Switched on Pop - Hip-hop's Sea Change at Rolling Loud

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Hip-hop is in a weird place right now. Research says that the genre, in both streaming and chart performance, has declined over the last decade. And while rap artists can still get number one songs on the Hot 100, it’s a far cry from the peak of trap circa 2017, when Nielsen data named hip-hop as the most popular genre in the U.S. So what does that mean for the future of rap? To find out, producer Reanna Cruz spent all weekend reporting from Inglewood, CA, at the California edition of the world’s largest hip-hop festival: Rolling Loud. Through talking to attendees and catching the weekend’s hottest sets, they learned about the current state of hip-hop – the good and the bad – as well as what the future may hold. To read Reanna’s highs and lows from the festival, check out their Vulture article here.  Special thanks to Antonio Cruz for his production help on this episode. Songs Discussed: OsamaSon – Pop Nicki Minaj – BARBIE DANGEROUS ¥$, Kanye West, & Ty Dolla $ign – EVERYBODY (live) ¥$, Kanye West, & Ty Dolla $ign – BACK TO ME (live) Junior H – Y LLORO Natanael Cano – Pacas de Billetes Fuerza Regida – Enculado That Mexican OT, Lefty SM – Barrio (with Lefty SM) That Mexican OT – Cowboy Killer (live) KenTheMan – Not My N**** – Extended KenTheMan – Poppin Sh!t KenTheMan – Keep Going (live) Kaliii – Area Codes Action Bronson & Statik Selektah – Respect the Moustache Drake, SZA, & Sexyy Red – Rich Baby Daddy (live) Sexyy Red, Sukihana – Born By the River (feat. Sukihana) Sexyy Red, Chief Keef – Skee Yee (live) Nettspend – shine n peace (live) Nettspend – deftones snippet (live) Matt Ox – Overwhelming Nettspend – What they say SOPHIE – BIPP Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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from the first instant and he has a wea. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute, hypnotica, irresistible. Discover it now and let you move over your sensia. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I am producer Rianna Cruz. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.

And I'm a songwriter Charlie Harding. Over the past few years, it's no secret that hip hop's popularity as a culture-dominating genre has waned. According to a report by the music analytics firm Chart Cipher, in 2023, hip-hop songs had made up about 27% of Billboard's streaming songs chart. But just three years earlier, hip-hop had made up 58% of the chart. That's a pretty big drop. And looking at the Billboard 200 this year, only two hip-hop albums in 2017.

have managed to top the charts. This could be for a few reasons. Maybe it's because country has been steadily gaining popularity over the last few years. Or, you know, maybe pop is just, you know, on a big Taylor Swift-esque kick right now. She's taking over everything. She really has. And maybe that's the title wave of Taylor Swift affecting all of the charts. But either way, hip-hop is in a much different space than, say,

2017 when Nielsen data named hip hop as the most popular genre in the U.S. These are interesting stats to hear, Rihanna, because I feel like this has happened really quickly. Like you were saying, it's just a few years ago that hip hop was the dominant form, and now that seems to be changing. How is hip hop responding to this change in its status? Well, I am glad you asked, because I thought the same exact question, and to figure it out, I traveled to Inglewood, California, with my brother Antonio, to catch this year's edition of Rolling Loud California, the world's largest hip-hop festival to report on the state

of hip-hop from the ground floor. You went about two miles from your house. Nice. I did. Long arduous journey in the lift that I called to SoFi Stadium. I've roughly heard of Rolling Loud, but I've never been. What's the deal with this festival? Well, first, let's start with some background. When it comes to hip-hop festivals, there is no entity quite like Rolling Loud. The rap festival has been around for a decade,

starting from humble beginnings in Miami to having offshoots everywhere from Thailand to the Netherlands, which I think is pretty crazy. I wonder what Netherlands hip-hop is. I don't know. Could be pretty dope. The goal of the festival from what I can gather is to highlight both up-and-coming rappers as well as A-list chart superstars to kind of craft a cohesive look at what's happening

in the genre. It's how you get someone smaller with a lot of underground hype like Osama Sun. On the same lineup as headliners' future with Metro Boomin, host Malone and Nikki Minaj. Barbie Dangerous. We just don't endanger us. You are over. You ain't enraged of us because I one, one, one, one, angel numbers.

