You will find some element of hip-hop culture in just about every direction you look. Actual rappers like Lil’ Kim appear in Old Navy ads, while CGI hamsters wear baggy clothes as they ride in a Kia Soul and bob their heads to Black Sheep’s “The Choice Is Yours (Revisited).”
If advertisers don’t want to use hamsters, human actors can simply dance to a reworked version of “The Choice Is Yours” that plugs a product, which is the route Venmo took (“You can Venmo this, or you can Venmo that”).
Aside from rap music being played at various sporting events and in sports video games, pop locking and breakdancing competitions are held on an international level, to the point of breakdancing being considered an Olympic sport in last year’s Paris Games, which featured Snoop Dogg as one of the torch bearers.
Amongst so many dazzling examples of hip-hop culture becoming a mainstay of American and international culture, there is much to be amazed by. However, in my mind, there is possibly just as much to be confused by. Namely, the immense popularity of rap makes me wonder if it was always destined for the spotlight it now holds, and if this was its ultimate purpose from day one.
What are we rapping for exactly?
Out of every hip-hop related event in 2024, the most notable was without a doubt the feud between two of if not the two biggest rappers in the world. Said feud not only consistently provided hits that went to the top of the charts or close to it, but resulted in Kendrick Lamar winning five Grammys and performing at the Super Bowl within a week’s time at the beginning of this year.
By the spring, Kendrick Lamar had narrated and appeared in a Gatorade commercial that utilized his 2024 song “Peekaboo,” featuring AZ Chike, while also being announced as an ambassador of Chanel around the same time.
There was and still is much fanfare around the success Kendrick Lamar was met with originating largely from his beef with Drake and "Not Like Us." While this was a very exciting moment for this record alone, it's important to note that the successes of Kendrick Lamar as a rapper in 2024 were also contextualized within hip-hop as being a return to form for the genre that arrived just in time.
As evidenced in Kyle Denis' 2023 article for Billboard, 2023 was largely viewed as an underwhelming year for rap in terms of its placements on the charts, as by the middle of the year, no rap albums had reached the top of the Billboard 200 and no rap single had fared better on the Billboard Hot 100.
With this in mind, "Not Like Us" was not just an anthem, but due to it's subsequent popularity it seemed in my opinion to become a symbol of rap still being a juggernaut of popular music. Kendrick Lamar was celebrated not simply for winning a battle, but because he made an undeniably successful rap record while doing so.
If what I am saying is at all accurate to how people felt about "Not Like Us," which I believe it is at least somewhat, I am curious as to what this means about how rap records are valued, generally speaking. If Kendrick Lamar's rap song receives awards because of it's success, does that mean other rap music simply needs to be more successful to get accolades?
If success in rap music is based on the amount of money and attention that comes to your music, does that mean that the overall or bottom line purpose for rap's existence is simply to generate said money and attention, and if so, why, for whom, and who made it so?
Those are a lot of questions I don't know the exact answer to, but I do know that rap music, as I pointed to earlier, is bound very closely to mainstream popular culture.
Even if not universally agreed upon, I believe the rap community, at least in relation to the music industry, wants this relationship to pop culture to continue, hence why rap's chart performance in 2023 was so off putting to some, and why Kendrick Lamar's dominance from 2024 to now has been applauded so thoroughly.
As I reflect have reflected lately on how my understanding of rap has evolved since my childhood, a constant I began to notice was how people in their analysis of rap often retrospectively talk as if it was meant to achieve the industry success it now has. In other words, the idea that rap music has worked hard to elevate itself to one day become this established in some way.
Perhaps one of the most famous examples of a statement that fits this mindset of hip-hop working to gain wealth and success comes from Biggie Smalls on his 1994 classic, "Juicy." Biggie's lyrics detail and celebrate his rise from poverty and having to sell drugs to becoming a popular rapper.
Biggie begins the song by detailing his fondness for rap during his childhood, with this retrospective focus on his youth in the '80s being backed by a nostalgia tinged sample of Mtume's "Juicy Fruit" from 1983.
Of particular importance to me, Biggie says the line,“Remember ‘Rappin’ Duke’? ‘Da-ha, da-ha, you never thought that hip-hop would take it this far.”
In this line, Biggie is referring to 1984’s “Rappin’ Duke,” a hit rap record from California written by Shawn and Greg Brown, and produced by H.B. Barnum for JWP Records. The “Rappin’ Duke,” who is played by Shawn Brown, is essentially just him rhyming while doing a comedic impression of famous actor and western icon John Wayne, whose nickname was “The Duke.”
“Rappin’ Duke” became a popular rap parody or novelty record across the country, one of many released during this era. These were records that many times featured an artist rapping while referencing or playing a character or historical figure from some other part of popular culture or history.
