, unruly social critique. His success established a new paradigm: to be a superstar was to be a visionary of fame, politics, and self-destruction. It was a posture—equal parts philosopher and provocateur—that 2010s titans like Kendrick Lamar and Drake would adopt during their own ascents. Good kid, m.A.A.d city positioned Kendrick as rap’s premier literary auteur, a meticulous storyteller mapping the moral and psychological landscapes of Compton, while Take Care cast Drake as a brooding bon vivant, his epic sorrow unfolding over vast, melancholy expanses of 808s and moody synths. Both projects marked a shift—mainstream rap had become as invested in high-concept narrative as it was in hit-making.

This is what I’ll call, loosely, the Kanye effect: a moment when rap’s most commercially viable figures also felt like its most ambitious, capable of unsettling the normie sensibilities that typically sand down pop culture’s edges. It was a brief, arguably brilliant period when mainstream rap still had the power to shock, to challenge, to feel genuinely urgent.

On the opposite side of the same coin, Chief Keef wrenched the daily horrors of Southside Chicago into mainstream consciousness, transforming drill rap from a localized menace into a global phenomenon. If Kanye was rap’s Lydia Tár, orchestrating grand theater with a kind of unruly precision, Keef was its wild-eyed demolitionist, razing the old guard with turbocharged murder rap. He was the Kanye set’s latchkey problem child—a gangsta rapper on steroids—whose anthems about robberies, fallen friends, and drive-bys hit just as hard at an Englewood block party as they did over the PA at a high school basketball game in Glencoe. Finally Rich went platinum, and its leading single, “Love Sosa,” nears a billion streams today. Keef wasn’t just big—he was seismic.

In the early 2010s, successful rappers largely adhered to one of two models: Kanye’s maximalist auteurism or Keef’s dirty realism, distinct yet intertwined approaches that together shaped the dominant sounds of the time. But as the decade wore on, things fell apart. Kanye gradually succumbed to the very excesses he had both indulged in and critiqued on MBDTF, spiraling into the psychosis of fame and settling into the complacency that often accompanies vast wealth. By 2022, he had rotted into a corpse of his former self, churning out hyped but forgettable singles and albums that ranged from middling to outright dogshit, staging increasingly erratic public stunts—threatening Pete Davidson, embracing Naziism—to stay afloat in the tabloids.

Throughout his descent, a wave of would-be torchbearers emerged across rap’s many subgenres, though few managed to leave an impact that lasted more than a few years. Some died before their legacies could fully take shape (Lil Peep, XXXTentacion), others settled into respectable but unremarkable consistency (Future, Pusha T), and more carved out niches catering to specific target audiences—chief among them, suburban failsons moshing at Rolling Loud (Travis Scott, Lil Yachty). By 2017 or so, the Kanye effect had lost its steam, fracturing rap into competing factions, each vying for dominance in a battle that produced no clear victor and left the genre without a singular, compelling identity. In an attempt to bypass this stalemate, the industry pivoted toward a hyper-commercial, instantly-dated sound—one that straddled an awkward, creepy middle ground between children’s entertainment and adult indulgence. Consider the major-key sugar rush of KYLE’s “iSpy” or DRAM’s “Broccoli,” two 2016 Top 40 trainwrecks that paired lines like “all my bitches come in pairs like balls in my nutsack” with toy pianos and candy-coated synths fit for an episode of Paw Patrol. Mercifully, this moment never fully cohered into a proper thing. Its shelf life expired before it could metastasize.

Meanwhile, Keef, mired in legal troubles, retreated from the spotlight and plunged into definitively experimental terrain, leaving a void in the booming drill scene that the industry was all too eager to fill. What emerged here was pop trap, a diluted, more pliable variant that marketing brass could graft onto anything, from Miley Cyrus to viral EDM. By 2022, drill’s biggest names were rubbing shoulders with Taylor Swift. Of course, drill proper lives on today, but its audience has shifted from the mainstream to a smaller subset of fans who seemingly enjoy the genre only for the real-world carnage that surrounds it. Drill fans today spend more time cataloguing murders, tracking feuds like box scores, and discussing arrests with the fervor of true-crime junkies rather than poring over the music itself. Meanwhile, the industry, long adept at profiting off street violence, ensures the circle remains unbroken. Labels quietly monetize doomed neighborhood heroes while cheerleaders like Akademiks, Adam22, and r/Chiraqology play hype men to a conveyor belt of Black death. Law enforcement exploits it, the media sensationalizes it, and audiences consume it with morbid fascination. A tale as old as time. Tuning into the drillosphere today is nothing short of staring into the abyss. You either get "Think You The Shit (Fart)” or "When I See You.”

