novembersownjrell asked: Then who you think took waynes spot since he fell off in 07ish
Nobody did and I don’t think anybody ever will. At least not for a long time. Wayne was the last gasp of hip hop consensus. Everything’s too fragmented now, everything moves too quickly. And most importantly the voice of the proverbial streets, which once set the tone for these things, has been dramatically marginalized on a crossover/corporate level.
Becoming the best rapper alive means forcing the rap’s core audience to adapt to your style first and foremost. Only after that is a rapper fully free to do whatever fruity little pop records are necessary to turn a millionaire into a multimillionaire and remain unchecked. It’s like that Jay line - first I had the streets, then I had the charts. There’s an order to this shit. But today that order offers little monetary incentive (in fact in some ways it can be detrimental) so a lot of these new dudes who skipped that step - Wiz won over the frat boys first, Drake was preordained as an upper middle class rap star by birth right - are just out there floating in space now. I doubt anyone but their most diehard fans are looking at them as Greatest Rapper Candidates, with the rest probably still deferring to hard canonized and washed up GOATS like Wayne and Jay.
I had high hopes that Gucci was going to grow into that rapper and despite all of the fruit flies that are currently throwing their little arms up I honestly do believe that he had all of the talent to do so. But he fucked it up by chasing Usher money too early (and doing a bunch of other dumb shit). Nicki too, might’ve filled that role well. “Monster” was a step in the right direction. Had she continued just spitting for a little while longer she could’ve been the first female rapper to ever hold that crown, but instead she jumped into teeny bopper land and never looked back. Which, you know, was probably a wise choice for her professionally in the present tense but it is going to weaken her legacy among the rap purists that she should’ve been working to win over during that stretch.
Assuming any rap purists survive the impending swagpocalypse.
