Death, drugs and destruction: the troubled year of SoundCloud rap

he past 1 year have generally been fair ones for hip-hop. There is reasserted a poster dominance first noted in 2017, when Nielsen Soundscan figures from your US suggested eight of the 10 most-listened-to artists on earth were rappers: new albums in 2018 by Drake, Travis Scott and Post Malone are already hugely successful, while seemingly tangential figures including Metro Boomin are finding themselves debuting at the top of the usa album charts.

But as 2018 draws to your close, no genre’s future appears to be simultaneously bright and grim since the subsection of hip-hop most often called SoundCloud rap. It’s proved the largest talking point in hip-hop, a divisive recent development that broadly speaking generally seems to turn older listeners into 2018’s equal to dads huffing from behind their newspaper at The top of Pops, angrily protesting it’s practitioners look idiotic and that their music barely qualifies as hip-hop