Is Hip Hop The Most Dominant Genre In The US ?

Well it’s about time… about a week ago, Forbes magazine reported that Hip Hop and Rap has overtaken Rock as the number 1 genre for the first time in History.

Now firstly “Can I please have a moment of silence” (Nas) to appreciate this milestone.

Hip Hop has had one hell of a journey, from the early days of Flava Flav and Salt N Pepper. We’ve seen Hip Hop evolve and develop into sub genres like Grime, UK Rap and Trap.

With O.G’s like Drake and Kendrick in the US and Skepta and Stormzy in the U.K, it’s actually surprising to me that its taken this long for the genre to rule music.

Even though the fanbase of Hip Hop as an umbrella genre has probably always been as large as that of Rock, the reality is, it is not within our culture to financially support the music we love. Which means it never gets the commercial success it deserves.

The rise of streaming, YouTube views and Independant artists in the last two years, means that now – all Hip Hop that is listened to is accounted for.

So what’s next? Well we’ve already seen these two massive genres collaborate with artists firstly like Jay Z and Linkin Park teaming up and more recently Stormzy and Linkin Park. But with the two genres Rock and Hip Hop ruling the music industry – will a sub genre Hip Rock be next?

Personally, after growing out of my Pop, Spice Girl faze, Hip Hop has been my favourite genre for the last  20 years. I’m sure I don’t stand alone, but the media has always found a way to down play the artists creating the music, by focusing on their personal life over their craft. But they can’t do that anymore, it’s ‘cool’ to be ‘urban’, wear trainers and everyone wants to be a rapper. So it will be interesting to see where Rock is in comparison to Hip Hop in the next two years, as the genre continues to dominate the charts and evolve in sound.