My father, who held the final say in anything in the house, said no, of course. I held onto this information for weeks, pretending like I was absolutely going to be at the party up until the day beforehand.

And then by the grace of something, I woke up on the day of the party with a scratchy throat, a runny nose and an all-around feeling of shit. Turns out, I had mono. We don’t need to get into the hows and the whys of it all, but just know that my best friend immediately knew I was down for the count when I called her.

“You sound terrible!” she squealed, horrified.

“Yeah,” I croaked hoarsely.

“Like, you sound like a man.”

“Uh huh.” I sniffed, satisfied that I sounded bad enough that I could pass for having a male voice.

“Well, you definitely cannot come,” she announced. “There are too many people here and I don’t want them leaving and getting all sick later on.”

I felt relieved in a state of melancholy despair.

Later that night, everyone was posting poorly lit photos backdropped against my best friend’s parents’ house (they were on vacation) and I grew increasingly depressed about my circumstances. Why was I cursed with the sort of parents that didn’t want me to have friends? Why did they insist on keeping my locked up as though I was some sort of magical Rapunzel? Didn’t they realize that it was a miracle that someone like me had any sort of friends at all?

I liked and commented on a photo, to which my best friend replied:

“Go have some fun on Omegle!”

If you were not around for the 2010-2014 internet era, I sort of feel bad for you. It was such a unique ecosystem of random applications that were essentially used to talk to people from the comfort of your homes. This sounds obvious now, but it wasn’t back then, because the novelty was that you could use these applications to talk to people that you knew (Skype, ooVoo, Gchat, Facebook Messenger) and people that you didn’t (Omegle, ChatRoulette).

And most of these interactions were done on my the computer early on, though phone based communication started to rise to popularity quickly.

Chatrooms scared me. I heard so many stories from the girls in class about getting online and a random penis appearing or a man in his forties jerking off while staring at your face. Many of the kids at school did this as a sleepover activity versus an actual way of making friends. They had enough friends. They just wanted to fuck around.

Maybe it was because it was almost midnight and because I was lonely as all hell, but after some contemplation, I bit my tongue and logged into Omegle, preparing for the worst. Omegle offered a quick method to shutting down a chat if you didn’t like where it was going.

My first (and last) chatroom encounter was surprising. Part of me wished I saved it. He was pretending that he was going to kidnap my sister and fling them over the Russian border. I played into it for a while, the conversation never once turning awry. After about fifteen minutes of a playful back and forth, we discovered that we were both from New Jersey, both around the same age and both felt things a little too deeply for the stages of our lives we were in.

We then exchanged emails. I created a fake one quickly, using my real first name and mom’s maiden last name, while my new friend used his real, college .edu name. He was a sophomore, a creative writing major at an Ivy League school, and he promptly began to chat with me via Google Chat.

We talked for about an hour the first night, briefly about our friends, school, life overall. At some point, he called me “charming” and that was it. I was sold.

Over the next six months, I talked to him daily. I was always logged into my email account anyways for school, so we chatted through classes, through homework in the evenings and everything in between. A few months in, we exchanged phone numbers. I had an old flip phone with a plan that didn’t allow texting (what a time to be alive) so we could only speak on the phone. Like, verbally.

And we did. For hours and hours and hours. I’d fall asleep with the phone glued to my face, frequently having to hang up by the time I had to get up for school.

I had gotten to know this guy so intimately, so deeply without ever knowing what he actually looked like. There were no profile photos. We weren’t friends on social media.

For the first time in my life, I realized that I was actually kind of funny! And smart! And unique! And that maybe I wasn’t the conventional picture of attractiveness, but I didn’t need to be in order to make a truly meaningful relationship. We sat on our laptops for hours listening to each other’s music libraries, so much so that I found myself reaching for Bruce Springsteen’s songs in between Drake and Lil Wayne tracks.

The best part about it? I could do it right under my parents’ nose. It was a dream come true.

That is, until my friend got a little too curious. He was subtle about it, wanting to know what I was like on the “outside” and I was terrified of losing what we had. We weren’t romantic at all, just close. In fact, he said that I was the closest anyone had ever been to him, and likewise for him to me. It was why I was so adamant about maintaining physical anonymity.

Perhaps it was foolish of me to believe that might last forever. When you’re seventeen, you think that good things will last forever because everyone keeps telling you how much damn life you have left.

Our conversations dwindled over the summer and through the following semester, down to damn near nothingness the year after. I reached out a few times over email with lukewarm responses back.

He had evaporated from my life. It’s hard not to think about whether he would have if we actually had met at some point in life. I was ready to after I’d left home and was able to grow into myself a bit more outside of parental influence, but it was too late by that point. He’d already built a life, and there was no place for me in it.

It would be impossible to forge such a relationship in our current day and age. Social media and the way we use visuals (photos, videos) to share our lives with everyone makes it infeasible to pull off what I did nearly fifteen years ago. I know what strangers look like in greater detail than I did my internet friend.

I find myself fondly thinking of him from time to time when I see his college’s logo or hear his name in an entirely different context. In a non-sensual way, he was the first person I ever fell in love with, the way he thought and synthesized information unlike anyone I had ever gotten to know before, the way he felt like he was mine within the bounds of that tiny little chat box in the corner of my screen. He catalyzed my confidence during such a formative time in my life.

Which, that’s all the good stuff, but there was some bad stuff.

When I realized he wasn’t interested in making time for me anymore, I was heartbroken in a way I couldn’t really fathom. There were residual impacts of having your first true human connection being fully online. I found myself far more confident online than I did in person, quickly adapting to the way people chatted with each other in Corporate America. People told me I was responsive, but I think it’s because I had a bit of a trigger response from wanting to respond to my friend as quickly as possible. I was able to form some pretty profound work relationships that way, too, but unfortunately, I shut myself off to the way that people formed relationships outside of work. If someone liked me, I just latched onto that person, regardless of whether they were actually a good fit for me.

That’s not a good thing.

It took nearly a decade to shake that off as it led to long term relationships with people who honestly sucked. I prided myself on always being in one for such a long time that I forgot that I had a choice in the matter.

I’m in a much healthier place now, but I still hope my friend is doing well, and that he’s living the life he had always dreamed of. I like to think that I knew what that was better than anyone at one point, in excruciating detail, and can only hope that it all happened for him the way it was supposed to.

Enjoy very few relics of my teenage self. I’m not proud of these.

It didn’t help that practically every single frat played Swedish House Mafia’s “Don’t You Worry Child” when I was in college, without fail. John Martin’s corny vocals preceding that corny drop. My friends were obsessed. I couldn’t wait till it was over.

Give me something I could feel in my chest.

I never bothered delving too deep afterwards into electronic dance music, specifically house music. My tastes post-grad expanded to include indie rock and pop and even classic rock, but I could never get my ear into EDM.

In 2023, I was single for the first time in my life, and crushing catastrophically hard on a coworker of mine. He was far too attractive for me. And that’s not meant to be self-deprecating, by the way, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was probably far too attractive for anyone according to his ethical nonmonogamy stance.

But something about the way he held my gaze when I told him about my trauma and my art and work and music and friends and what happened during my day made me feel like I had a chance. The way he told me about all of his trauma and art and music and friends made me feel like I had a chance.

I mean, there was a connection there. High voltage electricity. You know the kind I’m talking about.

Imagine the hideous squeal that erupted from my throat when he told me that he hooked up with his ex on a vacation he went on with his friends. He still held my gaze when he said it and then suggested that we hang out with his friends later that evening. I agreed and I acted like I wasn’t deeply affected by what he had casually let slip past his pretty teeth. For my sanity, if nothing else.

This was perhaps the first time in my life where I was dealing with misread signals. And I wasn’t a novice to dating or anything. I’d been in long term relationships for most of my adulthood. Somehow this three month will-they-won’t-they affair was far more agonizing.

That same night, alone in my bedroom, I did what any self-respecting twenty-something would do.

I purchased Weekend 2 Coachella tickets, two weeks away.

Specifically, 1 ticket.

He also texted me later, like he usually did, asking if I got home safe from our hangout.

Planning last minute logistics to one of the largest music festivals in the United States kept me so preoccupied in the coming days that I had no time to think about him and his stupid face and how he might as well have stomped on my heart. After a few days, I had a hotel, a rental car and a flight out - all reasonably priced, somehow - but there was one, small issue.

I had no one to go with.

