Charting Changes
Run-DMC, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, N.W.A., Cypress Hill, Three 6 Mafia, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Wu-Tang Clan, OutKast, Migos—this list could’ve been way longer if I wanted it to be. All these are the great hip-hop bands, truly some of the best music acts in history. However, none of them are actually still active. Can you even remember the last time a band was in the center of the genre’s attention?
Takeoff of Migos / Source: May 2017 / Getty Images
Culture III by Migos? That was over three years ago, one of them is dead now, and the band is defunct. City Girls? Separated too. Brockhampton? Same.
How is it possible that in the time of hip-hop catching up with rock in popularity, and Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ being at the top of the charts for 13 weeks, there isn’t a single mainstream rap group? How come the genre associated and founded by bands is not represented by them anymore? Is it just an occasional drought, or a sign of a change in the genre? Well...
...Let’s look at some music charts: this week in the Billboard Hot 100 (main US chart)—zero hip-hop groups’ songs (and currently there’s only two bands of any genre in general, but that’s unimportant right now). Last week—also nothing. In fact, to find a hip-hop band’s single in this chart you have to go back to the middle of June, when $uicideboy$ had two songs in there: ‘The Thin Gray Line’ (position 71) and ‘Thorns’ (position 91). Both these songs charted for a week and then disappeared forever. More or less the same is the situation with albums: in the Billboard 200, there’s one (1) hip-hop album—$uicideboy$’ New World Depression. One out of 200. New World Depression has been hanging out in the chart alone since its release in June.
Similar—if not worse—is the situation with the UK charts: in the Official Charts top 100 singles list we can only find D-Block Europe (DBE henceforth) and Aitch’s ‘Gold Mine.’ And that’s it. For months. The last hip-hop band to chart before DBE is... DBE. They did it together with Clavish on 17th of May with ‘Most Definitely.’ Hip-hop groups’ albums don’t chart either. Last ones to do so were, again, $uicideboy$ with New World Depression, and Kneecap with Fine Art, both waaaaaaay back in June. Apart from these two—nothing for months before, nothing for months after.
However, it can be argued that this approach—looking at the last few months of general music charts—is not very demonstrative. Maybe it’s not a trend, maybe it’s just that the past couple of months were not very rich on new releases by hip-hop groups. Maybe... or maybe not. Let’s find this out by looking specifically at hip-hop charts, and expanding our timeframe to, say, a year. Oh, and also let’s compare our current situation with rap charts from 10 and 20 years ago.
The result ends up looking like this. 2024 is the light-green line at the very bottom of the graph. I started the count on the current week and went back for a year.
As you can see, the line representing 2024 spends most of the time at one-single-in-the-whole-chart level. Sometimes it drops to zero; occasionally, gods bestow their blessings upon us, and we get two singles in one week. However—spoiler alert—the situation's not actually even this good. To further show how dire the situation is, here’s the list of hip-hop groups that made it into the chart:
D-Block Europe
TLC
OutKast
Yeah, that’s it. Only three groups. And two of them made it in with tracks that were released over 20 years ago: TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’ is from 1999, and OutKast’s ‘Hey Ya!’—from 2003. So, effectively, there’s only one active hip-hop group capable of charting in the UK—D-Block Europe.
2014 is the emerald green line, the middle one. Clearly, hip-hop bands were not in great shape even ten years ago. There were a number of weeks when none managed to get a place in the chart, but also, there were weeks when four or even more songs got a place on the list.
However, similarly to 2024, most of the singles were not contemporary. Out of 98 charted songs by hip-hop groups in 2014, only 29 were released in the same or previous year. That’s not even a third of the total amount. This is actually worse (percentage-wise) than it will be a decade later—39 percent in 2024 vs 30 percent in 2014—although the total number is bigger in 2014.
2004 is the highest line, the dark-green one. It never, even on its worst weeks, drops below four singles in the chart. And it peaks at a whopping 14 songs out of the total 40 in the list.