Rolling Loud also carries a reputation. It has been referred to by NPR previously as, quote unquote, a hotbed of arrests. And in the past, there's been well-documented incidents of stampedes, drug busts. But that being said, my personal experience, you know, I can't speak to those, but my personal experience was that of any other festival I've been to. It's as good of a time as you want it to be. I talked to some of the attendees over the course of the weekend, and some people were excited. It's just like a whole mix of music, which is just like, it's really cool, honestly. I just feel like it's hell of like versatile. Like you get rap, you get R&B, you get R&B, you get

Hispanic, like, like you get all, anything you want to listen to. Yeah. Aren't being especially a festival like this. That's pretty dope. But the more people I talked to, the more that I got the vibe, people were disappointed. These lovely women that I talked to the second day of the festival were more positive about it. So far so good. Day one was kind of lame, but it was good. It was lame the first day.

But it's good today. Have you seen anybody that you liked so far? Okay, we love sexy red. This is our second time seeing her. And we have this theory that she's our cousin. So sexy if you're listening to this. Hey, cousin. Hi, cousin.

We love you, cousin. I love that they just made her first name sexy. Do you know my friend Red, sexy Red? But that was one of the more positive reactions. Others had more tepid things to say. Well, it's a little bit like our roller coaster's ups and downs. Like us fans, we were let down. And to be honest, this was the messiest rolling out I've been to.

That was a woman named Carla, and unfortunately I, as well as a lot of other people that I talked to there, shared Carla's disappointment. Now, there were a bunch of amazing performances and artists that I did discover at Rolling Loud, which we will talk about. But overall, I found the festival kind of overwhelming. To quote something that my brother said, if your best part of the weekend is the food, bro, you're in trouble. And the food was nice. I had Prince Street pizza. I had so much good stuff. But not really what you want to be reporting back when your friends asked.

I was really loud. Well, the food. Let me tell you about the slice of pizza. The pepperoni was no. No, exactly. So let's start, I guess, with the elephant in the room, the headliners. For me, this was by far the biggest. let down. This edition of Rolling Loud

Cali was originally headlined by Lo Uzivert, Post Malone, and Future with Metro Boomin. Low Oozever, after the lineup was announced, withdrew, and said, I was never booked for this. Why am I on the lineup? Wow. I know. So he was replaced with Nikki Minaj. Nikki Post, Future Metro,

we've talked about all of them on this show over the past year. Then, after the lineup came out, a fourth night of of Rolling Loud was announced, headlined by none other than what I can assume to be pronounced, Y, S. It's like the sign for yen and the sign for dollar. Yes, yeah.

So are the yen, is it called yen dollar? Maybe. Oh, it's like yay for yen and dollar for Thai dollar sign. Anyway. Kanye West and Thai Dollar sign, they've got an album. They're doing the fourth night. They did the first night.

Oh. So they added a Thursday. Y.S. Kanye Westin Tide Dollar Sign. Headlined Thursday night. And this sparked concern within me, at least, for a number of reasons, right? Yay, over the past few years, has become widely known for his pretty crazy anti-Semitic statements. He even co-opted the aesthetics of the band Burzum. for his latest record.

And if you're not familiar, that is a black metal band fronted by a prominent neo-Nazi. He really likes to cater to the neo-Nazis. He has lunch with them. He imitates them. They head up his businesses. Yeah.

Oh, God. I know. He's cavorting with a terrible, terrible crowd, to say the least. On a much less important level, the duo's performances, and I put quotes around performances, Okay.

Have been more accurately referred to as listening parties. So they're not performances. They're basically tied all a sign in Kanye West, walking around on stage in masks, playing their studio album without microphones. Wild. Just wild stuff. And how was this listening party? Well, I went into it thinking, surely this won't be a listening party.

party because it was marketed as a performance, not a listening party, and the Rolling Loud ex-formally Twitter account replied to people on that platform asking if it was a listening party by saying they were performing. It is not a listening party. The performance that I saw was by the book a listening party. I got scammed. I got fleeced and I didn't even pay for a ticket. Press credentials. Did the crowd seem to have a similar disappointment? I took this video during the song Everybody, which you may know for featuring a very extensive backstreet voice sample. Just listen to the crowd here because I think it speaks volumes.

