How Rap Has Changed Over the Years

In 1987 the band NWA released their first song titled “Panic Zone”, it was a single. They released their first full album titled, “Straight Outta Compton”. Although this wasn’t the first rap music ever put out, it was the first rap music put out that talked about discrimination against people of color. When they released the album “Straight Outta Compton” it sparked a new genre of music. 

The next advancement in rap wouldn’t be made until 1998 when Dr. Andy Hildebrand invented autotune. The first song released with autotune was “Believe” by the band Cher and autotune shortly after became known as the Chers affect. The first rappers to use auto tune were T-Pain and Snoop Dogg.

The next step in rap was the internet, although the internet was introduced to the public in 1991 it wasn’t until 2007 that SoundCloud, the first on-demand music streaming service, was launched. SoundCloud was a music streaming service where anybody could post their music, allowing rap to branch out and introduce new styles of rap.

In 2013 Marshall Mathers, formally known as Eminem, released the song “Rap God”. In the song, Eminem raps at 9.6 syllables per second making him the fastest rapper in 2013. After the release of this song, it set a trend on social media where people would try to rap as fast as him. This starts a contest among rappers to see who could rap the fastest. The current record is held by Twista at 11.2 syllables per second.

The year 2016 brought something most people who listened to early rap didn’t enjoy, mumble rap. For those of you that don’t know mumble rap is when a rapper mumbles the lyrics to their songs, making it hard to sing along or even understand. Although the music is hard to understand, it’s still around today.

In 2017 a rapper by the name XXXTentacion released his first album “17” and it formed what rap is today. His songs targeted teens going through depression. Although there was an extremely popular rapper by the name Lil Peep from 2010, XXXTentacion was the spark that started the fire. 

As different genres of rap become more popular a pattern has come into play. Just as the rapper Lil Peep was rising to fame he passed away and everyone was sad but nobody thought anything about it. Then the rapper XXXTentacion died just as he began to ride to fame, because of this the rapper juice world released a song “Legends”, in which he states “all legends die young”. Juice world died at the age of 21.

Today, rap is far different than before and it has a lot to do with society. People today don’t have the same problems as people did in the 70s and people have to make their music relatable. As new tech comes out music will change. You never know who will be the next to rise to fame.