like i know i am a hip hop fan born and raised, so before i grew out my taste i had a bias towards anything that sounded like it

im not going to sit here and say rage against the machine is the greatest rock band of all time just because it’s semi-similar to hip hop in some senses, because i know that the genre has a rich history to get into and there’s way too many bands i haven’t listened to before i make such broad sweeping statements

it’s literally just being fair imo

Kendrick too

how is this dumb lol

you saw a buzzword, thought little about the context it was used in and instead sprang at it with your primitive, ignorant impulse? you disagree that racism is a far more complex concept than the trivialised word you chose to focus on?

also please don't be a hypocrite... "and recoil so hideously when they receive even the slightest pushback"???? is this not you... recoiling so hideously with logical fallacies?? i pushed your s*** back and you folded, practise what you preach and keep it moving big boy! subjects like this are more than just discussion for some of us

I kinda feel what you're saying in that regard because the so called "good" publications have some of the worst takes in hip hop but at the same time hip hop is a mainstream af now. Ye ain't at fault, ppl gon have their opinions regardless

Yeah, I get that. I agree with it totally. I'm just saying that I don't think it's right for OP to attribute it to Kanye when imo it's a result of the general commercialization and movement towards the mainstream that the genre had. But maybe I'm just thinking about it wrong.

imo hot take but if you want to claim that any artist or subgenre is responsible for bringing in outsiders to the genre with different ideas of what the genre is supposed to be, it's objectively the late 90s to mid 00s underground scene. I love artists like Atmosphere, Dälek, El-P, etc. but they collectively inadvertently pioneered an entire sub-section of both music/fandom elitism and subgenre cultural dissonance in sensibilities from mainstream genre sensibilities. Kanye was impactful but imo not necessarily influential; he's been a vehicle of the environment around him and his own ideas more than I think he's been directly responsible for bridging these types of gaps himself.

Lol

Didnt Snoop said that back in the day there was a s***ton of white people on his shows?

White people do this with everything tho, they insert their opinion on everything that they are guests to, and present it as fact

at least college dropout => graduation era kanye was making music that black people f***ed with

idk about 2016 onwards

OutKast was the first group to go diamond though, that’s a lot of people to bring into the genre. IIRC they were the first rap album to do that too.

Also that Miley Cyrus song doesn’t say “And the Kanye song was on”

Like the genre was always moving this direction to mass acceptance. Even influences outside of the actual music, like Dave Chappell had GZA and lil Jon in his skits and that was the biggest show on tv at the time. Bringing more people into the genre.

This was always going to happen, with or without Kanye.

I was actually just thinking about this the other day. A lot of people who never listened to hip hop at all crossed over into the genre via Yeezus

People tend to forget how big Dre and Snoop were back in the day that it truly brought rap to the mainstream. Hell, The Chronic was even the soundtrack of budding ethnically mixed gangs (black/white) in Little Rock, AR

“Bangin’ in Little Rock” is a really good documentary.

also give me an example of an artist who its not okay for non-hip hop fans to f*** with cause 99% of rappers have fans like that

Let's acknowledge how stupid he can be instead

He can be a no motive having Contrarian sometimes

Ahhh okay.

vampire weekend

Early Kanye in this period of albums was insanely transgressive, and i think it's hard to realize this from a modern lens. Yes these audiences were consumed by white audiences and helped foster a hip hop poptism, but he was being extremely confrontational on things. I said this in a different thread, but even when Kanye was catering to white pop sensibilities he was still attempting to control the narrative in a controversial way latently. He put milquetoast white pop star Adam Levine on a song where he literally says :

"Can I at least get a raise of the minimum wage?
And I know that the government administer AIDS
So I guess we just pray like the minister say
Allāhu Akbar and throw in some hot cars"

He put Crack Music on the same album. This was in 2005, anyone thinking this was just run of the mill in pop mainstream at the time is lying; the american public was extremely conservative back then socially, even more than now. There's a reason him saying "George Bush doesn't care about black people" the same year generated so much insane controversy whereas if a rapper said "trump/biden/etc doesn't care about black people" now it'd probably barely crack the news cycle for more than 2 days.

Eminem and lil wayne triggered the white phase. Eminem big artist white people can relate to. Wayne basically became a white teenager at the height of his career

A tons of rappers were which is why I can't entirely cosign OP although I see what specific groups he's referring to now.

But, in general, MC Hammer, Tupac, Biggie, Snoop, DMX, Nelly, Outkast, Lauryn Hill, Ludacris, 50 Cent, Wu Tang Clan, etc. had tons of White fans in their prime, probably more than Ye in his prime.

And Lauryn Hill and Outkast probably appealed to the same type of Whites that Kanye appealed too.

You can hate those people for being pretentious and snobby but you can’t change the fact that without those people and that audience rap wouldn’t be where it is today.

I'm a Weezy stan but Wayne just appealed to all types, including hood niggas who loved his mixtapes.

And he was often slammed by White hip hop purists and critics, being blamed for "ruining rap" and what have you.