Welcome to Listening Habits, a new column where I share the music I’ve been fixated on recently.
In the first quarter of the year, a number of the notable new rap albums have come from older rappers, many of whom were most relevant to me when I was a teenager in the 2000s. Some of these albums are more successful than others. One of the stronger efforts comes from 2 Chainz, the Alchemist, and (the much younger) Larry June, who released the collaborative album Life Is Beautiful last month. Here, Chainz and Larry make what could be called Yacht Rap over luxurious, though a little monotonous, Alchemist beats. In this same vein, we've gotten a new Busta Rhymes album, an album from Webbie and his son Tre Savage, and a new album from Jim Jones, fresh off beefing with Cam'ron online over old Dipset drama (again).
There is no genre quite like hip hop. It is a universe unto itself, encompassing much more than just music, and it has miraculously maintained its place at the center of youth culture for some 40 years now. As a result, the genre has a complicated relationship with aging. Rap's youth-centrism is easy to love when it coincides with your own youth, but yesterday's kids inevitably become tomorrow's adults. When that happens, suddenly the idea that rap should be a young man's game becomes contentious.
There are two schools of thought on this. The first one, stated above by Ad-Rock, says that what makes rap urgent and modern and, well, successful is the way it stays young. The styles change, what's cool about it changes, even the values change, but it's still rap and it still matters to kids in a way no other music has as consistently, primarily because it always belongs to the next generation. The other school of thought holds that rap's penchant for throwing out its aging stars and moving on to the next thing shows a callous disregard for its own history and historical figures. The thinking goes that no other genre is as quick to forget and even denigrate its own history as rap music is.
That second position is misguided, in my opinion, and also just plain incorrect. Rap is capable of eating its own tail right along with the best of them; it just does so in a different way, mainly through sampling. Also, these kinds of arguments can often feel more like business concerns than musical ones. For a long time, the idea was that older rappers didn't sell. But now that multiple generations of rap fans have aged out of youth, and aided by a more direct-to-consumer model of the music industry, the audience for older rap stars has become just as significant as those of their rock peers.
But even in this golden age of the old rapper, none of the music is so remarkable as to really discredit the genre's traditional ageism. I like the Nas and Hit-Boy albums just fine, but I do wonder how much of the love they receive is just middle-aged rap fans happy to see their middle-aged hero still doing his thing. 2 Chainz has been consistent for the last decade, even though his "moment" has passed, but none of it can match hearing "No Lie" for the first time. It's cool that Gucci Mane is still churning out projects, but mostly I'm just happy he's not in prison. Like everyone else, I loved seeing The Lox dominate that Verzuz, but those aren't anything more than career retrospectives. Even the older rappers who have found renewed relevance through the indie space, like Griselda, are cool and interesting but never really exciting. It's not just the rappers either. Producers like the Alchemist and Zaytoven have been in a bit of a musical rut, aping their own sounds to often diminishing returns.
And I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, either! There's a reason every genius, prolific, legacy artist has like two decades of music you'd rather not talk about or even remember. It's hard to keep creating at the same pace with the same quality over time, especially as you get more successful. Even rappers still in the twilight of their prime are starting to feel well-worn. Drake and Kendrick's beef felt like a belated hashing out of things that should've been dealt with 10 years ago. And both Drake's and Future's druggy, toxic relationship music gets a lot more depressing when you remember that they're both pushing 40.
There have been a lot of wistful remembrances of late for "the blog era"—a scene of loosely affiliated rappers, including Curren$y, Wiz Khalifa, Jay Electronica, and Wale, who all broke out on the early internet. Most of it seems more like nostalgia for Datpiff, Nah Right, and being a 20-something than any enduring appreciation for Charles Hamilton. But culture is in a "remember when" spiral: We're nostalgic for our own nostalgia, which feels like another reason for the old-rapper renaissance. My biggest caution about all of this is that as nice as it is to see how rock music constantly venerates its history, I do think that very reverence played a big part in rock losing its status with the youth. (Although let's not forget the destruction of music education, and how expensive instruments have become.) The genre became a mausoleum of its past. In contrast, rap's obsession with what's next has helped it stay vital.
The other issue with older rappers is that they tend to get caught in a push-pull, where they're not totally sure which type of audience they want to chase. Should they make music for the grown-ups they are now, or do they feel the need to prove that they're still on top of the times? That tension plays out on Jim Jones's new album, At The Church Steps. He wants to celebrate the history of rap, Harlem, and the drug-dealing scene he comes from, while also trying to appeal to what he thinks is hot in the streets now. And there's nothing more depressing than a 50-year-old throwing up gang signs.
I tend to think like Andre 3000, as laid out above when he spoke on what keeps him from wanting to rap at his age. It is just always more interesting to see what the kids are doing—what they find cool, the slang they're using, the music that left an impression on them coming up, and everything that informs ways they are pushing the sound forward.