Damn. I think you could hear like if I had to point out the voices of maybe two people in that video, I could. But how are you going to engage the crowd on one of the most popular songs of all time? And it's not a resounding cheer. People just like don't know what to do. I have been to campfires with people singing that song with more gusto than that entire stadium. I feel like you neither attended a performance, a listening event, because nobody seemed to be listening, nor a party, because it doesn't sound like anyone was having fun. None of the above. None of the above. I also took a voice note of another song during the show where the DJ cut out the music to hear the crowd sing along.

And you could hear a similar thing happening. I've been to weddings with more crowd engagement. That's rough. I mean, if you as a festival choose to market yourself with a special event, which is hosted by a person who caters to white supremacists. What does it say about your, like, what do you expect from your audience? What do you expect the cultural residence is going to be at this moment when the genres at loggerheads against other genres which are taking over the charts? They're literally catering to the most extreme.

So that was night one. And that kind of set a tone for the rest of the festival that I don't think Rolling Loud really fully. overcame. And the rest of the headliners, Nikki, future with Metro Booman, I will excuse Post Malone because Post Malone was actually doing a great job. All of the headliners kind of were just phoning it in, not really giving much energy. Nikki spent multiple, multiple minutes of her set, playing long video interludes with her off the stage, while full songs from her album played without much else. It was extremely disappointing. I feel like this festival leaning into these legacy act headliners does not bode well. Well, here's what I will say. There were bad parts about Rolling Loud.

But I'm going to be optimistic for a second. I think there were some really cool parts of Rolling Loud that speak to a larger state of hip-hop today. So to see what's new and exciting about the genre, I had to look away from the headliners, the nickys and the metros of the world, and travel into the undercard because that's where I think the true future of the scene lies. First of all, one of the most interesting things to me about the Rolling Loud lineup was the amount of Latino artists that were invited. Now, the festival was held in Inglewood, which is in Los Angeles. And Inglewood is a city that, according to the 2020 census, is over 50, percent Latino. Los Angeles and California writ large is heavily populated and influenced by Latinos

and Latino culture, specifically Chicano culture from Mexico. When the Rolling Loud lineup dropped, the most notable part of it to me was a distinct special guest slate populated by Mexican regional artists, specifically Juniore H. Netanyl Cano, and Fuerreirae, who we had previously discussed, who we had previously discussed on our Mexican regional chartbreakers episode. I'm just kind of stunned because... None of these acts are hip hop acts.

If you drive around, listen to the radio in Los Angeles, like probably a third of the stations play Mexican regional music. And these acts feel like a hybrid of this sort of more traditional form, plus the stylings of more contemporary vocal. But there's no rapping here. There's no beats. I just find it fascinating because so often I feel like Latin hip hop gets categorized as like Latin hip hop or Urbano or Latin trap and not necessarily just like hip hop

because Latino people have been in the history of hip hop from the very beginning as well, often sort of crowded out. So I'm just fascinated by the curatorial choice to bring Mexican regional music, which is having an absolute moment into this festival and what it might say about hip hop or large. Yeah, these acts all operate in the space of Coriados Dumas, which is a genre that fuses classic choritos with the personality, lyrical content. and swagger of hip hop. So it kind of bridges those gaps. By putting these acts on the lineup,

like you said, Charlie, like it feels intentional. It's a curatorial statement and kind of makes a point about what hip hop is globally. It speaks to the communities the festival is serving. And with the chart success that the genre has had over the past year,

it felt really smart. And here is where I wish I could play you a clip from the festival. But the thing is, none of those acts ended up actually performing. What? Due to personal matters, visa issues, and contract breaches in no particular order. So that was a massive ball dropped by the festival. Wow.

Oh, wow. Okay. Several attendees complained to me about this, including my interviewee Carla and her friend Jackie, who said this. All of us that spent like $800 for our BIP didn't get to see. three of our artists that we were looking forward to see. Then later on when I saw they added the Mexican artist, I was like, okay, this is the first rolling now that I've seen with Mexican artists. So I was like, yeah, that's worth it.

