The menacing subculture that birthed SoundCloud rap was survivable only when diluted mainstream

Evidence

SoundCloud rappers lived and died by menace. XXXTentacion was murdered at age twenty while awaiting trial for domestic violence charges. Juice WRLD and Lil Peep overdosed. And 6ix9ine, who launched his career while on probation for filming group sex with a thirteen-year-old girl for a music video, spent two years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder. (He snitched on his codefendants and got an early release.) The few SoundCloud survivors leaned toward the genre’s softer side, most notably Post Malone. White, heavyset, and covered in facial tattoos, he diluted the SoundCloud rap into mainstream appeal, landing Bud Light Super Bowl commercials. “Cosmetically,” critic Grant Rindner observed, “the music world doesn’t look much different from when SoundCloud rap came to the fore.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 562

Categorization

• XREF: Post Malone’s whitening/diluting of SoundCloud rap for mainstream ads echoes the reader’s trajectory concern — what survives into the ‘omnivore monoculture’ is the soft, signifier-stripped version, while the authentic edge burns out.
• QUESTION: Rindner’s closing line — the music world looks cosmetically unchanged from before SoundCloud rap — is precisely the kind of claim the reader must weigh as evidence for or against ‘blankness’: did the genre leave a visible trace or not?