With Kanye’s grand ambitions depleted and Keef’s dirty realism both co-opted and exploited, popular rap now drifts without a center. Where the early 2010s offered two distinct models based on Kanye and Keef, today’s landscape feels aimless, suspended between manufactured hype and algorithmic disposability. Recall the biggest names of the past five years: Future, Lil Uzi Vert, 21 Savage, Gunna, Lil Baby. Each has delivered moments of brilliance, sure, but the era-defining spark—the urgency, recalcitrance, and inventiveness of the early 2010s—feels conspicuously absent. Album rollouts arrive with the fanfare of epoch-defining events, only to recede into the churn days later, eclipsed by the next preordained release. Can anyone honestly tell the difference between Mixtape Pluto and I NEVER LIKED YOU? I don’t think so. These projects, rather than shaking the culture, often feel like strategic maneuvers carefully engineered to boost streams and social engagement, yet devoid of any lasting impact. What remains is a genre that feels both overexposed and underwhelming, everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. It is precisely this numbing ubiquity underlying the mainstream’s exhaustion with the genre.

An apologist for rap’s current moment might point me toward Kendrick Lamar here, citing the popularity of his fist-pumping liberation anthems as proof of a healthy rap ecosystem. I am ambivalent toward this claim. A tricky figure to pin down, Kendrick cut his teeth in the 2010s by releasing masterful, densely layered albums—furious in rhyme, unrivaled in storytelling—that brought the harsh realities of the contemporary Black experience to normie audiences without beating them over the head with sanctimonious moralizing.

From the get-go, his genius lay in his ability to provoke without ever being provocative himself; he shied away from media, gave few interviews, and avoided overt political affiliations, even as songs like “Alright” and “The Blacker the Berry” became the de facto soundtrack for BLM. Kendrick’s undeniable talent and revolutionary pose, paired with his indifference to celebrity, earned him mass acclaim from what Freddie DeBoer calls "The Right Kind of Whites,” the elite cultural institutions venerated by the “brownstones-and-podcasts-educated urbanite striver class.” Throughout the ‘10s, he racked up 17 Grammy’s, a Pulitzer Prize, and hundreds of laudatory articles from precisely these quarters. Through little fault of his own, Kendrick became a cultural credential, a shorthand for taste among a very particular, very annoying, and very white cohort. You know them: “The kind with $100-a-pop edibles and a copy of Intermezzo casually splayed out on their Noguchi table,” as DeBoer has it. As unfair as it might be to say, Kendrick has, in ways, become “The Emperor of Whites.”

I’d be more willing to look past this culture war BS if the quality of Kendrick’s music still carried the umph it had in the 2010s. But for me, the spark has faded. His last exciting record was DAMN. in 2017, and his last truly great one was Good Kid, M.A.A.D City in 2012. When he returned from a five-year hiatus with Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers in 2022, the reception was commercially and critically mixed. Overwrought and self-consciously tied to the anxieties of the moment—COVID, trans identity, the summer of protests—the album often buckled under its own historicized weight. It failed to produce a breakout hit, and Kendrick, for the first time in his career, seemed less like a generational voice than an aging star struggling to keep pace with the times.

Then, in recent months, he corrected course by doing something decidedly un-Kendrick: He embraced the spotlight. He doused his long-simmering feud with Drake in gasoline, unleashing a five-round barrage of diss tracks that ignited a media firestorm and propelled the standout, “Not Like Us,” past a billion streams. The song itself is fine, an infectious L.A. Mustard cut that effectively bounces its way into you, but it lacks the singular ingenuity that made “Swimming Pools” or “HUMBLE” instant classics. Strip away the spectacle of a heavyweight rap war, and it’s hard to imagine the track reaching such astronomical numbers.

