Image via Complex Original
Rap is always molting and changing. It moves fast. If you're not careful, you're liable to get left behind—played out like Kwame and them fuckin' polka dots that he has become so sadly, sadly famous for. We've been paying close attention to the rap game this year (as always!) with an eye specifically trained on the annoying, passe, ridiculous and otherwise stress-inducing habits no one (apparently) tells rappers that fans secretly hate. There's more than a few of these things we as a community have just been accepting because "that's the way it is," even though there's no book written in stone somewhere saying that's the way it has to be. (Trends don't usually make a whole lot of sense when you really sit and think about the "why" part.)
Not to worry, though. Like Tupac, Beyonce, Aaliyah, and Aphex Twin, I care. I'm here for you. The following is a list of trends hip-hop needs to leave back in 2013 when the calendar switches over. Someone said something about "#newrules" this year, right? Well here's a list of cliches we shouldn't have ever put up with in the first place that, going forward, we should put a stop to, for the betterment of future generations of rap fans. Complex is for the children, ya heard?
Written by Craig Jenkins (CraigSJ)
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Hashtags in song titles & dollar signs in artist names.
Peace to Ma$e, much love to Curren$y, and shouts out to A$AP Mob, but going forward you new rappers are going to have to ease off the creative punctuation in your rap names. The obvious reason for it is that the majority of the people who are bound to discuss your music online are not the type to be bothered following you through whatever outré method you've selected to spell your name.
So you're not only asking your fans to go through needlessly elaborate keystrokes to say your name correctly, you're also putting a strain on your search engine presence, and you're hurting your visibility on Twitter. Symbols like dollar signs are treated a lot like blank spaces by search engines, and words with symbols in them can't trend or be included in hashtags on Twitter.
Do you really want to limit your web presence and annoy your fans in one fell swoop? No, right? Let's leave that $#!† behind next year, eh? Stop with the hashtags in song titles too, please. They only really make sense on Twitter, and even then they look like trending topic thirst.
Releasing songs in the wee hours of the morning.
Midnight music releases are a holdover from another era, a time when the only way to get a record was to buy it a hard copy in person. Before leaks and iTunes, if you wanted to be first on the block with whatever the new shit was, you had to camp out at a record store so eager to get a jump on release date sales that they'd open at midnight to sell copies.
The tradition died when leaks started rendering release dates sorta obsolete. Midnight digital releases in the social media era don't have any of the aforementioned practicalities attached. At best, they're an attempt to replicate the feel of after hours shivering outside a record store, since a depressing number of those simply don't exist anymore.
But in an era where blogs and social media are major avenues for trafficking your music, why would you wait until the wee hours of the morning, when readership is lightest, and bloggers are asleep-est, to drop something new? Why not drop your track or mixtape or snippet or trailer during the hours of the day people are most active on the Internet? It doesn't make any sense not to...unless you just hate bloggers so much and want them staying up all night because there's a rumor you might drop something.
Sneak disses. (Say names!)
Sneak disses have been on the rise in the years since subliminal master Biggie popped shit to half of New York and California on record without saying their names and passed his predilection for hidden darts onto Shawn "You only get half a bar" Carter.
Sneak disses have supplanted forthright on-record slander to the point where we can't always rightly tell who is and isn't beefing. Frank Ocean most likely went after Chris Brown on Earl Sweatshirt's album. Migos and Chief Keef may or may not have had words with each other on a series of songs this month. Unsubstantiated rumors suggested Future's "Sh!t" was for another ATL trap star. Kendrick Lamar and Pusha T both appear to have come at Drake on multiple occasions, and Drake has been lobbing shots at all takers since Take Care dropped.
In 2014, if you don't like another rapper to the point where you feel a need to express it in a song, say names! Stop robbing us of the excitement of open shit talk. Stop killing future classic diss wars before they get a chance to flourish. Do like Kendrick did on "Control" and call your competition out by name and charge the rest to the game.
Endless RT's of praise from fans.
What's the first thing you do after you follow a rapper on Twitter? All together now: Turn. Off. Retweets.
Rappers, are you aware of this?