I want to come. But now that they're not here, I'm like, eh, whatever. You know, like, I literally sat in this line for like three to four hours because there's literally no one that I want to see right now. That's like me saying, hey, come to my birthday party. And by the way, John Williams is conducting the happy birthday song. And then last minute, it's like, no, there's no John Williams. And Nate hates the happy birthday song.

So it's absolutely ruined. I wish I to not show up to your birthday party. It's a tough look. These people have paid good money. That's terrible. I know. She said she paid $800 for a Rolling Loud VIP pass to see these acts in Englewood. And they didn't show up.

That's like a third of a Taylor Swift ticket, which is a lot of money. However, they weren't the only Mexican acts on the lineup. Looking into the undercard, you had some artists that operated more in the style of traditional American hip-hop, like that Mexican O.T., who blends Houston rap with his Tejano heritage. That's awesome. Holy shit. What is that? Wow. I feel like,

are you hearing the thing that I'm hearing, which is so uncommon in the world of hip-hop? It's a waltz. Oh. Yeah. Wow.

One, two, three, four, five, six. One, two, three, four, five, six. I didn't even clock that, yeah. Which probably works with the underlying sample. And then it's got thick 808 beats. Interesting, like the vocal styling, again, is actually, it's kind of this hybrid where it's like, it's got the, maybe

the attitude and swagger of a rap flow, but it's also song. It definitely feels like an evolution. Yeah, that Mexican OT is maybe my favorite rapper of the past few years. That's his song, Barrio, and his set brought

the house down. Lately, y'all be thanking about all the a push I'm in, Lately, about all the drink I've been drinking. Oh, lately I've been Every time I hit a new town I find my way all around

Everybody was into it He seems like a really nice guy He was donning like a vicaro hat Walking around on stage, you know Singing with the audience There was another treat on the lineup And that was in the form of a 17-year-old Sireno artist named Chino Baccas

And I know the other Coritos Tumbaro's acts on the lineup had bailed, but Chino kind of filled that gap. He was flanked by a full band and riled up the crowd, speaking only in Spanish, to an audience that sang every word. This, to me, is kind of what hip-hop is all about. Maybe it's not in the musical concept. so much, but more of the skill, the artistry, the swagger that the artist carries. And Gino had more than enough with the fan base to back it up.

It marked, I think, something indicative of the scene writ large, an embrace of the new, an embrace of the cultural. And at the end of the day, I feel like it doesn't necessarily matter to me that the rest of the Mexican slate didn't show up. It's that the hip-hop community reached out to them with open arms in the first place. I was talking to another attendee before Gino's set, who was a dude that went by Mike Man, pretty dope. He put it better than I ever could.

I'm a Oscar fan, you know, but I'm a Chicano, so I'm like, this is my new generation type of corrido, so I'm going to eat it, you know, and it's my generation, like I got a support, you know? Yes, yeah, clado. Do you guys feel like there are a lot of Latino artists that rolling with? out this year, what are your thoughts on that? It's the beginning of it, you know? Like, I think they're starting to recognize that we got the juice,

you know, that we also got the flavor, we got the rhythm, you know? As we support, like the rest of the community, they're starting to recognize that they can support us back, you know, like every black rapper that I'm a rapper, I'm a fan of, you see all the Mexicans supporting, you know? So they got to support right back, you know, so it's a good generation right now. They got the juice. Dude's pumped.

We got the juice. The flavor, the sason, he's, he's a good. He's so real about that. But, you know, the Latino presence wasn't the only thing that captured my attention this year. There's also the presence of female rappers and the hip-hop underground, which we can dig into after the break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions.

I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No.

No. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the path. in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Another thing to note from my experience at Rolling Loud is that the artists I saw with the most

dedicated fan bases were women. Even on the smaller stage, I watched crowds sing every word of songs by artists. I had never heard of, personally. Take Ken the Man, for example. Bitch, like a bitch with a own shit. I ain't never been a broke bitch. I've been having motion. Five stars with a toasting.

