KXNG Crooked has offered a solution for the current state of Hip Hop, and it’s not as technical as his approach to the craft.
On Sunday (December 31), the Slaughterhouse MC posted a video on Instagram in which he pointed out one fundamental flaw in the culture’s structure and how alleviating it would heal everything else that has gone wrong in recent years.
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“I got a very easy fix. I could fix Hip Hop in one move,” he began. “You know what the solution is? Love. That’s it. Love. Love the culture.
“All you executives in those buildings — get out if you don’t love the culture. All you artists in them booths — get out if you don’t love the culture, you don’t love the craft. All you artists selling out concerts — get off stage if you don’t love the people who support you, and honor them. Love — there we go.”
Hip Hop’s commercial reception took a massive hit last year, which could be one of the reasons behind Crook’s emphasis on restoring its spirit.
In October, Juicy J even urged the culture’s stakeholder’s to get together to discuss the dip, saying: “Rap is down 40 percent, man. We gotta figure some shit out. We gotta sit down and talk. Let’s have a meeting.”
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It took all the way to the end of July last year for a rapper to top the Billboard Hot 100 in 2023, which Latto achieved thanks to her “Seven” collaboration with BTS star Jung Kook. This raised a lot of questions regarding the genre’s future considering it spent the last half-decade as the most popular genre in the United States, statistically speaking.
Just a few months back, Erick Sermon expressed his qualms about Hip Hop’s modern state, dismissing today’s dominant trends as being uncharacteristic of the craft he helped to pioneer.
During an interview with Say Word! Podcast in mid-November, the EPMD co-founder didn’t hold back when he was asked his thoughts on the genre as it stands today.
“I just think that Hip Hop is just not Hip Hop,” he began. “I just think that they should change the name. No disrespect, but that’s not what that is […] Hip Hop can evolve, but this is not evolving. Evolving is Melle Mel to Rakim stage to the whole nine, to Wu-Tang [Clan] to Murder Inc., DMX — that’s evolving. Ya’know, Cam’ron. Ya’know, Dipset — that’s evolving.”
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After shouting out several other artists such as Ludacris, Migos and Soulja Boy for their originality, he added: “Music is in somewhat of a bind because it’s stuck in one place.”