I scoured Discord pages and found countless groups of other solo wayward travelers. I met up with another woman around my age who was solo and was into EDM. She wanted to see Fisher, Eric Prydz, and Chris Lake. I know Coachella is far from a rave, but it was my very first introduction to the essence of rave culture. The taste of a rave was in the field with us. As I tried to keep up with my new friend’s jumping, a young woman quietly took a lock of my hair and pinched a small leaf-like object to it. She then walked away.

My hair had grown unruly from the wind and so I tried to pull it out from the tangles, reminded of how children used to stick pencils and other objects into my thick hair in school. My new friend noticed that I was struggling among her bopping and held my wrists.

“What are you doing?” she shouted.

“That girl put something in my hair!” I yelled back.

She pushed my hair to the side and threw her head back in laugher.

“You got sprouted!” she said back jovially. “That’s amazing.”

“What?”

“Sprouted!”

She continued dancing as I reluctantly left the green bit in my hair. Over the next few days, I saw more sprouts on people’s hats and hair, as well as stickers that said “HOT” on it attached to clothing and skin. Somehow, it made me feel special. Somehow, I felt sad that I didn’t have a sprout to give back.

I left Coachella that year with a deep appreciation for EDM not only because I enjoyed the live performances, but because how that singular sprout in my hair made me feel part of something I’ve never truly felt part of at large.

A community.

People fling around the term community like it’s so obvious, but you only really know you have one when you feel it. Getting sprouted at Coachella was the first time in my life where I felt like I didn’t have to prove that I was smart enough, pretty enough or interesting enough to be somewhere, anywhere. I didn’t have to claw my way into taking up space. I didn’t have to pretend like I knew how to dance or what was going on in front of me. I didn’t have to be high or drunk.

These feelings only further intensified after attending more dance music shows and finally, the pinnacle of the feeling, at a true warehouse rave. As someone who is a mechanical engineer by trade and help blueprint warehouses for a living, being inside of one while someone is ripping dubstep behind decks is a pretty surreal, otherworldly experience.

So what’s up with the sprout clips? The HOT stickers?

Sprouts and HOT stickers are symbolic of the PLUR communities within the dance music fandom. PLUR, standing for, Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, is a guiding philosophy in rave culture. It kind of reminds me a little bit of the way SpongeBob worships the Krabby Patty formula.

Supposedly, PLUR goes all the way back to the 1990s. More recently it’s translated into a specific handshake during which you exchange handmade bracelets known as “kandi.” Unfortunately, if you are a sugar addict, it’s not real candy, but they’re genuinely real works of art, and people spend a lot of their time and energy into making them. For my first few raves, I didn’t have any kandi to give because I was woefully uneducated on the topic, but I still received them and it will never fail to make your heart swell.

PLUR is also used as a noun when describing an inclusive, good-vibes crowd. Trance, dubstep, bass and hardcore are well known for PLUR crowds, while tech house tends to be the least. A PLUR crowd is always preferred and for that reason, I have a particular affinity towards dubstep raves, though my tastes lean more tech house.

Most of all, PLUR crowds aren’t yappers. They’re there to move. Somehow you still end up making friends. It’s a phenomenon like no other.

The next time you’re upset, look for a notable dance venue nearby. Check out the scene. Go to your first one sober, especially if you’re alone. Be safe. Look out for others.

Bring a pack of sprouts. Clip it stealthily to someone’s backpack or hat. Watch it radiate joy.

Lock hands with someone random. Bang your heads in sync.

The whole thing has a peculiar way of sustainably lifting your spirits, even if you never go to another one again.

But his passion for Iggy Azaela was the thing that finally did me in.

He and I initially bonded a bit over our general love for rap music. My interests were significantly more vast than his, which was a source of contention eventually. His idea of a good rapper was strictly influenced by 90s east coast rap, so he could not fathom my love for someone like Earl Sweatshirt, for example.

It was all fun and games until Iggy Azalea broke onto the scene.

Iggy Azalea. Oh boy. Where do we begin?

Born in 1990 in Sydney, Australia as Amethyst Amelia Kelly, she dropped out of school when she was 16 and moved to the United States. She bounced around the South for a while: Miami, Houston and eventually, Atlanta. She formed several connections in Atlanta, including someone from Interscope Records, and they advised her to move to Los Angeles. It was at that point that she became Iggy Azalea, a combination of her childhood dog’s name and the name of the street she grew up on.

She released Ignorant Art (2011), her first full-length project, a rap mixtape. And it was pretty decently received, actually. Her song “Pussy” went about as viral as anything could in 2011, some praising the brashness of the song, while others criticizing the fact that she had a child hanging off of her in the music video. Either way, the song -and the mixtape - put her on the map.

And there were other things going for her, too. She had star power. She was tall, had long blonde hair, young, conventionally attractive. She was a white woman who rapped in the vein of traditional hip-hop. She was dating A$AP Rocky. She clearly had respect from the black community.

Her connections, her mixtape - it all led to the production of a studio album, titled The New Classic (2014), produced by none other than T.I. While waiting for it to come out, Iggy was everywhere. She joined several tours: Rita Ora, Nas, Beyonce. There wasn’t a single prominent music awards show where she wasn’t performing or at the very least, a prominent presence.

Her album finally dropped to mixed reviews, but was generally considered a commercial success. She won awards for it. It was named one of the best hip-hop albums of the year by XXL.

It was precisely during this time that my boyfriend was entirely obsessed with her. Yeah, he thought she was “hot” obviously, but more than that, he believed her to be genuinely talented. While I won’t deny that I didn’t hate Ignorant Art for what it was, I loathed most of her commercial work. I couldn’t stand whatever accent she was putting on. I hated her lyrics. I didn’t like the production.

Most of all, she acted like she got to where she was due to talent, and that’s simply not true. Perhaps she does have rap talent (I say perhaps not because I think so, but rather because I have no rap talent so who am I to say anything?), but let’s not act like her body and face and novelty had nothing to do with it either.

I made a bet with my boyfriend in 2014, at the height of Iggy’s career, that she’d be obsolete in three years. I didn’t find her craft to be sustainable. I found her live performances to be especially nauseating. She was shiny and new and would not last within a genre where shock value only goes so far.

He disagreed with me. Vehemently. Iggy was here to stay.

“You’re wrong,” he would say confidently, the sort of smug confidence that only a twenty three year old white male from the suburbs could have. “Dead wrong.”

I remember the way he said it, the way he smiled with all his teeth as he said it, canines bared and everything.

At that exact moment, it hit me.

He believed more in Iggy freaking Azalea than he did me.

And yes, a lot of people believed in her. It’s why she was famous.

But for my boyfriend - a man who I wanted to be worthy of - to believe she’d achieve generational success was a slap in the face. Over the years, he made a number of comments towards me about my physical appearance.

• Once, I wore a white t-shirt with a floral skirt, and was told that I had dressed “Indian.” News flash: I am of Indian descent. I will always look Indian. But my outfit was from H&M.

• My hair was too curly and unruly. He said I should straighten it to appear professional if I didn’t want to risk lost job opportunities.

• He said that my administrative job was dumb and that I should try to find something better. I was a junior in college.

• I apparently had no ass.

• My major was going to get me nowhere in life (math).

• I needed more friends.

• I was an awful artist and couldn’t paint.

Everything about me was all wrong. Nothing about Iggy was wrong.

And then, a full year later, I asked him whether he remembered Iggy Azalea.

“Of course,” he said. He proceeded to Google her.

She had virtually become irrelevant already.

“She’ll be back,” he promised.

She never quite did make a reemergence after her 2015 flop. In fact, she probably started coming downhill around the same time she came up, if that makes any sense.

I broke up with my boyfriend, then. For all of the above but also because he ultimately had pretty horrific taste in music.

Before mumble rappers, there was Asher Roth. And Hoodie Allen. And the late, great Mac Miller (circa 2012). And Sammy Adams. And Machine Gun Kelly (the rapper, not the rocker).

The other day, I was picking up my friend Lizzie while A$AP Ferg’s Always Strive and Prosper (2016) album was quietly playing in the background as we drove into Philly. I typically don’t listen to A$AP Ferg “gently” by any measure, but with company, I tune it down to nothing more than background noise.

“You still listen to this album?” she said, raising an eyebrow. She’s not really much of a rap music fan, but has heard me talk about it endlessly in an (entirely futile) attempt to get her into it.

“It’s a good one,” I argued.

“It’s from when we were in college.”

“I listen to a lot of music from when we were in college?”

She snorted. “Even ‘I Love College’?”

“Well, obviously not that.”