I've been on some thrill-foc shit. And I like my head. Ken the Man, that rocks. Can the Man, notable woman, is a rapper whose music lies, I think, somewhere between Megan the Stallion and Cardi B. She's a deeply sexual and provocative rapper whose rap's oozed with the same Texas twang

as Megan, listen to her song Pop and Shit. Hey, I smell good, fuck good. I ain't got a cook. Bad bitch, so they got a look. Walk through 10 bands, baby. I don't want no bottle. I'm rich. I'm a rapper crazy.

More bands in my file account. Two chains is a big amount. She's not just a can. Her flow is so in the pocket, my goodness. Yeah. Seeing her set was a very pleasant surprise. I watched her and her DJ engaged the crowd effortlessly, appealing to an audience of mostly women who,

hung on her every word. Her set was followed by her contemporary Callie. That's K-A-L-I-I-I-I, three highs. And Callie comes from a similar cloth. Her hit area codes blew up on TikTok last year. Got a white boy on my roster. He'd be feeding me pasta and lobster. He just sent me up on Tuesday.

Like, what's doing bad? Let me take you shopping. I told him all I'm a little busy. I want to see a compendium of all of the best fine Italian dinner references in the world of hip hop. I feel like this enters the top ten. Mom Spaghetti. Here we've got fine pasta and lobster. I'm sure Action Bronson has a lot that we can also look at.

This is a small sample size, but I mean, what I'm hearing from these rappers is a level of, like, lyricism. and precision and verbal dexterity that, you know, I mean, generalizing a bit, but has kind of been less privileged by some of the male rappers at the top of the game in favor of more just sort of like, you know, intonation and sort of like guttural sound effects and stuff. These women are bringing the heat, lyrically speaking. Yeah, and the thing that I like about rappers like Callie, like Ken the man and other female rappers I saw this weekend like Flomilly and Sexy Red. It's that they know how to have fun. Here's a clip I took during Sexy Red set.

You had a good 2023. You did three tours pregnant. You're going to get your baby girl this year. Let's give big sexy and congratulations, rolling loud. What the fuck we do? What's up? Yeah. Let that who she breathe. What's up? What we do? What's that? What's that? What's that? What's that? That's amazing. That's amazing. I have to send that to my mom because that was the advice she would give us for any of the way.

If you like, you know, got a scratch or like lost your finger, she would be like, air it out. The music video collab that Sexy Red did with Drake and says one of the more cognitively dissonant and powerful music videos I've ever seen in which Drake basically handicams, the entire birth experience that Sexy Red had while a full-on hip-hop music video with people shaking their booties is happening outside the birthing room. It's so bizarre and very powerful. It's incredible. I love Sexy Red personally. She's one of my favorite rappers of the moment. How could you not love a song like Born by the River? It's like a very contemporary update to the Chris Farley sketch from S&L, living in a van down by the Never.

But I'm... Okay. Nobody. Man. No, I got it, Charlie. I got it. That performed worse than the EA tie dollar sign set. Eish.

Okay. I'm going to find a new festival. We were going to give you the Italian dinner thing, but we can't give you the... I'm just going to stick to the musical insights. I'm sorry. That sense of fun and excitement is something that I think was deeply missing from a lot of other sets

that I watched. You could watch somebody like Big Sean, right? perform his greatest hits for an hour, but the sense of fun isn't there. On the contrary, you have Callie shoving a man's head into a cake that's shaped like her butt while calling him a bozo. My fact, Bozo, come here.

Let me show you what we do to bozos. Like, it's fun, it's exciting, it's enjoyable. And people, even the males in the hip-hop scene, seemed to know that Sexy Red performed twice over the weekend, once in her own solo set, and once with Chief Keefe, who used some of his stage time to let Sexy perform a few of her own songs again, including Skiyi. So, you know, we have the Latinos, we have the female rappers pulling the weight. But more than anything else this weekend, I realized that the real true hashtag hip-hop shit going down, to pay attention to, as in any scene, is the sounds of the young underground.

All right. Perhaps the most hype set of the entire weekend came at the hands of the 17-year-old rapper NetSpend and his B-2B with a 20-year-old rapper, Osama Son, a set that was so lit. Like, 20 people got pickpocketed, including my brother. Because everybody was so lit and moshing that they did not notice somebody lifting their phones. But that's a whole other thing. My brother got his phone back. It's all good.