Out of all 380 instances a hip-hop group’s single has appeared in the chart in 2004, only 33 were done by non-contemporary songs. That’s less than 10 percent. And they all were done by just a handful of singles:
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five - The Message (1982)
Sugarhill Gang - Rapper's Delight (1979) & Apache (1981)
West Street Mob - Break Dance - Electric Boogie (1983)
Pharcyde - Runnin' (1995)
Clipse - When the Last Time (2002) & Ma, I Don't Love Her (2002)
Wu-Tang Clan - Triumph (1997)
Beatnuts - Watch Out Now (1999)
Fugees - Ready or Not (1996)
All the rest of the songs (347 of them in total) that made it to the charts in 2004 were actually recorded in that same year. So, let’s look at how the graphs change if we remove all the old songs from them and leave only ones that were released at the time.
Evidently, both 2024 and 2014 suffered from this, the latter probably more than the former. Now, 2014 is barely reaching one single per week, it’s not even dreaming about five anymore. Here’s the total list of contemporary songs by rap groups that made it into 2014 hip-hop charts:
Jhene Aiko & Cocaine 80s - To Love & Die
Krept & Konan - Don't Waste My Time
A$AP Mob & A$AP Nast & Method Man - Trillmatic
Rizzle Kicks - Lost Generation
New Boyz - FM$
TLC & J Cole - Crooked Smile
The FiNATTiCZ - Don't Drop That Thun Thun
2024, admittedly, doesn’t look too good either. But it’s not like it had that many bands’ songs in the chart to begin with. If we cross out old tracks, the only ones left are:
Aitch & D-Block Europe - Gold Mine
DBE - Kiki
DBE & Noizy - Eagle
DBE - I Need It Now
DBE & Clavish - Pakistan
Changes in the 2004 line, however, are barely even noticeable. Why is that? Why has the decline in the amount of popular hip-hop groups happened?
Well, the biggest and most obvious reason is money. Groups are just not as economically practical as solo acts. And if duos and small groups are still somewhat fiscally viable, big groups with many members like Wu-Tang just don’t make financial sense anymore. Their profits have to be split between too many people.
In the past, it made sense for hip-hop artists to unite into groups, thus trading away their potential profits because they got in return two things: a creative platform for releasing their art (big labels) as well as protection from censorship and violence. Today, the need for at least one of those things has disappeared. Streaming services and social media allow artists to promote and sell their art without the music label middleman; the latter are only needed for promotion and release. There is more space for individualism and personal expression, instead of having to negotiate with like 15 other people, or even being told what to do.
A Tribe Called Quest / Source: RANGE / Getty Images
As for protection from censorship and violence, on one hand, hip-hop collectives can help with that. They don’t take artists’ money and don’t impose creative limitations, as they are just a group of colleagues and like-minded artists. On the other hand, this desire for an organization that would protect you from censorship and violence can lead to the opposite effect. Such groups today are at risk of being viewed by the legal system as criminal organizations, and thus persecuted, as in the case of Young Thug and his YSL Records label.
Moreover, streaming services pay artists for the total number of streams, thus encouraging the shortening of songs while their quantity per album increases. Therefore, with songs becoming shorter and shorter, perhaps there isn’t simply space for many people to say something. You cannot have both a short song and have many people make money off rapping on it.
For me, this is kind of sad. Out of my five favorite hip-hop acts, four are groups. It feels like on a hip-hop band song, they have to provide different points of view on a topic, which makes the track more interesting. And then the beat brings all of them together, unites them. This is where the magic comes from. Losing this feeling is upsetting.
However, the fact that hip-hop groups are slowly disappearing does not mean that they are all already extinct. There still are (or at least recently were) great ones. Run the Jewels, D-Block Europe, and $uicideboy$ are capable of getting into the charts; Czarface, Rae Sremmurd, EARTHGANG, NxWorries are still going strong. Among the recently separated are Migos, Unc&Few, City Girls, Brockhampton, etc. Perhaps, in 2024 hip-hop group landscape is by far not as strong as it was 20 years ago when we had OutKast, Wu-Tang Clan, and Black Eyed Peas together in one week’s chart, but it still (sometimes) has something interesting to offer.