And as the words tumbled out of my mouth, I grew oddly defensive about it. At least, internally. I would never defend Asher Roth’s magnum opus to the world.

After all, that’s what the anonymity of this account is for.

Once I got home that night, I got into pajamas and listened to the song again, alone, in my bedroom, as one does as a full adult. It sent me down a rabbit hole of other lost relics from the time period and I realized something that I hadn’t fully processed until pretty recently.

Frat rap is dead.

I had, somewhat naively, always assumed that frat rap was alive and well on college campuses all over the country, but supposedly it’s actually been on the decline even since I was in college.

Frat rap is defined as a sub-genre of rap characterized by upbeat, sample-heavy tracks which emphasize college partying and youth culture. It’s basically rap for white men that could afford to go to college and likely did not suffer in any sort of way that 90s rap popularized. This is a very similar phenomenon to the South Asian affinity for Drake.

Geographically, frat rap became popular in predominantly white spaces, such as Pittsburgh, upstate New York and Boston. New England actually generally produced the most frat rappers. It makes sense. White, middle-class coeds could see themselves in this music. It’s fun. It’s sing-songy. It rhymes.

I am neither white nor male nor grew up middle-class, but I did go to a college with many people within this demographic and you can bet that I was right along with them singing every single word in those basements. When I graduated, it was sort of an understood thing that it was time to put those songs behind you. The frat rappers I grew up with grew up, too. A lot of them rejected their status in the frat rap crowds, openly expressing their disdain for the title.

And that’s all fine, but it also never quite got replaced one for one. Instead, SoundCloud rap started to take over, trap and more melodic styles becoming increasingly popular.

Heavily formulaic and easy to replicate, the frat rap market was heavily saturated with the same sort of thing over and over again. In fact, I remember joking to my friend Billy in school that Sammy Adams and Asher Roth were the same person at a party once and his face immediately fell.

“Are you serious?” he yelled over Sammy Adams’ “I Hate College (Remix).”

And truly, frat rap is a bit of a caricature of more critically acclaimed hip-hop. Somehow, though, it still lived in between A$AP Ferg and Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper and other more well-received rappers on my playlists during my college years, and for that, I have a strange fondness for it. It’s probably just nostalgia, but just like I defend the mumble rap generation, I think it’s pretty incredible what these white dudes from the suburbs managed to do. They created an entire movement that resonated with a group that has long rejected rap music, shaping them to lean into their hedonism, womanizing and debaucherous ways for a transient period of their lives, and then decide that they actually want to create rock music. Or pop. Or reggae. Or something that isn’t frat rap.

All the while, their fanbase eventually graduates, buys business casual from Brooks Brothers, and perhaps sits in front of two monitors at a Big 4 accounting firm all day, with aspirations of becoming a DJ.

Perhaps one of the most freeing experiences I’ve ever had is cosplaying one of those people in a fraternity basement.

So yeah, I sort of miss it. I know. It’s objectively not great music. Fine. But it was fun! And it wasn’t made using generative AI. And all of that counts for something.

Anyways, where are the greats now?

Asher Roth

The frat rap king himself is a dad now and he still makes music, independently. He released Temporary Heaven in April 2024, which was with producer Heather Grey and features a jazzier indie hip-hop style. He’s also released some singles this year (“Dream”, “Happiness”, “No Secrets”). It’s significantly more introspective stuff.

Hoodie Allen

Hoodie was always my favorite. He’s still active independently as well (a theme, you’ll notice, as many of these artists were scarred by exploitative labels). He focuses on releasing standalone tracks consistently. He also recently collaborated with rapper Connor Price, who’s fairly popular on social media and with the younger crowd. Social media, overall, appears to be Hoodie’s strategy and marketing via those channels instead of traditional marketing methods.

I have to hand it to him, he’s actually pretty effective.

Mac Miller

R.I.P. to the legend himself. I was ready to go to war with Pitchfork (as anyone should) for their review of Blue Slide Park (2014). I loved that album. He worked diligently to shed his frat rap persona after that album dropped, becoming intertwined with indie rap collective Odd Future and leaning a bit more into west coast influences. His last several albums were objectively not anywhere close to frat rap, extremely conceptual and introspective in nature. He unfortunately passed 2018 at the age of 26 and I remember feeling like I had lost an old friend, as many did. In some ways, Mac Miller represented a bit of my own hip-hop journey, growing up loving the classics, clashing frat rap and more sonically acclaimed sounds, and then completely shedding the former into my twenties.

Sammy Adams

I never liked this guy but his remix of Asher Roth’s classic holds a special place in my heart. First of all, he’s a descendant of former President John Quincy Adams (yeah, like the sixth president of the United States). Born and raised Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’s 39 now and is an independent artist with some mediocre songs in the last few years. The thing about Sammy was that he was probably the most douchey rapper in the genre at the time, at least he was presented as such, so naturally, he attracted some pretty douchey dudes too.

Machine Gun Kelly

What a journey. Self-explanatory. You know what he’s up to already, and if you don’t, you at least know that he used to date Megan Fox. His rap music was so much fun back in the day. His rock music is good now, too. I like both versions, but this trip down memory lane made me miss his “Wild Boy” days.

Look, just throw on that last song I linked and drive through your suburbs at 7 AM. It’s an invigorating experience. Trust me.

We would sling our scooters around the concrete corners to visit our friends in neighboring apartment buildings while my grandmother watched haphazardly from the window whilst chopping vegetables. She didn’t really have to watch that closely. The neighborhood grandmothers were all doing the same thing. We’d duel Yu-Gi-Oh! cards on the pavement and play wall ball with a tennis ball and steal juice barrels from the corner store. We’d argue over who had a crush on who and begged our parents to let us stay out for just another hour.

All of this seems to have eclipsed the more bleak facts of my life: I was in kindergarten during 9/11 and witnessed the aftermath of it firsthand; I had to share a bedroom with my entire family; my bike was stolen once; my brother traded higher value Pokémon cards for worthless ones frequently; my parents worked several jobs, so I only caught exhausted, cold and stressed versions of them.

That last part wasn’t a big deal at first. While my mom and dad had emigrated to the States from their countries many years before I was born, the city was getting increasingly more expensive to raise a family in the early 2000s.

It was during this time that my father began to grow angry. There were slow indications of it at first: a snippy comment to my grandmother for making a dish he didn’t like (whom he called by her first name unironically, which I now realize is kind of strange), a pounding on the bathroom door when it was occupied because he needed to use it, a slap across the face because I left my workbook at school…

And I looked past all of that because I lived such little life within those walls of that tiny apartment. As far as I was concerned, I just needed to get through the aggregate hour that I saw my father everyday. I’d take a slap across the face if it meant being able to yell “EXODIA! OBLITERATE!” later.

One day, I returned home from school with my brother to find the contents of our apartment in boxes. Apparently, we were moving to a house in New Jersey. Three beds, two baths. It’s in a nice town, my mom said. Stop talking and pack your books, my father said.

My brother began to wail in fear, always quicker to process the magnitude of what was going on than I ever was.

Before we knew it, I was in the suburbs of central Jersey, without so much as a goodbye to my friends.

New Jersey was weird. An alien town. Everything was quiet by eight PM. Everyone had more than one car. People liked to wave at you in the morning and say nothing else.

There was grass outside that needed to be cut.

I found some solace at school. Fortunately, my parents moved to one of the most diverse suburbs you could possibly find in the country. Granted, I had to take a bus to get to school, but that was fine. During my first week, I made a friend named Julia. She invited me to her birthday party at the end of the month at her house.

I naively asked my grandfather if he’d walk me there at the end of the month. He laughed.

“Where does she live?” he wanted to know, amused.

I read him her address.

He shook his head.

“Your mom or dad will need to drive you.”

I asked my mom, who told me I needed to ask my dad. It was perhaps the first time in my life that I had to ask him to do anything.

“No,” he answered definitively, laying the first of many bricks for what I’ve come to expect from my father.

“No?” I repeated.

“No!” he shouted.

Just like that, my agency was ripped away from me practically overnight. My father didn’t need to work several jobs to make ends meet anymore, so he spent more time at home. This meant that everything from the books I read to the TV shows that I watched to the music I listened to went through him.

He had no idea that I listened to Notorious B.I.G. or Nas. I had no idea it was a problem.

As time went on, he continued down a path of extreme anger, especially after my grandmother died. As I was thrust into the throes of adolescence and started looking more like a woman, there were also more mandates. I could no longer wear shorts or t-shirts in my actual size. I could not watch sports with my brother. I wasn’t allowed to have social media. I couldn’t play video games. I couldn’t have a journal that he didn’t read. No phone, of course.

