Here’s the surest sign yet that Hip-Hop is in some deep doo-doo… and it hasn’t happened in 3 decades

(December 22, 2023). First, let me state that this is not a eulogy for hip-hop. Despite what you’re about to read, hip-hop will never really fully go away. It’s like rock and roll in that sense, which has always been more than just about the music.

Rock and roll became a lifestyle for generations of people who came up in the latter half of the 20th century and, despite the fact that it no longer dominates the record popularity charts, it still thrives on the concert circuit, particularly with heritage acts from earlier generations able to sellout stadiums long after their hit-making heydays.

Hip-hop may soon be headed for a similar fate. While diehard fans are inseparable from the genre — it’s not just music to them but a lifestyle and culture woven into their musical fabric — there are clear signs that the rest of mainstream America is getting bored with it.

One indicator clearly suggests that new hip-hop is not reaching the broader audience it used to, with an apparent decline in industry support for emerging artists being reflected on the Billboard charts. This particular data point is something that hasn’t happened in 29 years and, instead of a eulogy, should serve as hip-hop’s wake-up call.

Here it is (with some background provided for context).

For much of hip-hop’s 50-plus years in existence (the last 44 of which have been spent on mainstream radio and the music popularity charts), America’s most popular genre for seven years running (at least until this year) has prided itself on rolling out the freshest, newest rap talent from Anywhere, USA — or even abroad — and turning that talent into the latest national chart-topping sensation.

And as evidence of hip-hop’s ability to keep churning out fresh new talent year in and year out, there’s one statistic that has rung true for much of its chart-topping history.

With the exception of just three of the past 37 years (since 1987, when the Beastie Boys broke the mainstream glass ceiling with the genre’s first No. 1 LP), there’s been at least one rap act per year who achieved their very first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 (note: a total of 110 rap acts have reached No. 1 since 1987, see table below). 

The calendar’s three exceptions were 1988 (when the Beasties’ prior year success was still considered an anomaly and no rap albums topped the chart) and 1994 (only two albums — the Beasties with their second No. 1, Ill Communication, and the soundtrack to the film Murder Was the Case, credited to “various artists” — topped the list that year).

The third exception was this past year, 2023, which marked the first time since 1994 that no rap artists achieved their first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200.

That ended a nearly three-decade streak of fertility for new rappers achieving their initial chart toppers, with the only acts able to ring the No. 1 bell this past year being tried and true veterans (six of them, more on that below).

This ominous stat also continued a significant downward trend that saw only one rap act get his first No. 1 in 2022.

And that artist — Pusha T — was a 20-year hip-hop veteran who’d already charted seven prior albums on the Billboard 200 (including three with his former group, Clipse) before achieving his first No. 1 in May that year.

Since Pusha’s album topped the chart, there’ve been 15 No. 1s, all by chart-topping veterans who had been there before and have now had at least three No. 1s each.

If you exclude Pusha T, who was pushing 45 years old at the time of his maiden voyage to the top, you’d have to go back to August 2021 to find the last time a truly up-and-coming rapper reached No. 1 for the first time with an early-career album or mixtape: Australian teen The Kid Laroi, whose 2020 mixtape F*ck Love rose to the top more than a year after its original release thanks to multiple deluxe versions that piled on features by veteran heavyweights like Lil Durk, Polo G, NBA YoungBoy and the late Juice WRLD.

No matter how Kid Laroi, a white teenager with no prior professional music experience, got to the top, it counts for the purposes of this discussion.  Still, one has to question the direction of hip-hop (and the industry’s commitment to developing new artists) when the last two rappers to get their first No. 1s were a 45-year-old graybeard from Virginia Beach, VA, and an 18-year-old kid from Waterloo, New South Wales, Australia, in 2022 and 2021, respectively.

By the way, the now-20-year-old Kid Laroi’s followup album The First Time, billed as his debut studio LP, only managed to reach a modest No. 26 in November 2023 and is already off the chart.  And Pusha-T has yet to issue a follow-up to his 2022 No. 1 album.

Of note, no two consecutive years since 1988-89 have seen as few as one new rapper achieving his/her first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, an astounding void that 2022-23 now has the dubious distinction of joining and which has to be of some concern to the industry and a genre that, until now, has churned out new superstars annually for the better part of its mainstream existence.

So who DID top the charts in 2023?

As mentioned above, there were six chart-topping rap albums in 2023 — all by acts who’d been to No. 1 at least twice before. Gender-nonbinary Lil Uzi Vert scored their third No. 1, as did Travis Scott, Rod Wave, Bad Bunny and Nicki Minaj.  Drake, the most prolific chart-topping rapper of the past 14 years, notched his thirteenth No. 1 album in October with For All The Dogs (to mixed reviews, btw).

The closest a new rap act came to hitting No. 1 for the first time in 2023 was when South Korean rapper Agust D — formerly of the boy band BTS (yes, you read that correctly) — reached No. 2 in May with the appropriately titled D-Day.

There were eight other rappers that have never been to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 who reached the top ten in 2023, none of whom climbed higher than No. 4 this year: Yeat (No. 4), Doja Cat (No. 4), Offset (solo, No. 5), j-hope (formerly of BTS, No. 6), Don Toliver (No. 8), Jack Harlow (No. 8),  Lil Yachty (No. 9), and Rylo Rodriguez (No. 10).