Comedy is a key aspect of the performance-based essence of hip-hop to this day, and you had some rappers in the early ‘80s whose act was firmly attached to comedy, such as the rapping ventriloquist Wayne Garland and his “Rapping Dummy” named Charlie, who were on Sugar Hill and released a parody of Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks,” entitled “Check It Out,” in 1982.
The Treacherous Three famously did a fairly raunchy political commentary entitled “Xmas Rap” in 1984 that featured a cranky and destitute rapping Santa played by Kool Moe Dee, as well as the beatboxing talents of Doug E. Fresh. They performed this song, along with members from the b-boy group The Magnificent Force, in Beat Street (1984), directed by Stan Lathan.
Outside of the labels that featured early hip-hop recording artists like Sugar Hill, there would also be a number of rap parody or novelty records made by more mainstream celebrities and comedians during the early and mid- ‘80s.
Mel Brooks rapped as Adolf Hitler in “To Be or Not to Be (The Hitler Rap),” the titular single released for his 1983 film, while 1985’s “Honeymooners Rap” saw the SNL duo of Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy rapping while doing their impressions of Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton. The scratching on this song is credited to Grand Mixer DXT, or D.ST. at that time, which I believe stands for Delancey Street.
According to "The Underground to the Mainstream” episode of Hip-Hop Evolution, directed by Darby Wheeler, this trend of popular parody or novelty records was viewed negatively by many in the New York hip-hop community, who felt it said that rap was a joke and passing fad that entertainers and the American public, largely white, could leech off of and treat in a disposable fashion, similar to how disco was viewed through songs like "Disco Duck" by disc jockey Rick Dees & His Cast of Idiots.
In short, Shawn Brown’s “Rappin’ Duke" came out during a period where rap’s presence within the music industry and mainstream culture was nowhere near as established and dominant as it would one day be.
This is why Biggie references the song in “Juicy,” basically to tell his audience, who largely were children back when those novelty songs were released, to look at how far rap had come in a decade, also paralleling their own entry into adulthood.
I love “Juicy,” and Biggie’s “Rappin’ Duke” lyric in particular, but it still makes me wonder about rap's growing popularity in the 1990s. If rap was truly elevated from where it had been in the ‘80s, as Biggie says it was, why exactly did that happen and why did it need to?
This concept of pushing the boundaries of rap music further than where the genre had ever gone is perhaps not associated with any artist or artists more than Run-DMC, whose career can frequently be boiled down to being a list of firsts for hip-hop, such as the first rappers to grace the cover of Rolling Stone or the only rappers to perform at Live Aid in 1985.
In episode 2 of the 2024 Peacock docuseries Kings from Queens: The Run DMC Story, directed by Kirk Fraser, various associates and musicians who were fans of the group speak on their rise to stardom in the mid- '80s.
Questlove notes Rick Rubin's work on "It's Tricky," which for it's chorus utilized a routine DMC created to fill a long break during their performances of "It's Like That." Questlove explains that the format of "It's Tricky," with it's compact verses and catchy hook, contrasted the earliest rap records, which were in some cases 15 minutes of rap routines, like a party jam. Run-DMC's more compact format of rap song seemed to be a factor in how they attracted a mainstream white audience.
Former Adidas executive Angelo Anastasio, and Run-DMC's former road manager, record executive Lyor Cohen, also comment on the landmark Adidas deal Cohen negotiated for the group, which is essentially the precursor to many of the huge deals rappers make with fashion/athletic brands to this day, including Kendrick Lamar becoming an ambassador for Chanel.
Lyor Cohen explains that said deal was bound to happen with or without him based on the group's fame, while Angelo Anastasio explains that while it was a landmark, it paled in comparison to the sales and popularity the group had already generated for Adidas before the deal was ever made.
When the documentary gets to the group's revamped version of "Walk This Way" with Aerosmith, it presents the usual narrative of the song being a symbol of an underground black genre being able to elevate itself and successfully cross over into white America. It does partially interrogate this by explaining that the song alienated them somewhat from their core black and brown audience, and that this blatant of an attempt to be commercial was not liked by the group.
However, of more interest to me, amongst comments on how Run-DMC working with Aerosmith broke barriers for hip-hop in mainstream white America, Ad-Rock of The Beastie Boys made clear that the song was actually a much bigger benefit for Aerosmith rather than Run-DMC, as the Boston rock band had been in disarray since the late '70s.
Redoing "Walk This Way" was a revitalizing moment for Aerosmith, as opposed to Run-DMC, who had already been on the rise and selling millions of albums for a few years.
