Hip-hop’s mainstream success destroyed its outsider signaling function

Evidence

Hip-hop, which began as the self-expression of extreme outsiders, now provided the backdrop for luxury consumption. This threw the genre into an existential crisis. Rap could not be more mainstream. Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer in 2018, and melodic Canadian rapper Drake shattered records with seventy-eight Top 10 hits. Yet, as critic Jason England argued, hip-hop was not conqueror but “conquered”: “Hip hop assimilated. And that always comes at a cost.” Hits were “conservative, white-flattering, and, maybe worst of all, predictable.” Blame landed squarely on Jay-Z and his “Rich Dad Poor Dad rap albums.” “Popular music has sounded—for a long, long time—like prosperity gospel,” England wrote, “and too many of the rappers are sounding more like megachurch pastors than artists or insightful street reporters.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 639

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the omnivore monoculture thesis — the genre that once signaled subcultural difference collapsed into universalized prosperity gospel. Core to Marx’s mechanism that assimilation dissolves meaning.