And all of those acts are also chart veterans with each of them having released at least one Billboard charting album or mixtape prior to their most recent top-10 entries.  It’s also worth noting that Lil Yachty’s album wasn’t really hip-hop.  It instead dabbled in psychedelic soul/rock reminiscent of late-1960s/ early ‘70s fare by Funkadelic and Pink Floyd.

So what does all of this mean and why is it happening?

Well, bluntly speaking, it means hip-hop, which appears to be suffering from a dearth of fresh ideas and musical innovation, is slowly falling out of favor with the many casual or mainstream listeners who for a long time tolerated its folly and excesses. And the reasons could be many.

Few music genres of late have perfected the art of sounding fresh and exciting, and ideally hip-hop shouldn’t be held to a higher creative standard than say country or rock or pop, which are also guilty of retreading the same old themes, lyrically (and in many cases musically) speaking.

Except rap music is held to a higher standard, one because of its enviable standing as the most consumed genre of music in America for six or seven years straight and, two, because of its heavy influence on the impressionable young people who largely comprise its audience (and three, because it is largely by and for Black people, who’ve always had to do more to get respect in a white-dominated music industry).

But hip-hop’s messages are often brash and brutal — perhaps more now than ever — with lyrics that blur the line between fiction and reality and which have largely gone from cautionary to celebratory when it comes to the violent, hyper-sexualized, and drug-hazed rhetoric found in prevalent rap sub-genres like drill, pussy-rap, and trap music.  

With rare exceptions, rap also carries with it a toxicity that, in a post-pandemic world when the country is already socially, politically and culturally divided and its international allies are embroiled in humanitarian wars that have claimed the lives of tens of thousands, seems ill-timed and trite.

The only relationships depicted in rap lyrics these days are those that are in decay, with cheating girlfriends (or boyfriends), baby mama (and daddy) drama, ongoing beefs, and retaliation against one’s “opps” often dominating lyrics and, subsequently, headlines.  Also, the prevailing style today — particularly among up-and coming rappers — is “ratchet” or “hood rat” hip-hop, a theme that is, presumably, not to a lot of consumers’ tastes.

While none of these traits are new to hip-hop, they’ve dominated the music in recent years, sparking many a debate about whether the growing toxic and ratchet trend will continue to be prevalent in the future and whether this is ultimately damaging or good for hip-hop overall.  If the recent numbers are any indication, the short answer is no (it’s not good).

The industry is also changing how it markets hip-hop to an audience with shorter attention spans in the TikTok era.

Rappers are increasingly becoming more singles driven with one-off song releases and featured turns here and there (the songs are also becoming increasingly shorter in length, with many now clocking at less than two minutes).  This goes hand-in-hand with artists becoming bigger fixtures on quick-access social media platforms than they have been on the album charts.  Some veterans — like Kanye West, 50 Cent, Boosie Badass, and Soulja Boy — have graduated from releasing hit albums to being X (Twitter) and Instagram trolls with regular negative posts about, well, other rappers.

Meanwhile, newer acts like Sexxy Redd — the rising princess of so-called “pussy rap” — and her co-rider Sukihana seem more content with (and are duly rewarded for) gaining millions of followers on TikTok, Instagram and OnlyFans — and scoring quotable hit singles — than they are getting a chart-topping full-length album in Billboard.

Ironically to this point, Red’s latest viral hit single “SkeeYee” debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s TikTok Top 50 chart in September, further cementing her status as a social media superstar, despite the fact that both the song and its parent album/mixtape, Hood Hottest Princess, have so far peaked at a humbling No. 62 on the Hot 100 and Billboard 200, respectively.

Then there’s the issue of musical tastes changing drastically in recent years.  

Aside from Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen continuing their chart domination and SZA making a potent return in 2023, K-pop has taken the country by storm.

Five albums by South Korean acts topped the Billboard 200 in 2023 (following four in 2022), including two by the K-pop boy band Stray Kids (who also had two in ‘22).  All of the albums were by acts who, since 2022, have achieved their first No. 1s in America (with the exception of the last No. 1 by the world’s most prolific South Korean boy band BTS, who announced a two-and-a-half-year hiatus that year).

K-pop represents to the American mainstream a fresh new sound and in some cases offers a different style of hip-hop, especially with former members of BTS putting their alternative spin on rap.  It’s hardly a coincidence that the group’s Agust D was the closest any rapper came in 2023 to getting his first No. 1 LP. 

But maybe this international flavor of hip-hop is good for the genre, which will always be able to churn out new acts both domestically and abroad.  In the past month (December) alone, product from the following artists — none of whom have ever topped the Billboard 200 — have been released (to varying degrees of praise): Canadian rapper Killy, Sukihana (from Delaware), C Stunna (Florida), reality TV personality Chrisean Rock (Baltimore) and New York drill rapper Lil Tjay (a retake on Wham!’s holiday classic “Last Christmas”) to name a few.

But unless your name is Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Nicki Minaj, Rod Wave, or the many other artists who’ve already been to the mountaintop multiple times, it doesn’t appear too promising for those rappers that are still striving to get there… at least not on the Billboard charts.

We’ll see what 2024 brings and if this negative trend continues.  In the meantime, the below table is a list of all the rappers that have ever topped the Billboard 200, listed in reverse chronological order by the year in which they first reached No. 1. 

DJRob

DJRob (he/him/his), Billboard hip-hop chartologist, is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, pop, rock and (sometimes) country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff!  You can follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog and on Meta’s Threads.

DJRob (@djrobblog) on Threads

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