Now, while Ad-Rock made this point in relation specifically to Run-DMC and Aerosmith, I believe it actually can relate even more broadly to how rap music has related to the music industry since the first rap records were being made.
Even if when we talk about rap music we speak as if hip-hop needed to elevate or improve in order to become successful, I think we are saying something that is almost accurate, but backwards. It is not that rappers or hip-hop needed to become successful, rather it is that the music industry will always need success and profit, and it realized it could use rap to achieve that never ending goal.
Hip-hop culture was not looking to gain something from the record industry, it was sought out by it. There was a previous article I wrote entitled "A brief history of Paul Winley Records and the recording industry that captured rap."
The usage of the word "captured" in that title was very deliberate, as I wanted to make clear that the music business and black record producers like Paul Winley caught wind of hip-hop and then decided to make rap records to capitalize on it the way they knew how.
At the time rap records began to be made in the late '70s, hip-hop parties or shows may have cost an admission fee, but there was nowhere near the infrastructure to understand that there could actually be an international industry worth billions created from what the hip-hop community was doing, in some cases within neighborhoods that were literally falling apart.
In JayQuan The Hip-Hop Historian's YouTube video on the "Golden Age of Hip-Hop," he includes information relayed to him by The Treacherous Three, who said that back in those days, instead of money they were given pizza as payment for performing at certain venues. They were teenagers and very young adults at the time, and were not upset about getting pizza, as for them there was no understanding that there was real money in hip-hop, even as the first records were getting made.
Making rap records was not a desire or thought in the hip-hop community to my knowledge in the 1970s. However, making records and making money off said records will always be the desire of the music business, which is exactly the thought process of the first black labels that recorded rappers in New York, such as Paul Winley Records, or Bobby Robinson's Enjoy Records, both based in Harlem.
According to David Toop's The Rap Attack: African jive to New York hip hop (1984), label owners like Winley and Robinson, whose careers as songwriters/producers had seen success going all the way back and even before the doo-wop era, were not making much headway into the disco scene, which Robinson did not much care for due to the specificity of the bpm requirements and repetitive lyrical content.
Robinson had actually been out of the music business for a time and only began to return as disco's popularity started to fade, though he was aware of hip-hop since at least the mid- '70s, due, like doo-wop, to hip-hop being culturally present amongst black kids on the street in Harlem.
What truly peaked Robinson's interest in doing rap records, besides his nephew being Spoonie Gee, was the success his friend Sylvia Robinson had with "Rapper's Delight." Robinson was upset with himself because he had known about rap for some time, and wanted to have been the one to record the first rap hit.
If we take what Ad-Rock said about the collaboration of Run-DMC and Aerosmith and apply it to this situation with figures like Paul Winley and Bobby Robinson, we again see that hip-hop is not gaining something from the music business, but the inverse.
In my opinion, this same relationship has in one way or another stayed the same since hip-hop entered the music industry and become a mainstay in the repertoire of major record labels, a far cry from it's days with independents like Enjoy, when rap was viewed as a fad that could end at any time and record labels tried to profit while the getting was good.
The title of this article was certainly presented in a slightly hyperbolic fashion, but I believe it is an important question to understand who in my opinion truly stands to gain the most from rap records being made.
As a rap, "Not Like Us" has it's own context Kendrick Lamar wrote it within, but no matter that context the industry will always need a "Not Like Us" record to be invented because it demands hits, simply because that is the system it operates by. As of now, this system runs in part on a lot of output from rap due to how popular it is, with "Not Like Us" just being one in a long line of examples.
Essentially, when we see Kendrick Lamar winning Grammys, performing at the Super Bowl, and having his face attached to Gatorade and Chanel, I hope that we always make clear that this is not a momentous occasion because it somehow "elevates" hip-hop culture or rap artists.
Kendrick's dominance as of late is another moment, just like Adidas with Run-DMC, that businesses and brands have recognized the value of attaching themselves to hip-hop to sell product, which at it's most basic form is the same idea Sylvia and her husband Joe Robinson had back in the 1970s. They are elevated by hip-hop, not the other way around.
A song like "Not Like Us" did not make hip-hop suddenly realize it's own value all over again, it simply meant that the industry realized the value the song had based on the fanfare from Kendrick and Drake's battle. On a broad scale, it meant rap music was doing a great job of fulfilling it's hit making role in the music industry and in mainstream, and largely white, popular culture more generally.
The important thing for me to note is that no matter the reason rap records are made and applauded, rap music, as a piece of hip-hop culture, has and will always intrinsically know it is valuable no matter what. It does not have to be elevated in culture or on the charts to achieve the value it inherently possesses for existing. To be clear, though, this type of value is not based in a product or monetary system, and predates any idea of fitting rap into a recorded format.