To get white America on board, he needs to matter outside of hip-hop. As a result, artists like Thug become elevated beyond all reason: being great rap artists isn’t enough. So writers talk about how Thug is great because he’s “post-verbal” or that he’s evolving language or…some other thesis about how the work he’s doing matters to people who otherwise ignore rap. Great artists in rap are celebrated for being everything their art is not. But exceptional artists in most other arts are seen as great exemplars of their medium. He isn’t evolving rap, which isn’t redeemable at its core he’s evolving language, “transcending” his host genre & becoming important to the rest of us. The “evolution of language” argument contends that most rap is remedial, but this one guy is breaking with that obvious truism. Every time an artist in the genre Matters, his or her existence has to be defined in *contrast* to the very genre and traditions that made him (or her). And these attitudes have real consequences for artists and culture: see Chicago’s effort to tax small venues around the Flashdance-like notion that hip-hop and DJing don’t qualify as “fine arts.”įrom day one Young Thug has received “compliments” that serve to undermine him and hip-hop as a whole. The above quote-about how he’s “evolving language”-isn’t just an oddly anthropological turn of phrase. It’s also an implicit criticism of hip-hop as a genre.įor large swaths of culture writers and in the broader white popular imagination, it’s assumed that hip-hop is, at its core, disposable.
And it’s about more than music writing, because narratives like this are never limited to “writers.” They represent much broader attitudes. After all, it’s about much more than Young Thug. There are short and obvious answers to this (“white people” “most music writing sucks” etc.) but rather than being glib I would like to focus on the underlying rationale behind this form of Bad Writing.
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