My two favorite artists of last year, 454 and Skaiwater, have some similarities but a lot more differences. Both pull from different parts of the past 20 years of pop culture. 454, a Florida-born New York transplant, takes after that fast Florida chipmunk sound, combined with autotune, video games, and nostalgic R&B references. Skaiwater, who just released the new project #mia, is more of a student of pop punk and Lil Uzi Vert.
But even I, as an aging man, can feel too quartered off from or just weirded out by the age gap. Listening to Thirteendegrees' Clique City projects, particularly the newly released Vol. 2, was the oldest I've ever felt. Not because I didn't get it: He's pulling from early Young Thug and Dirty Sprite-era Future, but in a way that makes it his own. The production, from the likes of Gyant, Evo Frost, and 406Ahmad, does a brilliant job of feeling new while harkening to a late 2000s/early 2010s sound.
What's disorienting about the experience for me is the way it makes me look at the same early-'10s era, but from two different perspectives: his, as a child during that time, and mine, as someone who lived through it as a young adult. It's not just that I'm too old to fit in at the club; I now worry that I might get the cops called on me for showing up.
But that's the thing about rap: You get older, it stays the same age. Sometimes I wonder why I insist on learning about rappers with names like Nine Vicious or developing strong takes on Sk8star, Diorvsyou, Nosaint, and Yung Fazo. Some of these rappers are so young that they're now paying homage to Playboi Carti. Time keeps on slipping.
Ultimately, I keep on keeping up with this music because I love the game. I love rap music, flaws and all, being aged out and all. I can't get enough of it. Just please don't make me sit through a Plaqueboymax stream.
The Canceled Fave Corner: M.I.A.
Between November and January, I had extended stays in the hospital on two separate occasions. Going to the hospital is like my own personal purgatory: stuck on a bed, hooked up to wires and IVs, almost unable to move. As a result, I spend a lot of time listening to music, watching cable television, and trying out podcasts. Through the random series of hoops my brain goes through when left to its own devices, I ended up revisiting the music of M.I.A., specifically her first two albums and the Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtapes. Guess what? Still fucking incredible.
What should we do with our canceled faves? I am no closer to any concrete answer. The noble thing would be to dump them in time's garbage bag and move on. God bless all of you who can adhere to that. For me, there is just something a little antithetical about throwing out art just because it was made by an asshole.
In truth, canceled or not, artists tend to get in the way of the art. They break the spell by making it about themselves, or they confirm too much about the mystery of a thing, or they just start spouting wild conspiracy theories that make you question whether that thing you loved could actually be as great as you thought if someone like this could make it. I don't know what it is about the most adventurous and inventive artistic minds that also makes them so prone to lunacy, but I'm not sure anyone can do much about it. And also, not to be Mr. Overly Proud Male Feminist, but haven't women earned the right to be just a little evil, too?
"Paper Planes" and Kala was the more popular project, but Arular is in my opinion one of the best albums of the early 21st century. That mishmash of different cultures, textures, styles, and effects felt like it was supercharging my heart in ways I couldn't fully appreciate in the moment. At the time, it was good and fun, but it also felt like dance music for Pitchfork readers. It was a weird time in music in general, when the distinction between offline and online was starting to blur and nobody knew what was going on. Jay-Z and Beyoncé went to a Grizzly Bear show. Famous musicians wanted to hang out with Aziz Ansari. It was madness!
Relistening to Arular helped me feel alive in the hospital, and also reminded me how much more interesting music could be when it was informed by the tangible world of a person. There's an art-school sensibility in the way M.I.A. uses punk, dancehall, electronica, hip hop, raga, and Bollywood styles, infused with those politically fiery call and responses, sometimes in really arch ways. "Bucky Done Gun," "Fire, Fire," "10 Dollar," and "Galang" are standouts, but I am probably most partial to "URAQT," which fully realizes the musical brilliance of the Sanford and Son theme.
I try to be open about my hypocrisies. I haven't listened to an R. Kelly record in almost a decade, as his music just makes me feel gross now. I also haven't listened to much Chris Brown, but that's because he's an ass more than anything else. I know myself well enough to know that while I'll never defend Kanye West in any way, I'm also not going to stop listening to Late Registration. The hardest one for me to deal with has been Jesse Lacey and Brand New. I love Brand New, and after Taking Back Sunday, they're the best of the 2000s emo pop bands. But so many Brand New songs are about how much Jesse clearly hates his ex-girlfriends, and that, plus what we know about him now, pollutes my experience with the songs. There's no exact science to any of this; we're all just doing our best here. But I will show you grace, if you can show it to me too.
The Non-Rap Song Of The Moment
Or we can all just start getting into our jazz eras.
If you would like to contribute something or ask a question for future installments, email me at israel@defector.com.