The minute we follow a lot of you we very quickly get fried by the amount of self-promotional retweets you throw out there and just shut em clean off. Chances are we're already interested in your product if we've sought you out on social media. You're basically spamming testimonials to the already converted, preaching to the proverbial choir.
I get that it's an effective means of alerting people to the existence of new music you've released and an low stakes method of giving fans the indescribable feeling of their favorite artist acknowledging their existence. Social media is great for closing the gap between artist and listener like that. But there has got to be a more effective signal boost for your music than bombing everyone's Twitter feeds with people's flattering remarks about you, right? Right?
Multiple special editions & re-releases.
Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city is one of the great breakout rap albums of the decade, a much deserved profile boosting financial triumph for one of the best rappers to come out in years. But when it went to retail last fall, it arrived in a standard edition, a standard deluxe edition, an iTunes deluxe edition, a UK deluxe edition, and a Target deluxe edition. This is saying nothing of the Spotify exclusive Black Hippy remix of "The Recipe" or the reissue of the album this year that appended the Jay-Z assisted "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe (Remix)."
We understand the logic: you want to please retailers by giving them exclusives because they like special treatment, and you want to leave the door open to superfans who might spring for more than one copy of the album if you play your cards right. But pressing up three, four, and five different sets of bonus tracks isn't fair to fans who shell out good money to support your movement and quite frankly deserve to have all the extras, and reissuing albums that are still in print is gratuitous at best and borderline predatory at worst.
The appeal of quick turnover reissues is waning too: Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded - The Re-Up underperformed last year in part because retailers cagey about carrying what they worried would be deemed an extraneous holiday cash grab repackaging (even though the first disc contained thirty minutes of pretty good new music) decided to carry fewer units.
Thirsty freestyles over big songs that just came out.
Freestyles over other people's songs are an institution as old as rap itself. That's how we got "Rapper's Delight." The practice built a lot of careers at the dawn of the 2000s mixtape explosion, from the mercenary jacking-for-beats free-for-alls 50 Cent and G-Unit dropped on their come-up to Lil' Wayne doing his best Beyonce bars on Da Drought 3.
Fast forward to the 2010s, where shit's getting weird. In 2013, when you hear a major rap hit with an open bar or two at the end, you can't microwave dinner before somebody else has jumped on the beat. It's cool for about a minute; TDE did "U.O.E.N.O." justice and Drake bodied "Versace." Then a day or two passes, and everybody with half a buzz has dropped a freestyle. Then a week passes, and Twitter MCs are flexing over cheap artist's renderings of the beat.
Then Papoose shows up.
I understand a rapper's urge to try his luck over a beat that's a proven hit, but so few of these offer any noticeable improvement over the original, and every damn last one comes off thirsty. Real g's don't chase hits, they create em.
Rhyming about social media.
Rap's always been about keeping abreast of trends, but sometimes keeping up with the Joneses means five, ten years down the line you're gonna look a little dated.
There's probably a rap fan out there listening to the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Warning" right now mildly perplexed by the "Who the fuck is this paging me at 5:46 in the morning..." line because, "What is a pager?" The Biggie joint is a timeless classic, but technology moves at such a clip that whatever tech seems like hot shit when your record drops might not even be cool the next year.
So why do rappers keep rhyming about social media? Why's Jay saying "Fuck hashtags and retweets"? Why is Childish Gambino writing verses about Twitter mentions and emojis? Why's Fat Joe out here telling dudes to "Instagram That Hoe"? They're timestamping 2013 on the music, giving each line about the de rigeur social media sites of the era an expiration date.
You don't want your verses aging like warm milk, now, do you?
Trailers for videos and snippets for songs.
You're a rapper about to drop a new single. You announce a release date. We're excited. You release it. We love it. You drop a video. We love that too. That's how things used to work in the hip-hop industry.
In 2013, you announce you're announcing something. Then you announce a single. Then you release a 30-60 second song snippet. Then you let Funkmaster Flex drop 20 bombs over the edited audio of the full song on primetime radio. Then you send the song to iTunes.
