The weekend of July 4 was relatively stacked with hip-hop releases from stars who have been beloved in the genre for years, but data from Luminate and Billboard reveal that few of them made the kind of impact they’d once been capable of. Drake fired shots at fake friends on “What Did I Miss?”, ASAP Rocky dropped “Pray4DaGang,” singer Brent Faiyaz played the roles of “Peter Pan” and “Tony Soprano” with a double single release, Logic produced his own single “The Adventures of Cocaine Larry,” and Chance The Rapper enlisted Smino and Lil Wayne for “Tree.”
Yet, only one song cracked the Billboard Hot 100: Drake’s “What Did I Miss?”, which landed at Number Two. It was the only one to chart on Luminate’s list of the 100 most-streamed songs of the week, too, per a report shared with Rolling Stone (and it was Number One there). Even on hip-hop specific charts, things didn’t look much better for the rest of the gang. Only Brent Faiyaz’s tracks managed to grab spots on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart (“Peter Pan” at 47 and “Tony Soprano” at 28) in addition to Drake, and the Canadian rapper was the only one to make the Hot Rap Songs chart, too.
Notably, all of these artists are millennials who were stalwarts in what’s known as the Blog Era, the period between (very) roughly 2005 and 2015, kickstarted by the emergence of tastemaking rap blogs like NahRight, 2DopeBoyz, and Miss Info in the time of lawless filesharing and capped by the rise of streaming platforms like Spotify that radicalized the way music was made and monetized. Many of the biggest names in rap — and entertainment at large — today earned their stripes during the Blog Era. That includes many of these artists who dropped last week, as well as notable figures like Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Nicki Minaj, and Kanye West.
So, why does it matter that no one but Drake seemed to permeate the mainstream last week? Because, in this new era, stans have decided it does. Across pop music, warring fan bases lob streaming and sales statistics at each other online to prove the relevance of their fave – or the irrelevance of their rivals. Several hip-hop focused X pages noted that despite ASAP Rocky dropping “Pray4DaGang” as an Apple Music exclusive for the first 24 hours of its release starting July 4, it didn’t seem to crack Apple’s Top 200 songs chart, including one belonging to controversial streamer and Drake ally Akademiks, which taunted the Harlem rapper. While it’s less surprising that long-cooled acts like Chance the Rapper, Logic, and even the legendary Lil Wayne (whose latest album, Tha Carter VI was met harshly by many critics) didn’t quite breakthrough, ASAP Rocky’s quiet return is more jarring.
Yet, it’s just another signal of the changing of the guard as more niche music communities thrive, TikTok virality constantly thrusts new acts to the forefront, and monoculture erodes. Think about it: Kanye West is all but a pariah, Nicki Minaj garners more headlines for her social media tirades than her raps, and even as Drake sits atop the charts and headlines festivals, his reputation has been deeper in the pits than ever before. In 2018, The New York Times’ Nitsuh Abebe asserted that these greats were falling. “When it comes to pop, ‘people born around 1990’ are already done for,” he wrote. “It is a testament to their influence that popular music has already spent a decade doggedly attached to the same stars who took over the charts during this group’s teen years […] It has been an impressive run. Now it feels as if that run is ending.”