I’m old enough to remember when Nickelus F lost that battle to Shellz. He was a teenage wunderkind Unsigned Hype, way back when my people (Rural-Cracker Americans) were still taking The Source seriously enough to steal copies off the magazine racks. Hell, I even had friends who would tear out pages and hang them on their walls. Everybody wanted to be Eminem and nobody was addicted to prescription opiates yet. It was a hell of a time to be alive. After that, of course, music journalism got killed by free blogs & autistic trolls, and now you’re all stuck in here with me.
Certain industry plants may be getting a lot of press in recent weeks, but for a cultural institution of Real Yeti Rap’s magnitude & heft? None of that dogshit noise exists. Nobody who buys verses is part of the conversation. Dope ghostwriters are, though, and it’s great to see artists like Nickelus F (or Quentin Miller) getting their due after decades in the trenches. Doing the actual work. Paying a lot of wasted dues, too. Whether it’s New York, Los Angeles or Nashville, none of those motherfuckers love you, and they have been bleeding talent to death for a hundred years now. And almost all of it is legal.
“Look: I found my way, went from Soundcloud to paid from mixtapes in all the gas stations around the way.” This is a technician who knows better than to be too rigid with the rhymes. The real hypnosis is delivering all that signal casually, conversationally, and he walks that high wire end to end here. Like the late great Fred the Godson, his delivery is careful camouflage. There are deliberate drops in the bar schemes, sudden turns into new pockets, and repetitions that almost sound like mistakes. And all of it is perfect.
Most of those Unsigned Hype artists never amounted to shit. Which isn’t to say they never made great music, just that this business is a cold, cruel graveyard. Promising careers get destroyed every day, and often for no real reason; just clipped in the crossfire between vanity, money, and nepotism hires.
That’s just The Business, though. Sure, they dominate the discourse, shape the history, and own most of the master recordings, but that’s only ever just The Business. The Genre is something else altogether. Something bigger, too. Saigon just dropped a video for “Stocking Cap” back in February. Ghostface has a new LP about to drop, Supastition is repping North Carolina in high style again, and Blu is sounding better than ever. I could go on for many, many thousands of words. Christ Almighty, even Buck 65 is back from the deep stacks and dropping a legendary run of new material.
These are glorious days for The Genre, the increasingly global temple of hip hop exploring this infinite canvas, all collaborating & competing. We’re all going to win, too. Four Dickies.
