The death knell sounded in October 2025. After 35 consecutive years in the US charts, and six as the best-selling genre in the country, for one week late last year, rap music failed to appear in the Billboard top 40. Immediately, think pieces sprung up across the internet proclaiming the imminent death of the genre, with many citing ‘overcommercialisation’ as the murder weapon. Even Kendall Jenner hopped on the bandwagon, complaining that rap music is “repetitive” in an interview last month. But are these people right? Is rap music really hooked up to a life support machine, being read its last rites and, with its dying breath, hastily cutting Kid Rock out of the will? 

RAP HAS BECOME POP 

Well, firstly, let’s take a look at the Billboard list in question. It’s true that there are no straightforward rappers on the chart between 25 and 31 October, with almost the entire top 10 being taken up by Taylor Swift’s then recently released album The Life of a Showgirl, but that doesn’t mean the genre is absent. Take Saja Boys’ “Your Idol”, for example, which sat at number 20 that week. The song is classified as K-pop, but it’s hard to deny that its synthetic drum loop and central rap verse are lifted straight out of hip hop. Likewise, listen to Tate McRae’s “Tit for Tat”, which hovered near the number one spot before being dethroned by Swift – as much as McRae’s vocals may be pop, the track’s drum loop (and, in particular, the stuttered percussion before the second chorus) is heavily indebted to techniques pioneered by Atlanta’s trap scene in the mid-2010s.

Further afield, take reggaéton, which consistently ranks as one of the biggest genres globally and has experienced a particular uptick following Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance last week. 30 years ago, the genre’s Puerto Rican pioneers – DJ Playero and DJ Nelson – drew influence from the MC culture and looping production methods of hip hop and its close cousin dancehall, fusing them with traditional bomba rhythms to produce the reggaeton we know today. Bad Bunny is, among other things, a rapper.

K-pop followed a similar journey, quite literally starting as Korea’s response to hip hop. In 1992, Korean boyband Seo Taiji and Boys debuted on national Korean television, performing rap verses and choreographed dance routines in baggy baseball jerseys imported from America. The moment marked both the advent of Korean hip hop and the K-pop group formula which endures today. Examples like these are written all over the charts – despite its detractors, hip hop’s influence looms larger than ever across modern pop music.

RAP WAS NEVER JUST ONE SOUND

Meanwhile, as much as rap music has diffused into the mainstream over the last three decades, it has also become increasingly diffuse itself. Take BigXThaPlug’s “Hell At Night feat. Ella Langley”, which was the closest thing to a pure rap song on the Billboard chart last October. Until the light drum pattern and booming rap verse arrive 62 seconds into the song, there is quite literally nothing hip hop about the track at all – it’s basically country music. What’s more, when you compare it to the second most-popular ‘rap’ song on the chart that week – Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther”, structured as a ballad between its two West Coast stars – it’s hard to pinpoint any similarities at all.

Here lies a second distinction: rap music itself is almost unmanageably vast. Sonically speaking, very few of the genre’s biggest releases over the past year share anything in common – take Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out, EsDeeKid’s Rebel, fakemink’s The Boy Who Cried Terrified or Tyler, the Creator’s Don’t Tap The Glass. While the first marks a return to hip hop’s boom-bap heyday, the latter records all represent a wave of new genres and influences into the medium. 

Far from signifying a decay in the genre, this diffuseness speaks to something fundamental in hip hop. Speaking to Dazed in October last year, Odd Future alumni Earl Sweatshirt defined rap music solely by its malleability: “It’s the first genre that said, ‘We got room for everything’, by way of what was initially dealt with as theft and piracy. Rap is the number zero, you can multiply it, throw anything in it and it’s just zero. It can be folk, it can be gospel, it can be anything. It’s forever.” Through this line of thought, rap’s diffusion and dissemination start to seem less like a decline and more like a transcendence of genre itself.

THE ‘OVERCOMMERCIALISATION’ ARGUMENT

Returning to fakemink, however, the rising UK Ug star does represent one commonly cited reason behind hip hop’s supposed decline: over-commercialisation. When fakemink recently declared that he was an artist and not a rapper (a statement that he has since doubled back on), some online commentators were quick to accuse him of abandoning his rap roots, reflecting a wider critique of artists like Drake who have diluted the genre in search of mass appeal. “Drake is the personification of a culture dying, [he] was making music that was subpar in quality in favour of capitalising on the industry,” reads one such article. 

This argument presents hip hop’s supposed over-commercialisation as a domino effect, starting with Drake’s mainstream breakthrough Take Care in 2011, and ending with ‘real’ rappers being dethroned by artists like Saja Boys and Tate McRae on the Billboard Top 40 last October. But is this really hip hop’s fault? It seems strange to blame artists like Drake for achieving commercial success, and artists like mink for seeking it, when there are so many pop stars profiting off techniques that hip hop pioneered. Moreover, their success does not seem to come at the expense of other, more traditional rap artists. 

To some extent, this argument is self-defeating: it was hip hop’s brief absence from commercial charts that led to the ‘rap is dead’ discourse in the first place, yet over-commercialisation is the cause? Perhaps the real issue is that we’re conflating a culture’s value with its commercial performance. 

WHO PROFITS FROM RAP’S INFLUENCE?

But the dissemination of hip hop techniques throughout the commercial mainstream does reveal a deeper issue that is currently being neglected – and partially perpetuated – by the ‘rap is dead’ discourse. Hip hop might be more influential than ever, but that doesn’t mean the same communities are profiting. Rap music is deeply rooted in the African-American experience; it was born in New York’s Bronx neighbourhood in the early 70s, and early hits like “The Message” were primarily concerned with the social issues that that neighbourhood faced. 

The genre’s spectacular popularity in the decades that followed is a powerful testament to the innovation of these early pioneers – the use of sampling, the democratisation of storytelling through rap, and the looping of drum patterns are all now cornerstones of modern production. But these histories largely go untold in the cultural narrative around popular music today, and risk being further silenced by premature declarations of the genre’s death. Perhaps we need to reframe the discussion: rather than declaring that rap is dead, we should celebrate that it’s more influential than ever. This might not rectify financial imbalances within the industry, but it would certainly be a step forward in recognising these foundational contributions.