Not everyone buys it. Despite the study’s findings, “I don’t think hip-hop lyrics are angrier,” says Dame Aubrey, head of A&R at CMG Records and Management, a music label that represents rappers Moneybagg Yo, BlocBoy JB and GloRilla. If anything, Aubrey says, the changes we’re hearing are a product of that How Music has expanded. It’s simple, says Aubrey: more people, more perspectives. Due to available technology, the medium is now more accessible. “There are just a lot more artists that have the opportunity to be heard because it has basically become a trend to make music.”
An important change in all of this is how a song becomes popular and what creates its popularity.
In the age of social media, this can often lead to more of the same species of noise, although this is not always the case. So when Lamar throws punches at Drake, calling him one of the “goofies with a check” and then saying, “Before all your dogs get buried / That’s a K with all these nines, he’ll see the pet cemetery” – the verse wins on
Rap has always gotten a bad rap. Ego, anger, swagger – these emotions are part of the genre’s raw identity. Since hip-hop’s inception 50 years ago, artists have used these feelings to illustrate their reality. Rap is sport. It’s theater. It’s exactly the kind of music that encourages the style of intense engagement that’s becoming increasingly common among online fans.
Are less positive lyrics actually on the rise, or does the popularity of a certain type of song simply reflect what the algorithm thinks we want to hear?
Streaming has changed the music industry in every way. Composing hits is somehow easier, but just as difficult. The winds of virality can still be unpredictable. While it’s not an exact science, it’s obvious how streaming playlists help bring a song to a large audience in a way that wouldn’t be possible with analog media.
“While there are certainly trends in organic popularity, what sets playlists apart is the importance and importance of context,” says JJ Italiano, head of global music curation and discovery at Spotify. “Even the most popular songs can vary greatly in performance depending on the playlist they are in and the other songs in that playlist.”
Dasha’s current viral hit “Austin” had around 10,000 streams when Spotify editors began programming it for their playlists, says Italiano, and it performed best when paired with similar, themed pop songs that ranged between Moving between country and pop and arranged between summery, guitar-heavy sequences are melodies (like Noah Kahan), narrative country songs (like Zach Bryan) or similar heartbreaking tracks from another genre (like Mitski). “Eventually the song became so popular on Spotify that it made it into our most popular playlist, Today’s Top Hits,” he says. But over time, Italiano notes, order becomes less important to a song’s lifespan as listeners develop a “deep familiarity” with the song.
Artists then make music in line with current trends and try to achieve the same reach as songs like “Austin” or “Like That”. In recent years, everything from war to heartbreak has influenced the music of the moment. That’s still true, but now TikTok, X and other platforms dominate the discussion as much as anything else. “Social media definitely plays a role in songwriting, just as community, movies and television once played a role,” Aubrey says of rap. Depending on the mood of the exchange among users, which varies from lukewarm to outraged depending on the artist, certain songs dominate the conversation. Taylor Swift’s most popular online titles are often ones that talk about contempt.
Even an artist like Milwaukee rapper Khal!l, who told WIRED in August that he wanted to “create an atmosphere where we can mosh pit but then also cry and hold hands and do shit,” is beholden to the algorithm. He rose to fame through TikTok, and the best way to maintain his presence on the app is to feed it with content that resonates: “We gotta ride this horse until the hooves fall off.”