And I wasn’t allowed to have friends. Apparently, everyone was a bad influence.

I broke some of these rules whenever I could, but the general misery made me work towards a dream where I could break free of him again. For me, like many people in a similar situation, that meant one thing.

Financial independence.

As an adult, I look at my life and am grateful for many things. I have a good job, with a good place to live and good partner. I live in a premier New Jersey suburb. People cannot stop telling me how amazing my town is.

And yet, I often look at my hands as I’m typing during the work day and wonder who would I be if my parents had stayed in Queens?

If I was allowed to have real friends?

If I was allowed to join the school band?

If I was allowed to DJ with my cousin at his graduation party?

If I was taught how to swim?

If I got a hug every time I fell instead of yelled at?

If I could dress how I wanted?

If I was able to draw without being told how talentless I was?

Or read, without being censored?

What if I was allowed to keep that little TV tray that I spent an afternoon building to be my official writing desk, because I read somewhere that was the sort of thing you should have if you wanted be a writer? And the composition notebooks and the gel pens that my grandfather got me? The sticky notes that I wrote writing goals for myself on?

What if my father read my stories instead of tearing them apart, because he felt like it was too weird for a girl to spend that much time writing instead of learning how to cook like her mother?

What if he was someone I was able to look up to?

Countless what-ifs. A million possibilities.

The truth is, it’s pointless looking back and considering them all.

But it is quite fun to think of all of the different people who were within you when you were born and how the permutations of events in your life shape who eventually comes out the other side.

Could I be less anxious, now? Less afraid of losing my job? Better at speaking to strangers?

Perhaps.

What I do know is that none of it is a lost cause. We’re always young enough to give ourselves what we missed out on back then. And it still has worth. It’s still valuable.

That’s the beautiful thing about being a human.

And then he cuts the music altogether. The now-famous intro plays.

“Hey Macklemore, wanna go thrift shopping?”

A looping saxophone melody begins. My friend Sarah, wanting to show off to Jake how well she could dance, starts to switch gears and pop her chest, her elbows, her knees. Wanz’s voice comes in first, and then Macklemore’s, and people are drunkenly crooning along. I had heard the song before, of course, but it was in that moment that I finally realized that I don’t actually like Macklemore’s music at all and that he just has the sort of voice that makes everything sound good.

A few more of his songs from The Heist, his collaborative album with producer Ryan Lewis who is also from Washington state, blew up between 2012-2013. The songs had catchy beats, the general genre probably best described as pop-rap and I ultimately found most of them a tad bit corny.

I truly did not understand the fascination.

This was further exacerbated during the 2014 Grammys, an award show I normally couldn’t care less about, but decided to watch that year because Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.a.a.d city - an album I personally think is a masterpiece - was being nominated for seven awards.

And he won precisely 0 of them.

You know who didn’t though?

Macklemore.

I scoffed even more when he had the gall to post a screenshot of a text message he sent Kendrick Lamar telling him he believed that Kendrick was robbed.

Unbelievable! How performative.

I wasn’t the only person who felt this way, obviously. This incident was the first of a few that ultimately led to a steep drop off in Macklemore’s popularity. However strongly Macklemore felt about the whole Kendrick thing, people don’t like it when thinks look like publicity stunts. Who knows? Maybe it was one.

A few years later, in 2016, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis went on an indefinite hiatus. I mentioned before that I think Macklemore’s speaking voice is just…nice. But the true engine behind his music is Ryan Lewis’s production. There’s a reason so many of his known hits come from The Heist. Ryan Lewis knows how to make music. Without him, Macklemore lost a key component of his appeal.

The landscape of hip-hop also fundamentally changed during this time. On-demand streaming was becoming increasingly more popular. Trap and melodic rap dominated charts, especially from 2015-2018.

The final nail in the coffin, ironically, was that he started to push more heavily into political commentary in his music. Now, this shouldn’t be terribly surprising. He released “Same Love” with Ryan Lewis off of his debut album, a song dedicated to his gay uncles. People at the time were upset that he was profiting off of this music when he himself wasn’t gay, but ultimately it was a commercial success, becoming the first Billboard Top 40 song in the U.S. explicitly intended to celebrate homosexuality. In 2016, he released “White Privilege II” and “Wednesday Morning” - both featuring heavy political themes. He was featured on YG’s “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump)” part 2 remix, performed at Joe Biden’s inauguration, and then subsequently released “Trump’s Over Freestyle.”

Ultimately, 2016-2017 was a turning point for him. The masses generally don’t want to hear about politics in music. “Thrift Shop” was fun. “Can’t Hold Us” had a very generic spirit.

The drug crisis in America and Black Lives Matter? Does he not know his fanbase? The people who care about those things probably weren’t listening to him to begin with.

Macklemore released two more solo projects in 2017 and 2023, both generally favorably received and not total commercial flops. He just wasn’t insanely popular anymore. There some songs here and there that got traction, but for the most part, he was no longer what he was.

In 2024, he released “Hind’s Hall” - a protest song wherein he calls for ceasefire in the Gaza war. Like most things he believes in, the man has actually been quite vocal about this. I’m not exactly sure why Ed Sheeran didn’t expect him to give a speech about freeing the Palestinian people when he was opening for his show at MetLife.

His speech was posted on social media several times, at which point Pink, who might actually be less relevant than Macklemore over the last decade, wrote a note about how offended she was by the whole thing, especially as a Jewish woman. And that’s just the problem with it - Macklemore was very, very, very clear that his protest had nothing to do with Jewish individuals.

Obviously, things then further blew up and culminated into Ed Sheeran making the “very difficult decision” to remove Macklemore as a supporting act from his tour. This was apparently at the urging of stadium owners, like Robert Kraft.

Aaron Rowe and Lukas Graham, other openers, also dropped out thereafter. Finneas, who was supporting Sheeran in South America, dropped out, too. Sheeran’s band also dropped out, citing their Irish roots and the country’s history with colonization as the driving reason.

People might be loud and upset about Macklemore’s speech, but people have generally rallied behind him. The Heist has re-entered iTunes album sales top 10 chart. His music has been going viral on social media. There have been countless articles written in the last week ranking his songs.

Like me, people were ready to cancel Macklemore in 2014.

In 2026, we’ve somehow found ourselves united via a white rapper from Seattle for the unlikeliest of reasons.

We talk about separating the art from the artist a lot. Though I’ve never subscribed to the belief myself, I’ve found myself doing this a lot with Macklemore as of late. I’m still not particularly fond of his music, but he’s doing something with his fame and wealth that’s worthy of celebration. So while I listen, I think back to simpler times, the basement of a frat house, sticky floors and music pulsing in my ear next to a clapped out speaker, not a care in the world.

It might not be the sort of music that sets your soul ablaze. That’s okay. It’s firing up something way bigger than any one individual person.

That, in it of itself, is well worth it.

Since I didn’t know many of their more recent songs, I eyed the setlist the whole night and noted that they skipped a few - specifically their solo performances. I didn’t think much of it. I was already thinking about inching my way towards the exit to avoid being stampeded.

All in all, it was a great show. They’re great performers.

I got in my car, drove 15 minutes home, and went to bed. A few weeks go by and I start seeing images of the following note on social media.

I have nothing against this note, fundamentally. It’s decently written. It’s not rude.

It’s just…sort of strange.

The quote towards the end of the piece - “real bands save fans, real fans save bands” - is a more recent theme pushed by the band’s members at shows, emphasizing the heavily symbiotic relationship between consumers and musicians. Now, I don’t know what a real fan really is or a real band, even, but what I do know is that this note has an oddly corporate flair to it.

It essentially sounds like a consumer complaint dressed up as a love letter.

Musicianship and performing has come a very long way from where it was. Historically (think 19th century), performers were frequently dehumanized and treated like second-class citizens. I mean, they could’ve literally been commodities. Audiences also had much more physical separation.

This isn’t the case anymore. Artists are in our faces all day thanks to social media. I see the 5SOS guys commenting on fan posts all the time.

And this access begins to feel like intimacy.

Let’s look at the usage of the word “fair” in this context. Setlists aren’t contractual promises. They’re modified based on things like local curfews, travel plans, or even feeling. In this case, social media has allowed fans to compare experiences and determine what “normal” might be. Once “normal” is established, it shifts into expectation, which ultimately becomes obligation.

