Graphic via POW
Son Raw might blow up but he won’t go pop.
To my great shame, I’m not a spectator sports guy, my occasional interest in MMA or the NBA finals’ narrative aside. Nevertheless, the gravitational heft of the Super Bowl means I get sucked into a family watch party once a year, and this time around, the prospect of Kendrick Lamar humiliating degenerate sports-gambler Drake on the biggest stage possible was too good to pass up.
That halftime show, already old news, was riveting, a spectacle brought low only by Kendrick’s bizarre indulgence in bell bottom jeans. But while watching a man slowly ether Drake is good for the soul, half my attention went to my boomer father’s complete befuddlement at the proceedings. This was to be expected. He reasonably lacked the past 25 years of cultural reference points necessary to get the most out of a halftime show so deeply rap-coded. Hell, I’m sure part of the reason I gravitated towards hip-hop as a teenager is that my father simply didn’t like or understand it, and the ensuing years haven’t done anything to convince him popular music didn’t peak in the early ’70s. Nevertheless, his confusion bothered me because I was beginning to relate.
Not when it comes to millennial avatar Kendrick Lamar mind you. Kendrick makes complete sense to me, and unprompted, I’d be happy to monologue about how he built his style by hybridizing Kurupt, Nas, Wayne, Project Blowed and a half-dozen other tastefully curated reference points. I’ve happily talked shop about how Migos changed the game for a decade after my age bracket collectively decided that “real rap” died with Loud Records. I still hit up club nights – sober!
And still, slowly but surely, my innate understanding of new popular music is fading. One minute I’m lording my Billie Eilish and RXKNephew fandom over friends that stopped checking for new music during Obama’s first term, and the next I’m hearing OsamaSon and I’m left wondering where it all went so wrong.
For civilians with only a passing interest in music, this is the natural order of things. They’ve even had scientists look at this shit and conclude that it has something to do with brain development in your teenage years, which means I’ll forever be thankful that my younger self got into Wu-Tang. The WW2 generation hated rock, Boomers hate rap, Gen X hates autotune and I doubt I’ll ever have the inclination to listen to Chappell Roan of my own volition. This wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t my job to write about music. Given my circumstances, suddenly finding the vast majority of pop music aimed at 20 somethings unworthy of engagement is a cause for concern.
The caveat is that I actually still listen to and enjoy plenty of new music, it’s just stuff at the margins of popular culture, a comparative rounding error in the books of streaming services that have purposefully reoriented the listening public towards a few titanic pop acts. Last column, I poked fun at the cottage industry that has sprung up around the Griselda Records house style, but I’d rather skip practically every “culturally important record with something to say about the world” in favor of a 20-minute Westside Gunn EP made up mostly of jail phone calls or Boldy James’ third album of the year.
I remember the struggle when fans of East Coast rap had to live off a couple of Prodigy and Sean Price tapes for years on end, and I’m more than willing to let rich vinyl collectors finance a subgenre made entirely out of the music I love most. I just feel more than a little guilty when I hear a very earnest 20-something’s album and roll my eyes at it out of a complete lack of interest.
Part of that’s innate, I’m half-Jewish, half-Catholic and all guilt. Still, music writers are also conditioned to get on the new music hamster wheel and hang on for dear life, reflexively hyping up the next big thing for fear of being called a hater. I started reading about and discussing music in my 20s with plenty of free time, and that process was probably fun and felt natural. Now, like an aging baller with bad knees and back pain, I may never land a triple double again, even if my version of the triple double is caring enough about Nettspend to point out how awful his rapping is (I told you I wasn’t a sports guy).
At some point, I’m going to feel like a fraud come year end list season, because my listening will have consisted entirely of old Jungle vinyl rips, Roc Marci-core and a running playlist of Detroit and Milwaukee rap to keep up appearances.
The silver lining is that I didn’t start writing about music out of a surfeit of love for what’s popular: I started out blowing raspberries at the mediocre caucasity of bands like Animal Collective and The Strokes, and I believe history has absolved me quite nicely on that point. I was spoiled during the 2010s, a decade high on Blog Rap, Atlanta weirdness and late period Bass music, but this isn’t the first time the majority of the cultural industry’s offerings have left me cold.
In fact, the return of the mid is actually right on time: the 20-year nostalgia cycle has now hit the peak Bush years and while it’s never quite the same stuff that gets regurgitated, it’s pretty obvious to me that indie sleaze, rage rap, and bro country are the tragedy of the late MP3 era replayed as farce within the streaming services’ walled gardens. Five years from now, the ambient chatter around how great the blog era was should, in theory, coalesce into the sort of major label rap I can get behind, just as TDE, A$AP and company rose out of the ashes of the ’90s. I just hope I’m tapped in enough to care, because if not, I’m pretty sure Westside Gunn will be on Vol. 20 in the same span of time.
Until then, the goal is to keep an open mind: the concept of pop standom may be hive-inducing and I’ll keep wishing overdoses on white cyberpunk rappers, but there’s more music being released today than ever before, even if much of it is AI slop and much of the rest is just as bad. Whether it’s weird one off K-Pop bands taking inspiration from pop garage, grime revivalist crews using Youtube to bring back the energy of pirate radio or the wide breadth of exciting music operating under the umbrella of jazz, there’s so much quality art that deserves more attention, if only to offset the glut of music that’s only put out to spur parasocial relationships ahead of potential branding opportunities for serfs who signed 360 deals. That alone makes it worth it to keep bucking the trends instead of going quietly into the night.
We rely on your support to keep POW alive. Please take a second to donate on Patreon!