Oh, man. But let me ask you guys a question. Based on that description, how would you imagine Netspens music to sound? I mean, NetSpend sounds like a tech startup from the late 90s. So maybe like the AOL login sound. I'm sorry. Dear Lord. That's the first thing that comes to mind.

You just asked, just stop asking. my opinion. Okay, I'm going to say NetSpend, young rapper, I'm thinking like maybe some lo-fi kind of crunchy beats that are like kind of staticky because they're

being replayed at a level that's like peaking past the decibel level that the speakers can handle. I'm anticipating like maybe a ton of auto tune on the voice and I'm imagining not super like dense lyrics,

but probably more like kind of in your face, percussive, sort of like anthemic lines. That's just my wild guess about this set. Wow, you guys are a lot more on the nose than I thought you'd be. Hey! Here's a clip of Nets Ben performing

Shine in Peace. So you could hear my brother singing in the back there. Listen to the studio version of Shine in Peace. It's a lot less hype than the live set and speaks to the very sounds that you guys were just talking about.

You got it, Matt. Chaos. Wild. The beat is so dense. It's actually louder than the vocal. And the vocal auto tune sounds like the AOL login. You guys were very accurate. I'm surprised at how on the nose you guys were. We're healing the generation divide one 17-year-old rapper at a time. Netspend is an artist that I feel is more, I think, indebted to the sounds of the, like hyperpop or a rapper like Young Lean, then he is to the sounds of the trap artists of yesteryear. His music is auto-tuned to high heaven. It's extremely messy, digital, deeply catchy, and like you said, Charlie, chaotic.

It kind of breaks the rules of good production arrangement to a certain degree. And I think that's probably part of the aesthetic. It's like, rather than everything having its own little place and you can hear every element, it's just a barrage of fast synth arpeggiators happening over this 808 that's filling in the same space as the base that's, it's all kind of just like mashed together. It's kind of like a new, it's a new lofi. It's a new DIY style of making something. Don't make it sound too good, I guess is what I'm saying. You know, it's very punk rock in that kind of way as well. This sound, to me, mark my words, y'all, is what people will come to know hip hop for in the next few years.

You heard it here first. You heard it here first. You already see it blowing up in the underground. It's young artists that rely on the internet. It's aesthetics, the abstraction and digital distortion it brings. And often there's zero desire to be mainstream and have widespread appeal. someone in Gen X is going to get upset about this, but it's kind of like the Nirvana phenomenon, right?

It's like just when everyone is like dressed up to the nines in hair metal and the productions are getting really good sounding and we've kind of been doing the same thing for too long, out walks, you know, three dudes in some, in thrift shop where just kind of can't really play their guitars, yelling into the microphone, and the thing which sounded completely underground, became the biggest sound of the 90s.

Like, that could happen. And I think part of what's fascinating about it is that it's young people. I think back to, like, 2017, and there was a rapper named Matt Ox, who put out a track called Overwhelming when he was 12 years old. That song, when it dropped, went viral, and got a viral. and got memed to high heaven. Now, in 2024, I find it interesting that rappers like NetSpend, who is 17, are doing essentially the same thing. But instead of getting laughed at and mocked,

they're essentially being laughed with. It's not, they're not getting a reaction of, you know, WTF is this. It's being replaced with a reaction of, yo, this is tough. This is what the underground is sounding like. It's a really like punk way, I think, of like looking at rap music and the people that love it. It's less rigid in its sonics. Listen to the studio version of Netsben's song, what they say. There's no beat.

There's no main beat. I think it's dancey in a way. and there's percussion in there that kind of is giving crunk, like I'm hearing a little snap here and there, you know, but it's nearly a club song, or at least an abstract, internet forward club song. Yeah, almost in the way of like some of Sophie's early productions, the early hyper-pop music where it's kind of like the most maximalist sounds of pop,

but then reduced down to only like five elements, where you expect everything to explode, but it doesn't. Right. It just kind of coasts. It's sort of of anxiety producing in that way. Very nervous energy.

