Soundcloud Rap and Masculinity in Hip Hop

If you ask any young person to describe contemporary hip hop artists such as Lil Pump, Denzel Curry, Lil Tracy, or xxxtentacion, they will likely tell you that they are “SoundCloud rappers.” These artists are not necessarily similar musically, nor do they carry a homologous public image by any means, yet they’re all grouped into the elusive category of “SoundCloud rap.” SoundCloud is a platform open to all kinds of eclectic musicians where they can upload, share, and like tracks. So why exactly have a specific sect of hip hop artists been labeled as SoundCloud rappers, while other who also got started on the music-sharing platform haven’t? In attempting to answer this question, it’s important to pay mind to the many nuances of music and genre formation, both of which often seem to arise spontaneously and without explicit motivation. Very few artists are quick to label themselves, and understandably so. No one wants to be “put in a box,” creatively speaking. So it is often critics and peers who ascribe genres to musicians, not the musicians themselves. This is a critical distinction to make, as it is important to remember the subjectivity of genre as a means of categorization.While the SoundCloud rap genre is relatively new, SoundCloud itself has been around since 2007. What originated as a platform for EDM artists and focused heavily on the Scandinavian region, has since spread worldwide. The main benefits of SoundCloud are its very user-friendly interface and low cost nature. This made it practical for small time artists with low budgets to be able to quickly proliferate their music towards a wide base of listeners. Even though the genre itself has only been realized recently, the “SoundCloud rap style” is actually an incarnation of the themes and motifs touched on by several internet rappers such as early Tyler, the Creator and mid 2000s MF DOOM.The advent of the internet granted a revolutionary amount of leeway to artists of all stripes; artists no longer had to make music with the preliminary intention being to appeal to corporate suits in order to obtain a record deal. Artists could circulate music with creative freedom. This freedom led to artists like Lil B, or, The Young Based God, who employed unique and unorthodox beats, morphing the surreal with non sequitur lyrics, forging forward in the pursuit of humor. Rapping over the Imperial March from Star Wars with lyrics like “still on the yellow bus with a gun and some lean, pink shirt tiny jeans bruh man,” is something we may take for granted today but it’s important to remember how weird such a concept was over half a decade ago. In many ways, it could be said that Lil B was the first “SoundCloud rapper” in terms of pioneering its style.After making the prestigious XXL freshman list in 2011, Lil B paved the way for many other internet rappers to break through. Among them were Yung Lean and Tyler the Creator, who could be considered the next wave of internet rap. Lean and Tyler both started out as “SoundCloud rappers”. Each became popular through the internet almost exclusively and sounded strikingly similar to many of the SoundCloud rappers today. It’s hard not to notice the influence of Sadboys on Lil Peep and Lil Xan, or the influence that early Odd Future has had on $uicideboy$ and Ski Mask the Slump God.Perhaps it’s important to ask at this point, “What constitutes a SoundCloud rapper?” This is a very tricky question, which may well warrant some comical answers such as “someone with pink dreads who says ‘yuh’ and ‘aye’ a lot”, or “someone who takes a lot of Xanax and wears Gucci.” But obviously this doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what SoundCloud rap really is. The most unifying theme among most SoundCloud rappers could be described as irreverence—a shedding of perceived norms within the hip hop and musical world in favor of a much more personal and often comical approach.One way that this often manifests is in the “memeability” of most SoundCloud rappers. That is to say, they are often viewed in a humorous light. Many of them embrace this status such as Lil Pump, who willingly perpetuates Harvard and iCarly memes on his Twitter (if we can add pictures to the article, visuals would help make this less confusing for people who haven’t seen Lil Pump’s iCarly jokes). Other rappers such as Lil Peep and Lil Tracy, both members of Goth Boi Clique , have posed with Ichigo Kurosaki’s sword (of the anime Bleach) in photos. This brings up another common feature of SoundCloud rappers, a love of anime. While fetishizing Asian culture isn’t exactly new to the hip hop world (see Wu Tang Clan), it’s practically a