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Comment by wyattpeak | Hacker News Reader

> we ended up with mumble rap

> It's samey as hell and stagnant

I don't follow rap, but these two claims seem contradictory. Is the first not evidence of evolution in the genre, if in a direction you don't like?

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If anything mumble rap is a devolution. Add auto-tune to this and you are left with a worthless corpus of shitty rap, hip-hop and also pop music.

It is samey, because everybody does the same thing. You can’t really differentiate music by different performers anymore. Each song is the same.

There used to be a cost to producing music; you needed a studio, producer, physical copies of the samples you wanted to use (in case of most rap), etc. Now you can just boot your computer and use one of the many digital studios.

It is a blessing in some ways, but a curse in most I think. Quality is by no means the element by which (popular) music is judged. It is all about presentation, which somehow means the most deplorable people get the most praise.

Note: I am talking about what is mainstream and played on still high quality radio. I don’t listen to rap stations and luckily there are stations that have a good selection of older music and only play some of the new stuff. The new stuff there is already worse than music from the past though.

If you look at the rap and hip-hop scene however, the quality has plummeted even more. It is just one homogeneous soup of crappy, lazy music. In no way like the music of 2Pac, Notorious B.I.G and Outkast but still all the same as the other new crap.

You’re just saying the same things older people have been saying about new music since time immemorial.

That's true and yet the decreasing revenue, monetization, and relentless cost-cutting is real as well.

Concerns about making money are not going to destroy art. Almost all art through history has been made by people trying to make a living, not trying to express for its own sake.

We don't have a thousand years of portraiture of the elite because artists were just absolutely convinced that was the ultimate expression of the medium.

You should say mainstream art in any era.

The lack of discoverability and gatekeeping (to some extent) ensures that unpromoted art will not be known. When did the last non-supported musician hit it big? Artist support and development is important as well.

Perhaps, yet: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/what-these-grammy...

Generalizing criticisms as the same as past criticisms is a sidestep rather than a point.

How about from other established rappers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0OdmRtuQew

Admittedly they are now "older" :)

You say they're older as a joke, but it's very much relevant. Old artists dismissing the developments and approaches of their younger colleagues is a tale as old as time.

And yet - dismissing criticisms of older people by younger people as "you're just old" rather than answering the criticism is just as old.

Older gens hated rap when I was a kid and I was thirsty to defend it with supported reasons

Kids today just say OK boomer and move on. Bc they have no defense .

Established older musicians hated The Beatles.

Generalizing criticisms as the same as past criticisms is a sidestep rather than a point.

Andre 3000 is a big fan of Future fwiw.

I think the claim is that mumble rap dominates this new ecosystem, that this ecosystem is less diverse, and that this ecosystem does not seem to be changing significantly.

I have no idea about Spotify or mumble rap but that's how they might not contradict.

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