But the thing is, people respond to it. It communicates live. Here's Net performing that song what they say. What was it like to be in that room right there? Yeah, I was just asking that's the same thing.

Well, okay, I'm going to invoke a cliche that you guys might balk out, but I think it's really, really apt, okay? there's that quote from Brian Eno that's like the first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everybody that bought it formed a band. Watching that net spend set, no gas, I felt a similar feeling. Like that stage had only 200 people or so at it. But the energy was so infectious. everyone there was there specifically to see NetSpend.

It felt like I left knowing something so deep about the future of hip-hop, which is fascinating at a mainstream hip-hop festival, like Rolling Loud, where NetSpend was a late addition. He wasn't even on the original lineup and got brought on later. So it feels like we have, in some ways, like three different contenders of sounds that are happening, I got to say, like you have this sort of, hyperpop DIY thing of this younger crew that somehow uses the names of 90s tech companies as their group name. You've got these incredibly dexterous female rappers who are really pushing their

abilities of flow. And then you've got these Mexican regional artists. Three different sounds, in some ways it kind of says to me that perhaps that rolling loud doesn't represent any kind of totality, that this is maybe a moment of diversion, trying to figure out what the next sound of hip hop is going to be, as you put it after, you know, like a decade of the sound of trap and drills dominance. Exactly. And we can glean all of that from the festival itself. That, you know, doesn't excuse the fact that there are serious cracks in the festival's infrastructure. Like, to get water at the festival, I had to buy an aluminum can that costs six bucks. People were getting pickpocketed. I heard from several attendees that crowd crushes were still a thing. And an attendee who needed ADA assistance also told me that he was forced to only watch the screen due to lack of accommodations at one of the stages.

So there's still, I think, issues with Rolling Loud as a festival. But extending to the lineup, what I think this festival could have done to, knock it out of the park was tie the new music that we're hearing with the hip hop of a previous era. Other rolling louts have had artists like 50 cent headline one of the days. And I think what this festival was missing was a legacy act. It doesn't strike confidence in the long lasting nature or future of hip hop when the largest legacy act you have on the lineup is Nikki Minaj. Well, I mean, depending on what kind of fan you are, that might, she'd been around for two decades, and they had Kanye West. Post Malone at this point, I think is a legacy act. But you're looking even further back to the larger history of hip hop. And I think you can even go much further back than 50 cent. Because, right, we're like just five decades into the genre, they could have pointed to all kinds of historical acts. And what we've heard from Rihanna is that the more elder acts, the Nickies, the Kanye's that were there. didn't really bring the heat, weren't prepared.

Yeah. Didn't care enough about the audience. So, you know, I'm very grateful to you, Rihanna, for braving the chaos of Rolling Loud to come back unscathed relatively. Yeah. Presumably still with your wallet. I have a chain wallet. So I, that was a preventative measure I took at this festival. Phone in the front pocket.

chain wallet on pickpocketers beware. And it sounds like even if hip hop has slipped a bit in its chart dominance, the future is bright. And we'll have to come back and check in with some of your predictions here and see how these younger artists from Rolling Loud might shake up the hip hop game in the years to come. Yeah, what it really comes down to is that if you want to be tapped into the underground, The smaller stages at Rolling Loud is where you have to look. It's the largest and arguably most important hip-hop festival for a reason.

And I'm very tired and very achy, but it is, in fact, an experience that I will not forget anytime soon. Switched on Pops, produced by Raina Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Alice Gottlieb, Community Management by Abby Barr, Nishakarwalore. Ashok, Carr was our executive producer, a member of the Box Media Podcast Network, and a production of Vulture. It's part of New York Magazine, which you can subscribe to at NYMag.com slash pot. You could find us on social media at Switched on Pop. If you went to Rolling Loud, tell me, what was your experience? I would love to know. Or if you want, you know, the intel on a specific artist that maybe you saw on the live stream or, you know, maybe

you missed in person. Maybe I went. So hit me up, let me know. I want to give a special shout out to my brother, Antonio Cruz, for helping me co-produce this episode. He's very tapped in, so gave me a lot of intel on the acts that I should see and the people that I should talk to. We'll be back next Tuesday with a brand new episode. And until then, thanks for listening.