Blogs, SoundCloud & Streaming

This is the era most of your friends actually grew up in.

Kanye breaks the mold

Early-2000s mainstream rap meant tough guys and shiny suits. Kanye West was a Chicago producer who'd made beats for Jay-Z's The Blueprint, and he wore pink polos and backpacks. Labels didn't see him as a rapper. His debut, The College Dropout (2004), went multi-platinum anyway.

1. 2004

   The College Dropout

   Soul samples, jokes and vulnerability. It won the Grammy for Best Rap Album.

2. September 11, 2007

   Graduation vs Curtis

   Kanye and 50 Cent release albums the same day. 50 jokes he'll retire if he loses. Kanye wins by about 250,000 copies, and the moment gets read as gangsta rap's dominance ending.

3. 2008

   808s & Heartbreak

   Kanye sings through Auto-Tune about heartbreak. People are confused at the time. Now it's seen as the blueprint for the next decade of melodic rap.

His later public controversies are a whole separate conversation. The influence of these albums isn't really up for debate.

The blog era

By the late 2000s, rappers didn't need radio. Free mixtapes on sites like DatPiff and music blogs built entire careers.

• Drake's free mixtape So Far Gone (2009) got him signed to Young Money. He went on to be one of the biggest artists of the 2010s.
• Nicki Minaj built her name on mixtapes, then her verse on Kanye's "Monster" (2010) is still called one of the best guest verses ever.
• J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar, Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller all came up the same way.

SoundCloud rap

By the mid-2010s, teenagers were recording in their bedrooms and uploading straight to SoundCloud. Distorted bass, short songs, face tattoos, colored dreads. Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, Trippie Redd and Juice WRLD blew up this way. Older fans called it "mumble rap" and hated it. It topped the charts anyway.

The dark side was real: Lil Peep, XXXTentacion and Juice WRLD all died between 2017 and 2019, aged 21 or younger. Mental health and drug use became part of the conversation about this music.

Drill goes global

• Chicago, 2012: Chief Keef's "I Don't Like" kicked off drill: bleak, menacing and very local.
• London: UK artists made it their own with sliding 808 basslines. That's UK drill.
• Brooklyn: New York took the UK sound back. Pop Smoke's "Welcome to the Party" (2019) made him a star before he was killed in 2020, aged 20.

Streaming crowns rap

In 2017, hip-hop/R&B became the most-consumed genre in the US for the first time, according to Nielsen. Streaming rewarded what rap already did best: constant releases, features, and fans who replay songs endlessly.

Then the establishment caught up. In 2018, Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for DAMN.