Look at Frank Ocean, for instance. He’s known for bailing on shows. In 2023, when he was supposed to headline Coachella, we were all but expecting him to bail Weekend 2 he bailed Weekend 1. And bail he did. We scoffed. We moved on. There were certainly no viral letters with demands going around.

The way that 5SOS Mexico (I like that they’ve named the fandom the same thing as the band also) writes this note resembles a labor negotiation. Like they’re part of a union. There’s an undertone of threat, almost, where they are saying that 5SOS owes them on the premise of loyalty and payment.

To me, this eliminates the ethos of performance. You go to watch artists showcase their art. If you hate it, complain afterwards. Why does the complaint takes the form of a collective claim on the artist’s choices, rather than simply an expression of disappointment?

And this whole thing isn’t weird because fans care too much. It’s weird because it reveals how radically the psychological contract between performer and audience has changed in some cases with artists that allow a higher degree of access among their fans. KPop deals with this too (think Aespa’s lead singer Giselle not being allowed to have a boyfriend because fans argued that they weren’t enough).

They don’t know you. They make music for you. You’re not going to go see a jukebox perform for crying out loud.

So just go and enjoy the damn music.

Except there was one key difference this time.

They were only giving it to me.

Most memorably, over Christmas dinner a month after we got engaged, my future in-laws surrounded me as I attempted to disassociate for a few moments by staring at the pulsing lights on my sister-in-law’s tree. They oscillated red and green before flashing bright white three times and then returning back to red, beginning the cycle again. I remember thinking it was an oddly complex pattern for lights.

“Hi.” Rosie, my mother-in-law’s sister shimmied closer to me on the sofa with a glass of sloshing red wine in her hand.

“Er, hi,” I said, eyeing her glass cautiously. “Glass number four?”

“Five!” she whispered cheekily. “Renee is on six.”

I glanced over at another sister, sitting perpendicular to us with her legs messily crossed while glaring at me.

Crystal and Emma, my husband’s sisters, grabbed chairs and scooted in front of me. They’re both over a decade older than me, both married.

I was now fully surrounded, my only mode of escape pulling a Jason Statham-esque stunt to catapult over everyone.

“We finally get you alone for a little,” Crystal squealed, clapping her hands.

I giggled nervously as I picked the skin off of my thumbs. Perspiration started to travel down my back. It was suddenly a hundred degrees in the otherwise frigid room. I search for my husband, but he’s busy washing dishes.

How dare he be helpful in my time of need!

“So!” Rosie began, leaning in so that her fermented grape breath washed over my senses. The pasta in my belly threatens to go overboard at the scent. “We heard that you guys are eloping.”

She said it like she was saying fuck while seated in a church pew.

“And we don’t want you to feel forced into anything,” Crystal continued, her brown eyes mirroring the lights on the tree. “But we just wanted to understand a little more. I get my brother not wanting a wedding - ugh - but you?”

Emma nodded in response to her sister. I smiled stiffly at both of them and straighten my spine. My feet went ice cold in my tights. Being sweaty and cold is not a combination I wish upon my worst enemy.

“Think about it,” Renee slurred, flicking her manicured fingernails instructionally. “Everyone you love in one room. Your mom and dad…they’ve been dreaming of this day for your whole life.”

“Right!” Rosie agreed emphatically. “And you know a marriage isn’t about the joining of just two people, right? It’s about two families coming together.”

My nails dug into my palm. One of the primarily reasons we decided not to have a wedding was because both of our families were challenging: mine were still mentally stuck in the villages of Gujarat from the 1950s while his lived in a town with a 97% white population, thought that all brown people knew each other. It forced us to consider the purpose of a wedding for us specifically and realized that we were both much happier without the stress of planning an event solely decided to damage control.

But of course, you can’t really tell people that, so we just chalked it up to finances.

“Well, we want to buy a house,” I said firmly. “Weddings are really expensive.”

“Oh, I’m sure your families would help,” Rosie said sweetly, her eyelashes fluttering.

She’s not wrong about my husband’s parents. They’d shell over a blank check if they knew we’d be throwing a wedding.

Mine, on the other hand? Not a chance. My father still brings up how much he spent raising me down to the penny - gas for car rides, field trip dues, the one time I needed to buy a new pair of shoes for school because my old ones broke.

That was besides the point, anyways. We could afford a wedding if we wanted to have one. We just couldn’t get through a conversation about it without wanting to pull our hair out, so we decided it wasn’t worth it.

I smiled back at the gaggle of women from my husband’s side of the family as genuinely as I could manage.

“Aren’t weddings supposed to be about the bride and groom more than anything else?” I said through practically clenched teeth. The lights continued to twinkle at me. I desperately wanted to stare at them again.

“Oh, well, of course,” Emma chirped, sitting up an inch, her curls bouncing around her face like a halo. “I mean, it’s the most important day of your life. That’s why it has to be perfect!”

I had heard this sentiment before, the one about weddings being the most important day of your life. Specifically, I’ve heard it in the context of women.

It’s HER big day.
This is the most important day of HER life.
She can decide whatever she wants for HER day.

I couldn’t help myself when Emma said that. The words came tumbling out of my mouth before I could stop them.

“Is it, though?”

All four women looked at me, entirely stunned. Rosie, who I had seen getting reamed out by her husband for speaking when he didn’t think she should; Renee, who has a husband with the personality of a wet noodle; Crystal, who is married to someone who cheated on her three days after their wedding; and Emma, whose husband might be dead or alive (we’re not sure, no one’s seen him since the wedding, but she swears he exists and just works really, really, really hard).

“Of course,” Crystal stammered. “It’s the most important day of anyone’s life.”

“Even your brother’s?” I challenged, apparently unable to shut up.

“He’s a guy,” she argued. “He hasn’t been dreaming of getting married since he was a kid.”

I pressed my lips together to prevent from saying more. I hadn’t been. Of course not. After all, the only example I had was my parents’. I watched my mother slave over the home, my father, his parents, me, my brother and a full time job for the better part of two decades. I watched my father kick her awake from a nap so she could make him a snack because he was hungry. I watched her quietly stand behind him, gaze to the floor, when he took a fist to my face because he found out I was talking to a boy, her fate the same if she dared to speak up.

I watched her suffer because of marriage. I’d seen her wedding photos. She had a grand, beautiful wedding. Multi-day. Flowers and hundreds of people.

Not a single one came to her rescue when she spent early mornings wailing in the bathroom alone because of how much she hated her life.

Somehow, every woman around her was living the same life, keeping the system alive on stilts made out of seemingly nothing.

I didn’t want that. It wasn’t until I met my husband that I did.

“We both want to get married,” I said after clearing my voice. “I just think we want to figure out a house situation beforehand, so elopement works best for us. We’d love to have dinner with you all after we get married on our own.”

There must have been some sort of finality in my voice that left them all scattered, the conversation a byproduct of holiday drunkenness the following day. No one seemed to have remembered it and their concerns returned to inside thoughts. It wasn’t long after that I became acutely aware of how many creators label themselves as “2026 Brides” on social media platforms, with multi-part series on the wedding planning process.

It becomes who they are, essentially. A bride.

And people want that. It’s all about supply and demand. People eat that content like it’s dessert every time.

The wedding itself needs to be productionalized too. People want to judge, hate, gossip, critique. The dress (too much? too little?), the hair (who wears their hair down for their wedding?), the makeup (she wore NO makeup, can you believe it?)… the groom (he’s chopped!).

In going through this particular experience, I couldn’t help but wonder why we treat wedding days like they’re a core part of who they are. They can beautiful celebrations of the next stage of your life, but why does it matter so much for women? Why is it such a core part of their identity?

As girls, we’re taught that marriage is the goal, either subconsciously or consciously. Yeah, sure, get an education and all, but one day you’re going to get married and we’re going to be giving you away! Over time, a complex develops. Pinterest boards, a deep obsession with getting proposed to (ugh, it’s been 5 years and he hasn’t proposed! Leave him!), a heightened sense of self-worth attached to the type of wedding you’re going to have.

An unbalanced obsession with being chosen for love by a man.

I’m not saying your wedding day isn’t an important day in your life. It absolutely should be, however you do it. But if it’s leaving you stressed out, throwing up, sighing of relief when it’s all over, getting frustrated at your loved ones, and fundamentally turning you into someone you are not, it likely calls for some reevaluation.

Most important day of your life? I guarantee it’s not. There will be days where you’ve accomplished everything you’ve ever dreamed up, days you’ve overcome trauma, days where you’ve beaten all odds.

For me, it was the day I had finally saved up enough money to break free of my childhood home. I was nineteen. So a wildly expensive party where I’m worrying about table seating or outfit changes in my late twenties wasn’t going to do it for me, unfortunately.

