That's nothing new

Master P was warning rappers back in the mid-90s and a lot of OGs are broke as f*** nowadays. De La Soul had to fight tooth and nail for over a decade to get their publishing

Number 2 is the most important thing!!! Just listen to the s*** that sound good and forget that other s***. Like who give af about superstars and big 3s and if people are pushing a style of hip hop you personally don’t like, just find your s*** and go about your day. I don’t like EVERYTHING but I’m not going on daily rants for a month straight about the stuff that I don’t like. I just rock out with the stuff I do like. It’s too much good music out here for all this lol. Then these niggas do ignore the good music from lesser known niggas until they get a mainstream co-sign.

Dre, Diddy, Em, Jay, 50, and Cube pimped out hip hop to their advantage no differently than these kids now. Jay gentrified Brooklyn, let alone hip hop. Eminem is the poster boy for gentrifying rap in the 2010s. His entire career reinvention was predicated on winning over white audiences. This s*** been happening. Even RZA sold out

50 had goddamn video games and they sucked

Y’all could help support these rappers ktt niggas be posting. You can’t complain about what’s being pushed when you don’t even support the type of niggas you wanna see shine 😂

You open the floodgates for selling out and the bullshit gonna start pouring in

We gonna pretend that the Jay-R. Kelly collabs didn't happen? That Eminem hasn't been remaking "Rap God" for 10 years? That 50 Cent burnt out after his debut? That Wayne doesn't have an equal amount of dogshit albums to great ones in his album discography (perhaps even more bad than good)? We gonna pretend Ice Cube isn't a damn teddy bear conservative grandpa today? That Diddy didn't help build the "shiny suit era", one of the tackiest eras in rap history that the underground fought against tooth and nail for like a decade? That y'all were dissing TPAB for being "negro spiritual music", that you don't mock British rappers without even giving them a chance? That y'all put down greats like G. Rap, Rakim, KRS-One, Grand Puba, and so forth, just to keep talking about the same 5-10 motherfuckin rappers in every goddamn thread? Give me a break man. S*** been sold out and good music has been dropping regardless.

Difference is,Master P was independent and represented black culture through Hip Hop,and people reciprocated that love by buying his product. De La Soul are OGs,they didn't know s*** back then about the business of rap,they just wanted to create. When they found out the business of Hip Hop,they fought tooth & nail against it,and got out of the game first thing,and kept creating music.

Fast forward till now,everyone wants a deal,everyone want things quick. Rappers work for their labels now more then ever,cause its not about the art now,its about a quick buck that does them no good in the long run.

This just like those shorties who wanna see Flo Milli blow up but don’t even support her music when she drop like you have to do your part as well.

and stop giving a f*** about them blowing up

if they eating off the craft and the s*** is good who gives a f***. Drake and Jay fried y'all brains

P helped cheapen the craft too barely any of the music on No Limit was notably good but he put on for black artists and that's why he's a legend. He helped commodify this s*** all the same

You know what, man? You win lol

Its still a business at the end of the day. All these dudes your naming,stand on their two and know how to make money without rapping. You can't really vilify these guys cause at least they attempted to take Hip Hop to the next level,artistically and business wise. How was the culture gonna move forward without putting money into it?

Its not selling out if people respect the way you presented the product. Everyone understands that theres money to be made.

I know I do cause y’all full of s*** lol but keep arguing in bad faith.

God forbid rappers make money and expand their presence

Lowkey a good idea but tbh it would be disappointing what fills up the rest of the section if any complaint about music was soaked to one thread. Be careful what you wish for lol

No Limit was a black/urban product through and through tho. White people didn't f*** with Master P beyond the hits,but thats all he needed cause his deal helped him make majority profit. The endgame was always to commodify Hip Hop,it was also all about how it was done.

Motherfuckers now probably won't ever even own their masters to their music. Actually,most of these new acts barely have real labels that help their artist blow beyond a youtube video and a hole in the wall club. Dudes are signing their lives away for an image,and its killed the business/independence aspect of Hip Hop.

All of those guys aside from Dre have made some suspect music before, and Dre has financed some of this suspect music

There was money in hip hop well before Jay came along. Jay wanted to be sitting next to the white oligarchs and was willing to do whatever he had to to get to that level, including investing in the Barclays Center that helped destroy Brooklyn, investing in the prison industrial complex, and making two dogshit collab albums with a serial pedophile. Diddy put out a s*** load of crappy music during the 2000s too. "Recovery" is toilet water. Dre helped derail Rakim's career tryna turn dude into a gangsta rapper to sell records. That's more than "making money", that's pimping the culture.

The third paragraph is a bigger factor than people want to admit

And tbh we have to ask has there been any other genre that has recovered from that?

Jay is looked at as this rap deity when dude has a few songs making fun of b-boys and conscious rap in favor of dumbing it down for mass consumption

Whole lotta bullshit revisionism itt (not by OP) and if we wanna get real honest about talking about cheapening hip hop a lot of "legendary" names are going to be coming out of the woodwork. Jay is like if Gene Simmons was actually good at making music...sometimes

It’s not necessarily some sinister thing but the simple truth is that the 2000’s is where the doors opened for this s*** to get away from it purely being about the art. It’s just that everyone from Hov to Drake and everyone in between who occupied that Big 3-5 space between 2001 and 2015-16 had restraint to still include some of the fundamental s*** we loved.

And tbh we could take it back even further to Bad Boy and Death Row. Rappers like Hov and Nas probably market themselves completely different if Native Tongues, Public Ememy, Tribe etc are in the mainstream spots that BIG/Pac/Bad Boy/Death Row end up taking

Making money is OutKast making "Ms. Jackson", a pop rap smash that kept it ten toes down for rap 100% of the time, yielding a 5x Platinum album.

Pimping the craft is Jay rapping at Hillary Clinton's campaign rally

Death Row had strong FBI ties too

Idk what to tell you,theres such thing as bad investments and bad ideas? These acts now don't even take risk,thats how manufactured this s*** is now. And when im speaking about Jay,im talking about the artist,and even as a businessman,his faults get amplified X2 cause he's Jay-Z.

This I can respect, and like I said P is a legend and has way more integrity than a lot of rapper-entrepreneurs. But we also can't ignore that some f*** s*** has gone down to get money that goes well beyond reasonable concessions. Nobody knocking "All Eyez On Me" or "Life After Death" but Blueprint 2, Views, Recovery, Rebirth, etc, are all sellout bullshit if we are keeping it 100% about commodification in hip hop.

So are rappers not allowed to be as big as popstars and other music stars?

"Faults" is one way to describe destroying his own hometown and putting ankle monitors on parolees

Jay a sociopath who can spit like an Olympian