Monocultural Rap Stardom is Dead—and That’s OK
What does it mean to be a rap star in 2026? Some thoughts on rap’s current standing in the mainstream and the genre’s health in the post-social media era.
More and more, I find myself repeating the same phrase when I see the way other people engage with music: “Everything’s new to somebody.” That meant something different when the only places you could find your new favorite rapper were at a live show, in a music magazine, at a music store, on TV, or on the radio; whether you were into 50 Cent, Kanye West, or Lil Wayne, chances were you at least knew something about the other two. Now, the internet has further isolated our avenues of consumption, and our attention spans. A unified monoculture hardly exists and so everything—from music to movies to politics—is siloed into niches of varying popularity. This fragmentation has put rap under the microscope, as conversations about its longevity and viability sprout up across the internet.
Many are hammering the point that, similarly to how Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have yet to abdicate their pop thrones for newer acts, rap has yet to usher in its next generation of superstars. Blog-era titans from the 2010s are still hogging space on the charts and in the discourse; the Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef further exacerbated this in 2024, on top of introducing the idea of a Big Three—in this case, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and North Carolina’s J. Cole, who more or less inserted himself onto the ballot—currently holding the torch of commercial, critical, and cultural influence. (Rap fans have debated and ranked their favs since the genre’s birth, but the idea of a consensus Big Three holding court wasn’t a thing before Cole coined it during his verse on Drake’s “First Person Shooter,” and canonized further when Kendrick later refuted it on his verse from Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That.”) Last year, Billboard reported that no rap song had charted in the top 40 of their Hot 100 during the week of October 25th, breaking a streak that had been in place since 1990. The intelligentsia seems eager to play up hip-hop’s decline every chance it gets, but the last year-and-a-half of speculation has been particularly heinous. Looking at rap, or any modern form of media, solely through the lens of the overculture in 2026 is a fool’s errand because the most exposed areas aren’t the ones where things are thriving right now.
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