If it was my first day on earth, I would’ve thought this was a parody of some sort.

The album was also professionally panned by critics for its use of AI. Tyga admitted to using generative AI for production purposes, something that is evident almost immediately.

Here’s how larger publications rated this hot mess of an album:

• The Needle Drop: Not Music/10

• Sputnikmusic: 0.5/5

• Rap Reviews: 1/10

• Pitchfork: 0/10

I’m not going to do the indignity of reviewing his album here. In fact, I don’t recommend you contributing to its streaming numbers at all. However, I am particularly fascinated by Pitchfork’s 0 out of 10 rating. In high school, I basically blacklisted Pitchfork because they gave the late, great Mac Miller a 1 out of 10 for his debut album, Blue Slide Park. I loved that album with everything I had at the time.

But I am older and wiser and I sort of understand why they did Malcolm dirty at the time, especially if you listened to any of his subsequent releases. So I’m willing to give them another chance.

Let’s look at some other albums Pitchfork gave a 0 out of 10 to. I’m a bit out of my wheelhouse here as none of them are rap albums. Still an enjoyable rabbit hole, nonetheless.

Music from “The Elder” - KISS (1981)

Pitchfork gave this album the most scathing review (a common theme, as you’ll see…) but in general, this album was widely disliked. The album frequently appears on lists of the worst albums ever made. What’s odd is that no other outlet gave it a flat 0 - most sat it somewhere in the middle or lower-middle (Rolling Stone at 2/5, Collector’s Guide to Heavy Metal at 5/10). It’s safe to say that people initially rated the album somewhat generously, but it was ultimately a commercial flop.

Apparently, Ezrin was hopped up on coke at the time and he attributed that to a poorly executed album. It’s still all very perplexing though, because the album’s also been called underrated in recent history.

NYC Ghosts & Flowers - Sonic Youth (2000)

In July 1999, Sonic Youth’s instruments were stolen - specifically guitars and effect pedals. NYC Ghosts & Flowers was thought to have been created as a byproduct of that experience. It’s considered to be experimental rock, something Pitchfork clearly did not like at the time with a 0/10 rating. The author, Brent DiCrescenzo, wrote, “These 40+ year olds continue to operate under the perception that they matter.”

Sonic Youth isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I don’t have to like them to feel the pretentiousness oozing from the page. DiCrescenzo later said he actually liked the album, nearly 13 years later, citing his youth as the reason for his stupid review.

Other outlets, including Rolling Stone, gave the album a much more lukewarm response, some even generally positive.

Liz Phair - Liz Phair (2003)

Phair already released three albums prior to her self-titled release and was well known by the time it came out. The reviews spanned perfect scores to Pitchfork’s famous 0. They called it “hyper-commercialized teen-pop” and yes, it definitely has an overproduced feel to it compared to her other records, but I can’t help but wonder how this record would do nowadays, especially with the emergence of hyper-pop as a dominant genre (think Charli XCX).

Pitchfork seems to have had the same thought, as they included the album in its 2019 list of scores they “would change if they could” - stating that that it would be upgraded to a whopping 6!

Shine On - Jet (2006)

This was an iconic review for Pitchfork. Their review for Austrialian band Jet’s second album was just a chimp peeing into its own mouth and a 0 / 10 score. You could say that the execution of this review was beyond its time. It wasn’t until 2024 when Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef explained that the album felt lazy and repetitive to other rock coming out at the time. Here’s a great article from The Ringer about it.

Other sources didn’t give such scathing reviews to the album. NME was a solid 7/10, Q a 4/10. The album’s reception was thoroughly mixed.

(There are more but after listening to Shine On, I realized that the problem is actually fundamentally Pitchfork. Their rating system feels entirely arbitrary. I’m convinced that my teenage-self was completely right in loathing the publication for their review of Blue Slide Park. But this is probably a conversation for another day.)

As it stands, $tarface appears to be a unifying force in the music review world. It’s one of the only albums where other critics are just as displeased with the record as Pitchfork is.

It’s worth mentioning that Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop gave this album a scathing “not music” rating. He actually has ranked some rap albums in the same vein.

• Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven - Kid Cudi (2015)

• The Big Day - Chance the Rapper (2019)

I think both have significantly more artistic merit than any of Tyga’s albums do, especially $tarface, which makes me wonder how the scales will tip with generative AI coming to the forefront. I wrote a little bit ago about its effect on electronic music specifically, as it has a unique susceptibility to it, but it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing it more broadly in other genres and it makes me wonder whether our ears are trained to that level of discernment.

Or whether they need to be? Perhaps our definition of a 0/10 will change.

People love him. Even after his feud with Kendrick, he remains enormously popular.

But no one loves Drake like a brown kid from the suburbs. Not even those women crying on the Jumbotron at his shows.

I grew up in the suburbs of central NJ (yes, it’s a thing). For reference, below are the demographics of my town:

I was first introduced to Drake in middle school by a gaggle of South Asian boys in my math class. They called him a “rapper” but he was singing on the track. Then he rapped, then he sang again, rand then rapped again. The track was “November 18th” and it still is one of my favorite songs by him to this day.

Drake eventually released his acclaimed album Take Care and the obsession in my town grew deeper among the South Asian diaspora. There were entire personalities being carved out in his image. Boys started wearing gold chains more and blasting his music while they drove down to the township mall. Regrettably, some of them began saying the n-word.

Blackness became an aesthetic - their clothes, hair, speech.

So what is it about Drake that influenced this behavior?

It’s not just that South Asian men are obsessed with the concept of urban blackness (and being perceived as being cool) and therefore they like Drake. There are a lot of rappers out there. Most of them are black.

Drake, in particular, embodies a very specific type of blackness.

It’s accessible, it’s suburban and it’s not…totally poor.

When Drake said he “started from the bottom” he meant the suburbs of Toronto. We all know he was Wheelchair Jimmy on Degrassi for a long while. Yes, he wasn’t making millions upon millions of dollars, but he raked in a pretty decent $40,000 per season or so.

For South Asian teens growing up in non-urban areas, it means that Drake’s blackness is ultimately accessible for them. It puts that “cool” factor within reach.

If Taylor Swift had a male counterpart, it would be Drake.

Drake sings and raps a lot about relationships. He centers his music around emotional availability and vulnerability. “Marvin’s Room” went platinum in my homeroom circa 2010. He sings stuff like that and women are still obsessed with him. His brand of rap didn’t require hyper-masculinism the way rap previously had been known to.

He’s a nice-guy that just wants love after all. Who doesn’t want that? When you don’t have to worry about where your next meal is going to come from, love does become the next most torturous thing on the docket.

There’s a lower barrier to entry.

South Asian parents have a notorious reputation for being strict. My father was no exception. He used to screen all of my music yet he still let me listen to Drake. In fact, as soon as he heard him crooning over a melodic beat, he assumed the song was okay.

From a parent’s perspective, his style of hip-hop is, well, “safe” for open consumption and therefore, a South Asian teenager didn’t have to hide it from them if they wanted to listen to it in the car or in their rooms.

Drake’s racial background is multi-faceted.

Not only is he black and white, his mother is Jewish. His popularity fundamentally disrupted the standard American stereotype of Black musicians. His mixed identity gives American-born children of immigrants something to latch onto for relatability.

So, yes, suburban South Asians can attach themselves to blackness to build a more desirable, cooler aesthetic, but Drake in particular holds a special place in the community given his unique origins (at the time at least).

And while times have changed, but he’s remained remarkably timeless, even as mainstream rap popularity declines.

And then when that became hard to do, parents shifted and started telling us that we had to get a job in a lucrative field - engineering, computer science, accounting. Now, we can have that apartment, the friends and the view.

And only God knows what parents are telling kids these days.

The biggest lie we were fed was that there was a concrete formula.

The other day, a woman appeared on my For You page claiming she was my corporate bestie. She said that she became a director at the age of 28 at a Fortune 500 company and that she wanted to show everyone how she got there.

Her tried and true strategy?

A OneNote template that shows you how to walk into a room with your manager and manage them, show them who’s boss.

She twisted her computer around, showed us the template and then told us that we should comment the word growth (yup) to receive the keys to this holy grail of a template.

Her page was cluttered with all sorts of nonsensical advise. She consistently used her director role at the Fortune 500 as a hook - even though she got laid off from that very job - to perpetuate archaic standards within corporate structures. How to dress, how to speak, how to walk, how to behave in meetings.

