Designer Clothes, Art Collections, and Hip-Hop?: The New Breed of Rappers.

Hip-Hop has always been synonymous with violence, gang glorification, and misogynist lyrics but a new trend is leading rappers to change up their baggy pants and chains for well tailored suits.  Given the growth in popularity of the genre (and in the rappers’ bank accounts), the formulaic cop-hatin’, gang war-declarin’ lyrics of the past just don’t translate today. It’s hard to take Eminem rhyming about being “true to the streets” when he’s got an Academy award. Even Jay-Z has changed his previous gangsta stance to rapping about “being up in TriBeCa next to DeNiro”.

Rather than fighting the privileged lifestyle they now lead, this new breed of rappers are embracing it. They aren’t about drinking gin and juice and drive by’s, they’d rather sip Chandon on the Upper East Side. Through Kid Cudi’s hazy “Pursuit of Happiness”, Jay-Z’s urban Sinatra persona and Kanye West shift from rapper to artist, it is proof that you don’t need to have a police record to be respected. As Nicki Minaj mused in Rolling Stone, “At one point you had to sell a few kilos to be considered a credible rapper…but now it’s like Drake and I are embrac[ed for] the fact we went to [performing arts] school, we love acting, we love theater, and that’s okay”.

In their film clips, you won’t find them in dingy nightclub scenes throwing cash at strippers, there’s are highly stylised, fashionable shoots (or in Kanye’s case, 35 minute long short films) throwing back to the artistry of music greats like Michael Jackson and Madonna.

Although not the first to start the trend,  Kanye is the definitive poster boy for this new genre. He is an art aficionado, he has interned for several designers, and worries more about wearing a dinner jacket during the day than gang colours. Imagining himself as more than a name attached to an “explict language” sticker,  his latest LP, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,  replaces regular fodder of murder, crime, and poverty with intense self reflection and a critique on the lifestyle fame allows (and on a more shallow level, model and designer name drops).  A far call from Snoop declaring “1-8-7 on an undercover cop”.

Rather than succumbing to a stereotype enforced by their precursors, these artists are trying to shift the genre into something greater, bringing style and a social conscience into rap, and they’re doing it in a three piece suit.

3 Feb 2011, 9:57am Blog Street by admin
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