backbone for multiple parts of the SoundCloud sphere. This is another way SoundCloud rappers deviate from previous norms of the hip hop world. A decade or two ago a love of anime and memes probably would have been viewed as rather unusual for a hip hop artist, maybe even stigmatized—now it’s not only accepted, but embraced. Some pre SoundCloud artists did make references to anime in their music, notably Joey Bada$$ who said “got dragon balls like my name was Vegeta” on the song Christ Conscious. However, it wasn’t until around the time SoundCloud came along that these references became extremely common, mostly due to the popularity of anime among young people in the West.The characteristic of SoundCloud rap utilizing unusual beats was popularized by the aforementioned Lil B on his song Comin’ from the Unda, but it continued in songs like Ginseng Strip 2002. and embodies SoundCloud rap in songs like Broccoli by Lil Yachty, Ghostemane’s Mercury, and Do Bettuh by Big Body Fiji. Often these beats are taken from movies or TV shows, like Rob Stone’s Chill Bill which samples the tune from Quentin Tarantino's film Kill Bill. The circulation of pop culture references is abundant in SoundCloud rap. Regardless of where they come from, their beats are often aesthetically littered with very unusual sounds or themes, expanding further on the playful nature of the genre. Of course this saturation of pop culture references bares its own questions. A cynic might argue that this is an attempt to appeal to a specific group as opposed to a genuine interest in the object of the reference.Soundcloud is about as post modern as music gets. It has shed practically all preconceived notions of what hip hop or music are “supposed to be.” In an age where sadness is the new commodity, hip hop has adapted as well. No longer do listeners turn to hip hop artists just for lofty fantasies of sports cars and polygamous relationships, instead they look for stories of lost love and social anxiety, of a desire for purpose and a sense of identity in an age of representation. Soundcloud rap is everything music and hip hop aren’t supposed to be: it’s melodramatic, it’s self loathing, it’s warbled, it’s hard to understand, it’s angsty, and it’s everywhere. A generation of cynics has bred a generation of cynical rappers. An important note about the progress of SoundCloud rap in relativity to other hip hop subgenres is its general irreverence for classical masculinity. Of course the old bravado of rap is far from dead. Flexing is still prominent both in music and in the appearances of many Soundcloud rappers, but now it comes in more forms (or perhaps not at all). At one time I thought this was a sign that rappers no longer needed to “put up a front” and that they could truly be themselves. However, that might be a bit naive. In reality, it’s likely that just like with any artistic movement, there are a few trailblazers being themselves and vastly more imitators attempting to cash in on a new trend. Perhaps rather than simply destroying the boundaries of masculinity in rap, new, more Byzantine boundaries have been formed in their place.Regardless, some of these artists have blazed their own path and become their own men. This honesty and public introspection is something that caught fire after many of the “proto-SoundCloud rappers” mentioned earlier like Yung Lean and Tyler, the Creator started relying on its poetics. Now more than ever are able to fully wear their heart on their sleeve thanks to the orange cloud logo. After all, what is art if not finding a new medium to express oneself when other options fail?With SoundCloud reaching a new peak in the public sphere just the past year, it’s likely that we will eventually experience SoundCloud saturation, as there are no limits to who can upload on the platform, but the number of SoundCloud artists dominating mainstream hip hop and being featured on XXL’s freshman list couldn’t possibly get much higher without taking over the entire scene. The torch of hip hop has effectively been passed to the SoundCloud generation.Clout is a fickle thing, and though SoundCloud rap may not last as a genre, it certainly won’t be regarded as a flash in the pan. Too many artists have gotten too big for it to simply fade into history. Years from now when we’re all having music beamed directly into our brains by some transhuman music service created by Amazon, we might be hearing artists call their biggest influences Lil Uzi Vert and $uicideboy$. Then we’ll be able to remember, wistfully, the days when we checked Twitter to see who our favorite artist was beefing with and looked to a Swedish EDM site for the most cutting edge hip hop around.