Older listeners of hip-hop criticize the current state of the music genre and blame new hip-hop artists. Now, over 40 years have passed since hip-hop’s beginning, and it seems as if hip-hop has been split down the middle between its listeners. The music genre has morphed since merging with mainstream society, as a myriad of different artists have adopted hip-hop and made it their own sound. The definition of hip-hop has changed since its birth in 1973 at a birthday party on the West side of the Bronx, New York City. If anything, the term is helpful at least as confirmation that young rappers, like them or not, are making new sounds and rendering themselves purely unintelligible to closed minds, as hip-hop has always done.“Lil Yachty” by Anton Mak is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons) But “mumble rap” is more ill-fated than “trap,” “gangsta,” “backpack,” or “boom bap” - or even “mumblecore,” which is now an accepted genre of film - given that the term is, by design, more a messy put-down than a coherent musical (or aesthetic) assessment. “Trap,” which theoretically describes hard Atlanta street rap, has somehow come to include all bass-heavy synth beats with stuttering hi-hats, regardless of where they come from or what kind of rapping goes over those beats.
Granted, most popular subgenre terms become reductive after a point. As long as I continue to prosper, I’ll take mumbling to the top.”
“I’m not saying I really be spitting,” he recently told The Breakfast Club, “but I feel like I open up my mouth, or I be harmonizing and singing. being “overrated” and disparaging of ’90s rappers and their fans as “old and washed up.” Once Yachty shot back at Pete Rock, fans and critics rallied around “mumble rap” as hip-hop’s great generational fissure - even as Yachty himself has pointed out that he doesn’t really mumble on songs. Two months later, Wiz Khalifa used the term “mumble rap” on Hot 97 to describe “lil homies” who “don’t want to rap” as hip-hop’s dominant fad, prompted by an Ebro question regarding Lil Yachty and Lil Uzi Vert.īut it was Pete Rock who truly popularized the term in September when he criticized Yachty in a couple of Instagram captions, following the upstart’s comments on the Notorious B.I.G. 1 single, “Panda” - a song so wildly unintelligible that the rapper spent 90 percent of his video interviews last year repeating the lyrics slowly so that fans could understand what he’s even saying on it.
The sentiment has been kicking around since last April, thanks largely to Desiigner’s no. Which brings us to the other way to think about “mumble rap” - as a reclaimed pejorative that fails as a musical description, and that gets trickier to define the more rappers it encompasses. They’re two very different personas who make very different rap music. I say “apparently” because - outside of being young, and being black, and being rappers - Lil Uzi Vert and 21 Savage don’t have much in common. There are two ways to think about “mumble rap.” First, as a loose contemporary hip-hop subgenre that apparently includes rappers such as Lil Uzi Vert and 21 Savage as well as the other, aforementioned examples. Kendrick Lamar Will Never Rap Harder Than He’s Rapping on ‘Damn.’