After a while, you let slip you're shooting a video via behind the scenes stills. You wait a while and release a 30-60 second trailer for the video. Then you finally release the video.
It's a tedious and overcrowded release cycle, and it's very specifically designed to keep the rapper's name and music hot in the press even in the absence of new material to share. It's pimping the system. It's filler content cluttering the rap Internet. Don't lead your fans around dangling fractious bits of promo that only lead to slightly bigger bits of promo.
Mixtape countdown clocks.
Advances in technology have afforded artists a myriad of new avenues for the sale and promotion of their music, from streaming services like YouTube and Soundcloud to digital music retailers like the iTunes Store and Bandcamp.
This is saying nothing of file sharing services that allow an artist to drop music directly on the fans without the interference of a middleman, like Flying Lotus did this month when he unloaded a bunch of loosies and fragments onto the world via a zip file shared over Mediafire.
In this climate the continued reliance on mixtape sites like Datpiff and LiveMixtapes to do the heavy lifting in the rollout of mixtapes is perplexing. The interfaces are blocky, and major releases reliably crash one or both, forcing fans to just head over to whatever file sharing service the artist probably should've used in the first place.
The countdowns to mixtape releases employed on both sites are all right (if a little extra) when they work, but remember the week Lil' Wayne scheduled Dedication 5, then for a week every time the mixtape site countdowns went to zero, more time would pop back up on them? That sucked.
Why set up a countdown to the release of your tape if you know your tape isn't finished yet?
Poor punctuation and spelling in tweets. (Hi, Gucci)
Spelling. Punctuation. Grammar.
Embrace these pillars of human communication. Please.
I'm not asking for rappers to write like they went to school for it, but I do need y'all to be able to express basic thoughts using your words if you're going to maintain a social media presence. Be aware that words mean things. Try to spell them correctly. Your critical spelling errors are loads of fun for the rest of us, but they hurt your brand.
Maybe consider drafting outside help to handle your web presence? Whatever you do, don't replicate Gucci Mane's bridge-burning Twitter catastrophe where he played fast and loose with the English language in a three-day rant that was equal parts tragedy and side-splitting comedy.
Also, French Montana, this is just not a good look.
Hipster Scapegoating (aka using the word "hipster" when you just mean "white people")
Most of the bad habits we've called out so far have been actions perpetrated by artists. But we're not making it outta here without giving rap fans some of this work too. As a community we've been embroiled in a drawn-out series of skirmishes for control of the rap narrative, of what artists do and don't deserve attention in the media, on Twitter, the radio, what have you.
The rap Internet Hunger Games are divided into two factions: Those who grew up steeped in hip-hop culture and those who ostensibly didn't. Those assumed to be new to rap have been lumped in together under the pejorative banner of "hipster media" and blamed for all of the wrongs befalling rap in the 2010s: non-lyrical phenoms burning up the charts, the proliferation of blustery, violent trap music, outlandish developments in streetwear, literally everything.
But level with me here, level with yourself: what we talk about when we talk about "hipster media" isn't really hipsters or media, it's sneaky shorthand for "white people."
The underlying assumption is that black rap fans know better, that the ills of 2013 hip-hop are largely the machinations of clueless white interlopers. It's a crock of shit I run into on a weekly basis whenever someone disagrees with something I write about rap on the Internet and invariably cartwheels into my Twitter mentions or wherever else to call me some kind of "white hipster."
It's comedy to me because I'm black, and I've lived the overwhelming majority of my 32 years on Earth living in Harlem. I came up loving Nas and Wu-Tang. I listen to Future now too, and there ain't a damn thing wrong with it. You lose when you make assumptions about people based off the music they listen to, and you lose when you fail to appreciate the diversity at work in hip-hop, both in the sounds artists are making and in the makeup of the listening audience.
You fail when you try to control the direction of a genre you don't have any real control over. So stop crowing about big bad "hipster media" snatching hip-hop from the jaws of its rightful owners and start thinking about the fact that maybe your idea of where the culture should go and the reality of where it's headed aren't one and the same, that you might actually be the one doing the steering it off its natural course.
Happy holidays.