It was essentially a page on how to play the corporate game based on her lived experiences as a white collar employee.

The worst part? She’s not the only one. There are thousands of corporate-help pages online. None of them are showing you an actual, tangible skill. They are just showing you how to perform within a system that may or may not still exist.

The thing is, I don’t blame any of these creators for starting these pages either. I’m a young director in a corporate setting. I can’t tell you how many people ask me for advice when I tell them what I do.

Yes, I worked hard. Yes, I learned everything I possibly could. Yes, I stayed curious. Yes, I asked Steve how his kids were doing every time I saw him even though I didn’t really care.

But I was also enormously lucky.

The latter is the piece of the puzzle we often ignore when it comes to looking for jobs in general. Rejections are rarely a byproduct of your perceived incompetence.

You need some luck, in any and all cases of success. Sometimes that luck is in your privileged upbringing and sometimes it’s because the recruiter picked your resume out of the pile when the AI agent rejected it.

It’s a statistic, not a surefire strategy for success.

As for me, I didn’t use a freaking OneNote template to manage upwards. I don’t own a blazer or a pair of pumps. I don’t do my nails or straighten my hair. I roll out of bed 10 minutes before my first meeting. I often scream into pillows and I often make my frustration very clear at work.

I find the things that need to be done, I do them and I talk about them.

At the risk of being a stranger giving you career advice, here’s a few tips from my angle. Take it or leave it. You really should leave it, though, because I don’t know what I’m talking about.

1. There is no formula. There are suggestions and recommendations, but they are not formulas. Every step you take is a gamble and that is 100% okay. Bet on yourself. Do it over and over again, as many times as it takes.

2. If you are a high performing woman, a man will feel threatened by you at some point. If that man is your boss, you need to leave him.

3. Take steps back as investments for your future. Careers don’t have to be linear. Take a lesser paying role if the company feels like a better fit for you.

4. Happiness > pay > titles.

5. Don’t pander to old school ideologies if they don’t represent who you are.

6. Everything everywhere is the same. If you have a bad day and think about quitting, just remember that everything everywhere is the same thing, different font.

7. People are going to forget you exist sometimes and you’re just going to have to stop taking it personally.

8. The way you have to dress and show up for your corporate job will affect your mental health so take that into consideration if you care about that sort of thing.

9. Become hyper-competent. Learn so much about the job, about the company that you are a wealth of knowledge. This will go much further than a template or blazer will.

10. If you want to leave, don’t quit until you’ve found something else.

These are all white-collar corporate principles. It only really works if you have a made up title and a company that is currently worshipping generative AI.

And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t care about your work either. You’re there for a lot of time everyday. You should enjoy it to some degree. You don’t have to be obsessed with it, but if you like the sort of things you’re working on, you won’t need a template or a blazer to do well. You just need your brain and a sprinkle of luck.

They were fun. Super energetic. A very dedicated, engaged crowd. The four girls in the group felt like parts of a well-oiled machine: each had a specific purpose, a specific thing that they added to the group. The star power was undeniable. The dancing was incredible.

And the music was…well, it wasn’t really my thing, but that’s okay, of course. It’s a music festival. Part of the reason I go is to listen to things I might not on my own.

It was an experience that I didn’t really feel the need to relive. I enjoyed it for what it was and then moved on to my depression about Frank Ocean pulling out of the festival, followed by an extreme high with Skrillex, Four Tet and Fred Again.. performing.

I didn’t think about it much next few years.

Until 2026.

I’m at Lollapalooza, walking over towards their EDM stage when I hear autotuned vocals and thudding bass coming from the mainstage.

“Travis Scott?” I mumbled, pulling up the lineup on my phone to triple check that he wasn’t doing a set. I didn’t see his name. I got curious.

I walked over to the edge of the hill to see who it was. Imagine my surprise when I saw a group of five East Asian men wearing baggy clothes with a black MC accompanying them. The song finishes, the crowd cheers and one of the men starts to bark telling them crowd that they are Cortis, here in Chicago all the way from South Korea.

Except he was using African-American Vernacular (or commonly known as AAVE). He was using slang and an accent that was very clearly not his. There’s no getting around it.

And if that wasn’t already perplexing enough, Juicy J then comes out. As in, Three 6 Mafia Juicy J. The sheer irony is that a few minutes later, I’m watching Mustard’s DJ set and he plays a few Juicy J songs without Juicy J.

Then Aespa later brings out Ty Dolla $ign.

Needless to say, after Lollapalooza this year, I went down a 75 hour listening spree of K-Pop, which in turn made me go down a deep research rabbit hole thereafter. As a lover of rap and hip-hop for most of my life, I had to figure out what the crossover was, especially since K-Pop music still didn’t really appeal to me, even if the performances were entertaining.

At the risk of fans coming for me, here’s what I found.

K-Pop is not a genre as much as it is a industrial system.

Modern K-Pop operates on a strict, vertically integrated business model managed by various corporations, known as agencies. This differs from the western music industry, where we usually rely on independent artists who are then managed by record labels.

In order to become an entertainer within the K-Pop industry, you must go through a specific training program that takes many years, often beginning when you’re a child. If you are then placed in a group, the agency will then manage every single aspect of your personal and professional life. This includes how you talk, walk, sleep, eat, breathe, dance, sing, dress and spend your time. Your image is polished and buffed to be squeaky clean.

Much of the music itself is developed via agency-purchased demos from Western producers and then layered with some Korean lyrics and complicated choreography. The songs are primarily written by large production teams hired by agencies. Music is somewhat of an afterthought for many K-Pop groups.

Perhaps most interestingly, the system is so well-built that it survives any one individual member. Everyone in the group has a role: you have the leader, the main singer, the visual, the main dancer. There’s even a whole role for being the youngest (the maknae), someone who’s literal job it is to be young and cute (hmmm…). When you have a system, parts are interchangeable. In this case, the parts are, unfortunately, the humans.

And it works. The system is built to captivate. It does. The songs, even if you don’t like them, are catchy. The choreography is impressive. The music videos offer dopamine hit after dopamine hit.

K-Pop tows the line of influence and cultural appropriation when it comes to hip-hop.

When I was watching BLACKPINK in 2023, their opening song “Pink Venom” was familiar in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. That’s because it was familiar to me in approximately six different ways, given that it had number of melodic interpolations by famous black artists like Snoop Dogg, Rihanna, and 50 Cent.

Sampling in music exists in every genre. Inspiration exists in every genre.

But at what point does it cross that line?

You already know I listened to 75 hours of K-Pop music. What I was not expecting was the AAVE, the slang, and - my gosh - the rapping! Nearly every song had a rap break! Nearly every group had someone who is a designated rapper!

This started back in 1992 with Seo Taiji and Boys, who infused hip-hop elements into K-Pop (rapping, breakdancing) to create the blueprint for what we know as K-Pop today. Nowadays, agencies will openly state that black music is the base of their entire musical identity. It’s no secret. They hire black producers and choreographers and frequently collaborate with black artists.

The primary issue here is that these agencies also treat acting black as a marketable aesthetic.

They cherry pick what appears “cool” to them and then apply that to their visual curation process. Black hairstyles, for instance, are commonly used among K-Pop entertainers. Fine. But why are they “edgy” on them and associated with something much more negative when on a black person? K-Pop entertainers wear grills and durags and are called “bold" or “tough.” On black person, it makes them subject to racial policing.

It appears to be what critics call cultural extraction without context. These kids coming up through the system are taught how to rap without any idea of where it all comes from. And no, having Juicy J or Ty Dolla $ign join you on stage doesn’t automatically absolve anyone from that.

The fandom is equally as systematically curated as the groups themselves.

My algorithms skewed heavily towards K-Pop during my August listening sessions. In that time, I read thousands upon thousands of comments. The fans are intense, extraordinarily protective and highly engaged.

That’s not organic. That’s just another part of the business model.

Let’s start with the artists themselves. K-Pop entertainers are actually specifically called idols. That’s right. Like a deity. Perhaps a religious one? That’s the same term they use for these artists.

You’ve probably heard of the term parasocial. From Merriam-Webster:

(adj.) relating to or involving a one-sided emotional connection with someone (especially a celebrity or fictional character) whom one does not know personally

Agencies create this illusion of a two-way relationship between the fan and the idol by implementing tactics such as having private social media accounts that follow fans back at select times or creating private messaging apps where fans can pay a monthly subscription fee to receive messages.

