"Hip hop is today's rock and roll, and I'm a rock star," said American rapper Kanye West five years ago, and almost everyone laughed at him, but time has shown that he was on the right track. Last year, hip hop and R&B officially surpassed rock and roll for the first time, according to a survey by the world's leading market research company Nielsen. Rappers are taking over the American mainstream, and Darko Delić, author of one of the most important hip hop blogs in the area, ex Yu, and a former journalist for Popboks magazine, sees this as a logical sequence of events.
"The American music industry has long since been reduced to two huge poles; one is this 'urban' which refers to the rap-R'n'B umbrella and everything under it, and the 'rural' appendage of the vast machinery of 'modern country.' a logical division and the moment when the rap-R'n'B sector finally pushed classic pop out of this 'urban' register, it could only expand from there. Today, American 'pop' itself is largely dependent on hip-hop patterns." , he explains in a conversation with "Vijesti".
Predrag Vukčević, another hip hop journalist known to the public as a rapper behind the pseudonym Bege Fank, also agrees with him. "Rap dominates and will continue to do so" was the title of the interview he gave to "Vijesta" three years ago, but Vukčević says that this does not mean that he is a prophet, but that it was obvious, only now it has been officially confirmed. When asked if it is just a passing trend, Delić says that it is difficult to predict the waves of the contemporary music industry, because things are becoming too chaotic, but that he is convinced that as long as the industry is alive, it will "grab everything it can from the black population".
Vukčević, on the other hand, does not question rap and R'n'B dominance and expects new trends within American black urban music, whose main determinants in recent years are trap and contemporary dancehall and reggaeton variants combined with electronic music.
"After all, most of the things that have been considered popular music for the last 70 years or so came from the music of black slaves in the US, that is, African-American, Afro-Caribbean and Latin American ghettos," he points out.
What foreign analysts single out as the biggest novelty in Nielsen's listenership calculation is the introduction of audio and video streaming as parameters, along with album sales.
"There is no doubt that various sections of the American cultural establishment have obstructed the expansion of hip-hop in every way since the 90s. Now that it is a dominant part of the music offer of the world's most powerful economy, that is no longer possible," replies Delić, who is also a member of the hip hop collective. Bombs of the nineties, when asked if the fact that streaming is only now included in the calculation means that this genre may have been the most listened to in previous years.
And what does that mean for the regional rap scene?
"In our country, all these global ones have been recognized for some time, and solutions have been written down that are believed to fit into what I call Balkansploitation music, i.e. solutions that resonate with our people, both those working abroad and here. It's nothing new, because popular music in our country has been working this way since the 50s - with a few exceptions such as 'shepherd rock', some expressions created in the New Wave and parts of the South Wind production," says Vukčević.
However, both he and Delić do not expect major changes on the domestic rap scene after the "official" popularity of American rap.
"There may possibly be some minimal changes in the minds of people from the older generation who have the power of decision and selection at local festivals and the like. Local rap artists will probably continue to behave the way they have thought they should, which is mostly quite different from what in America. Of course, that's not bad in itself, because it's desirable to introduce a local flavor, but it's bad when the basics are missing, the thing without which rap isn't rap, and that's the rapper's self-emphasis and his winning attitude," points out Vukčević.
Delić is worried about the future of rap in this region, which he says has a critical life path and questionable stylistic choices.
"This will probably be even more pronounced because the contemporary rap sound has been systematically softening over the past three to four years, in order to fit as much as possible into the mainstream preferences of the average Western listener," he believes.
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