Four months after the song’s explosion, the NFL named Kendrick the headliner for the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show. (If you work in media, the dots aren’t hard to connect—this is textbook flighting.) Kendrick at the Super Bowl is the same flawed audience strategy that led Kamala to sell camo campaign hats: a calculated pivot to generate buzz by either provoking or winning over the beer-guzzling, Barstool set. After conquering the “The Right Kind of Whites,” he now needed to set his crosshairs on the Wrong Kind. Again, none of this would bother me much if Kendrick were still making great albums, but he’s not. His surprise (surprise, surprise!) 2024 release, GNX, was uninspired, a forgettable effort from an artist now more invested in spectacle than substance. He's no longer a legitimate culture shaker in the way he was during the 2010s; he’s become edgy in the way Saltburn is edgy—calculated, aestheticized, and packaged for upper-middle class white discourse.

If popular rap wants to make things right—to awake from its current slumber—it could look to two of its most vibrant but historically under-leveraged subgenres: Atlanta futuristic swag and Chicago bop. These styles, while vastly different in sonic texture and regional character, share a crucial trait that today’s marquee rap stars sorely lack: they revel in movement, spontaneity, and, most importantly, fun. They aren’t weighed down by the grandstanding seriousness of corporate-approved spectacle or flattened by algorithmic demands or cannibalized by cycles of violence. Instead, they operate on a different axis entirely, one that prioritizes rhythm over rhetoric, swag over discourse, and feeling over branding.

Take Atlanta’s swag era, a movement that emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s, bridging the gap between the ringtone rap explosion and the eventual dominance of trap. If early-2000s Atlanta belonged to crunk—think Lil John’s guttural call-and-response chants—swag took that same rowdy, communal energy and coated it with a layer of futuristic varnish. It was glossy but unpretentious, stylish but loose. Artists like Rich Kidz, J Money, and Yung L.A. specialized in shambolic, synth-driven club bangers that felt tailor-made for both high school proms and Magic City. Their songs were built for immediate, physical response—light on introspection, heavy on hooks, with beats that pulsed in multicolor. Listen to “This is How We Play” by J Money above, a quintessential swag-era track. Stuttering synth arpeggios jitter above rolling snares, while J Money’s delivery—half-sung, half-rapped—glides across the instrumental with effortless charm like a pimped-out Sean Kingston. “And we do the Ricky Bobby, call it shake ‘n’ bake,” he boasts, invoking Talladega Nights with the kind of playful, pop culture-laced bravado that defined the era—half inside joke, half flex, all good times. The whole thing carries the vibe of a neon-lit roller rink on a Friday night. It’s unfussy, a little weird, and impossible to resist.

Swag production, pioneered by producers like KE on the Track and Sonny Digital, ditched the ominous, gothic textures of early Atlanta trap in favor of bright, bouncy instrumentation. It was a sound of endless forward motion: pulsing square synths, skittering hi-hats, and a call-and-response structure that emphasized collective contribution over individual performance. Even the artwork that accompanied these releases reflected swag’s busy, unpolished charm—blurry, low-res cover art often featuring garish fonts, chaotic collages of luxury logos, or hastily edited photos of the artists flexing in designer fits. It was a DIY aesthetic that moved its feet, built not for brooding headphone sessions or Jumbotron spectacle but for the immediacy of the dance floor, the house party, the parking lot function. Swag tracks like “This is How We Play” didn’t concern themselves with narrative depth or lyrical complexity; their brilliance lay in their sheer physicality, their ability to turn any space into a party.

Swag’s DNA carried forward in artists like Young Thug and Playboi Carti, whose early works like 1017 Thug and Die Lit took its melodic exuberance and warped it into something alien and unclassifiable, distilling rap to what makes the genre so much fun in the first place: rhythm, texture, heart. However, for all their groundbreaking contributions to the genre, Thug and Carti have, like many of their peers, succumbed to the very complacency that now plagues chart-topping rap. Thug’s albums since 2016’s Jeffrey have become indistinguishable from one another, and Carti’s MUSIC tests the limits of patience. (While I refuse to believe anyone who says they made it all the way through that slog, I’ll gladly acknowledge the genius of “Like Weezy,” a direct homage to Rich Kidz.) Compare this to the dizzying, untamed excitement of “WE STRAIGHT NOW” by the forgotten swag posse POLO KIDZ. When was the last time you heard a rap song as thrilling and as weirdly earnest as this?

