Sicker Than Your Average

Hey,

Along with billions of other people, I received my Spotify Wrapped list the past week that highlighted my music listening habits. I had artists I was expecting to see on there, and I found a few strange inclusions because of Today’s Top Hits. The one thing I didn’t see on my list is any mediocre rap.

The best rap music is made by rappers who are either extremely good or extremely bad at their craft. The musicians who are technically gifted at what makes a good song usually bubble to the top, and it’s because of their mastery of rapping and structuring verses. There are also a lot of musicians who turn their technical deficiencies into earworms and catchy melodies. The one thing I don’t have a desire to listen to is average rap music, which involves people technically going through the motions but without anything that makes the music truly unique.

I struggled a bit with defining what truly mediocre rap sounds like, because I want to emphasize that they aren’t great or bad. They’re somewhere in between, in like a musical purgatory. Examples of mediocre rappers today would be Saweetie, A$AP Ferg or Russ. It’s also important to note that in most rap groups, the majority of members are usually mediocre. An example of this would be the other members of the St. Lunatics besides Nelly or Murphy Lee, or everyone in D12 not named Eminem. My theory about this is that if you’re an above average rapper, you can probably tell what truly bad rap is and won’t let those people appear on your albums, but that’s a topic for another newsletter.

The dilemma of a mediocre rapper is that it’s much harder to stand out and maintain a fanbase when you truly sound like everyone else that’s making rap music. As a bad rapper, you can rely on catchy melodies or other gimmicks to gain fans, and as a great rapper you can leverage the anticipation of how you’re going to float over the next track into record sales and touring schedules. If you’re an average rapper, you have to rely on catching lightning in a bottle and hopefully having one song that tops the charts, enabling you to ride the coattails of a platinum record into a respectable career. In my opinion, no one epitomizes this more than B.o.B.

B.o.B was once viewed as the 2nd coming of Andre 3000, one of the best rappers of all time, but by the time he signed a major label deal with Atlantic Records he was firmly in the camp of mediocre rappers. B.o.B followed up being named one of the XXL Freshman of 2008 with the release of his debut album, “The Adventures of Bobby Ray”. On that album, he struck lightning several times with three platinum singles, “Nothin On You”, “Airplanes” and “Magic”. In my opinion, those three songs could have been performed by any rapper and if you maintained the hook, guest feature and the underlying music they would’ve been equally as successful. That’s the catch-22 of a mediocre rapper, and explains why B.o.B has had a difficult time replicating his initial successes.

He’s rode his platinum singles into what I would call a successful career, as he has multiple albums to show for it, but I would never refer to B.o.B as a great rapper. I also wouldn’t refer to him as a superstar, so somehow he’s still in that musical purgatory that he was in when he was a new artist over a decade ago. I’m sure there are lots of artists who would love to have a career like B.o.B, but with so much other music to listen to I don’t find myself gravitating towards new B.o.B releases. And that’s because he’s a mediocre rapper.

Who’s your favorite mediocre rapper?

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