Yet the potential for a swag-era return remains. As I’ve argued, the mainstream rap landscape has grown bloated with machine-learned mediocrity, but there’s an opening for a sound that prioritizes fun and spontaneity over the calcified seriousness that so often drags down today’s releases. Swag thrived on being there, on a kind of reckless joy that feels sorely absent in an time of calculated rollouts and streaming-optimized filler. A return to that ethos—to rap that is infectious, unselfconscious, and built for communal experience—could be precisely what the genre needs to break free from its current malaise. Let us have fun again.

The same could be said for Chicago bop, another regional phenomenon that briefly flickered into mainstream consciousness before fading into obscurity. Originating on the West Side of Chicago, bop emerged in the early 2010s as a counterpoint to the city’s dominant drill scene helmed by Keef. Where drill was stark and unflinching, bop was buoyant, fast-paced, and built for dancing. It borrowed from Chicago’s long history of juke and footwork, incorporating both genres’ frantic percussion and rapid-fire hi-hats, but added a melodic pop sensibility to the mix that made it all more accessible. If drill was about confrontation, bop was about release, a momentary escape from the weight of reality. The sound was inextricably linked to the dance that gave it its name: an intricate, high-energy style that fused footwork with big, wavy arm swings and smooth glides. To understand bop, you had to see it in motion—this was music meant to be felt in the body, an interactive expression of joy in a city that too often found itself in mourning. Peep this video of bop trailblazers Stunt Taylor, BopKingDlow, and Lil Kemo doing their thing for an example.

Tracks like Sicko Mobb’s “Fiesta,” DJ Nate’s “Gucci Goggles,” and S.B.E’s “Killin’ Shit” (above) exemplify bop’s frenetic, candy-coated euphoria—melodies stretched to their shimmering limits, Auto-Tune dialed to an ecstatic warble, and beats that bounce with an almost weightless momentum. More than just neighborhood anthems, these songs felt like bottled-up teenage joy, their hyperkinetic rhythm and collective energy an invitation to dance, flex, and escape. Peep this seminal video of Chicago’s Oak Park High School bopping their way into Spring Break for a clear example of what I’m talking about here. Despite its regional popularity and viral moments (DLow’s “DLow Shuffle” made waves in 2014, even earning a co-sign from Steve Harvey), bop never found a sustained mainstream presence, perhaps because the industry largely ignored its rise in favor of the blood money proffered by drill. It fizzled out before it could realize its potential, though its legacy lingers faintly in the aggro melodies of pluggnb and the genre-melting chaos of hyperpop.

Still, the blueprint remains. A return to bop’s jackhammer rhythms, its emphasis on movement and community, could serve as a much-needed shock to a rap landscape that has become too bloated, too self-conscious to dance. In an era where major releases feel less like aesthetic offerings and more like meticulously optimized marketing campaigns, a sound that prioritizes unmitigated joy over brand curation could offer a way forward. Swag and bop were never about viral album rollouts or carefully orchestrated social media engagement—they were about the feeling of the moment, the rush of a perfectly executed dance move, the thrill of a song so infectious you couldn’t help but move. The subgenre thrived at block parties, on high school bleachers, in packed gymnasiums and clubs, places where music still functioned as a call to action rather than a commodity to be passively consumed.

Rap, at its best, has always been a genre defined by reinvention, of unexpected pivots and left-field resurgences. If the current landscape feels stagnant, it’s not because the genre itself has run out of ideas per se but because its dominant players have settled into a market-encouraged complacency that prizes scale over inspiration. The future of mainstream rap need not be yet another cycle of homogenized releases or publicity stunts from artists too big to fail. It could be something wilder, more chaotic, more alive—a reclamation of the restless, shape-shifting energy that made popular rap music the most dynamic art form of the past few decades. (No, don’t try and talk to me about shit like xaviersobased and BabyChiefDoIt here—they ain’t it.) The roadmap is already there, waiting for someone with enough swag to follow it.