The connection is also gamified, wherein fans earn interactions via points that are accumulated, typically by spending money. It’s worth noting that many of these fans are very young and impressionable. They’re likely the ones begging their parents for their credit cards to be able to subscribe to these tactics.

Idols are also typically not able to publicly date anyone, inked via strict contract clauses. They must maintain an appearance of being devoted and only emotionally available to their fans.

And boy, does all of this work.

Back in 2024, Karina of Aespa was in a short-lived relationship with a South Korean actor. When fans found out, they drove a truck into her agency with an electronic billboard.

It said: “Is the love given to you by your fans not enough?”

The worst part? It wasn’t even the only one.

The image above says:

Karina, rather than feeling sorry to the fans, you should be sorry to yourself who has worked hard for seven years!

You ruined your own career yourself.
All your efforts are being denied because of a single dating rumor.

Are you satisfied?

Karina, then 23 years old, issued an apology for this, saying she would work harder and be more mature in the future.

Fans are also encouraged to have a bias, which is essentially one idol within a group that you feel most attached to. I even saw fans standing up for their biases on social media by attacking the agencies themselves, which is pretty ironic, considering their biases don’t exist without them.

Tinashe is a notable figure in all of this.

K-Pop is apparently obsessed with Tinashe. I mean, we all should be, but specifically she is viewed by K-Pop as the ultimate blueprint - and it goes all the way back to 2014, with the release of her song “2 On.” J-Hope and RM, members of BTS, had her as their lock screens at one point. She is allegedly on vision boards at K-Pop agencies. There has been some speculation that her songs are frequently assigned for monthly evaluation metrics for trainees.

While there are a few supported instances of plagiarism (DIA’s “Woo Woo”, LE SSERAFIM’s “Easy”), it appears that it’s far more controversial than that. People are pretty split on her influence in the K-Pop industry.

I can see it, to be honest. Tinashe has the vocal control, the dancing ability and the stage presence that K-Pop attempts to manufacture. Not to mention, she’s black.

My exploration of K-Pop was illuminating, but perhaps the biggest takeaway was that the idols themselves are relentlessly hardworking and hyper-talented individuals.

It’s just…they’re not really individuals. At least, not within the K-Pop megasystem.

“Yes.”

“Positive?”

She’s asking for confirmation as if I just asked her to tie my tubes.

“Yes,” I repeat tersely.

“Back to black?”

“However close you can get it, please.”

“Okay,” she singsongs as she bounces to the mixing counter.

Her intonation reminds me of how daycare teachers talk to infants. You want this toy instead of that toy? Okay…

I can’t remember anyone asking if I was absolutely certain before I dyed it blonde for the first time half a decade ago. I would’ve remembered if someone did. I certainly don’t think I’ll be forgetting this sort of psychological torture.

She comes back with a small black bowl and a brush. She appraises my untamed hair for the fifteenth time that morning. Stroking it with a feathery hand, she prods again.

“We can touch up your roots, honey,” she offers. “It’ll be as good as new.”

“I’m kind of over it, to tell you the truth, Cynthia.” I once read somewhere that you should say someone’s name if you really meant something, but I don’t like how hers sounds rolling out of my mouth.

“I understand,” she says, pouting. “It just brings out your eyes! Pop!” She sparks her hand next to my face.

“I want it all dark again, thanks.”

“Alright, dear.”

She rakes my hair gently with a paddle brush, almost too gently, like she’s afraid it will fall out if she applies more than a ring finger’s worth of pressure. For a moment, I consider telling her to brush my hair, pull at it, rip out the tangles across all of the layers. I think about telling her that generations before me implemented the same technique on the same kind of hair. I want to say that it can handle it, that it’s strong enough.

But honestly, I don’t know if it’s true anymore. As she brushes, I notice bits of hair flying from halfway up the shaft of stringy yellow threads, snapping like a piece of dry spaghetti.

She applies the chemicals as she talks my ear off. She’s asking me questions about where I grew up and what I do for work, whether I have a boyfriend or not. She hones in on the latter. She wants to know everything, all of the details.

All of the things I just told her about my life, and all of the cool things I’m doing, and she can only care about the boyfriend.

Specifically, she wants to know if he knows about my decision to dye my hair darker.

“It’s my hair,” I tell her through gritted teeth.

“Hey! Sometimes men like to be consulted about that kind of stuff. It’s just a question.”

Part of me thinks that this isn’t worth it, that I should go to the store and get a box of dye and do it myself. I have to remind myself that my hands were not meant for the mutilation of my hair.

It’s also usually unwise to have your hair stylist mad at you, so I soften my face.

“He doesn’t care.”

“Good for you.”

She lets the dye sit in my hair for twenty minutes so it can attach itself to the blonde pieces. I pick the skin around my fingernails, avoiding my reflection in the mirror at all costs. When Cynthia comes back, my fingers have been picked raw. She leads me to the hair washing bowls where there are a few other women sitting around. They are both middle-aged and look to be stuck in the doom loop of artificial blondeness. They are loud, yapping with their stylists over the downpour of water washing over their heads. I close my eyes while Cynthia works her fingers through the product out of my hair. The lukewarm water feels nice on my exhausted scalp.

She finishes in about half an hour, cycles of washing and squeezing occupying most of the time. She attempts to wrap my hair in a microfiber towel, but it’s not big enough to hold all of it, so I awkwardly keep it clasped against my head as I walk back to the styling chair.

She roughly towel dries it before applying a few spritzes of a cucumber scented spray. From her tools, she produces a hair dryer and round brush. She wants to blow dry my freshly washed hair straight, she tells me, to give it a little flip around the layers, and trim my bangs. She wants to take a picture after she’s done for her social media account.

My hair, thick and prone to water retention, is still sopping wet, but I remove the cape and the towel and tell her no, thank you.

She hesitates. “It’s included in the cost.”

“I don’t need it.”

Despite her subpar performance, I tip Cynthia generously. I am grateful for her restoration, for her crepey hands working through the arduous task of handling my hair, a task that only my grandmother ever did without complaint before she died.

The heat from the summer day accelerates the drying process on my way home, amplified by a rolled down window. I notice the curls begin to form around my face as the moisture evaporates. My head feels light, fresh, like I got a haircut, even though not a single inch was taken off.

I catch a reflection of myself in the car window as I get out once I’m home. I’m taken slightly aback.

I finally recognize myself again.

It’s called a 9 to 5 but it’s 7:00 PM and it’s the third day in a row this week that it’s 7:00 PM.

Somehow, it’s also only Wednesday. How is it possibly only Wednesday?

My husband is outside, changing the oil on the neighbor’s car. Every few minutes, I can see him through the window, moving around beneath the hood, wiping his hands on a rag. He looks up and catches my eye.

He smiles.

It’s the kind of smile that would light up a room: fully dimpled, all of his teeth showing, radiating pure joy. I want to smile back at him the same way and sit down next to him in the driveway, ask him many questions about his oil change and listen intently to his answers.

But I can’t. I don’t have the mental capacity. I listened so much today, like every other day, across both sides of arbitrarily constructed hierarchies.

I am exhausted.

In fact, I am so tired that doing anything that’s not laying horizontally with a phone stuck in my face, doomscrolling through short-form content that robs me of contentment, feels depressingly worthless.

The thought disgusts me. I need to get out. I cannot rot away another evening.

I tell myself I need to run an errand to restock some things that were nearing empty on my bathroom counter. It feels very adult, going to the store after work for things you require.

“Do you want me to come with you?” my husband says enthusiastically as I saunter outside to say bye to him.

I consider his offer, imagining swatching things on his arm as he asks me thoughtful questions about what everything is. It sounds nice. It sounds perfect.

But I don’t want to answer any more questions today, even from him.

He hugs me gently after I decline his offer, before I drive away. Ten short minutes later, I’m at the store.

Beneath the familiar fluorescent lighting that threatens to expose every pore and dry patch I have, I find a strange peace. I’ve been coming here for the past decade, ever since my feet bounced happily across these floors instead of dragging through them. It’s been one of the few constants in my life.

Some things don’t change. My gaze still hooks onto the pretty iridescent eyeshadows and duochrome highlighters and glitter glosses. My fingers still graze pots of pigments and then smear the back of my hand. I’m still stunned by the beauty of color in general.

At one of the main displays, I pick up a pearlescent liquid eyeshadow with metallic blue flecks and briefly toy with the thought of purchasing it. I think to myself that I can wear it to a concert next year.

My nose wrinkles at the thought. I can’t do things like that anymore. Don’t I know how much it costs to live life? Don’t I know that I could lose my job tomorrow?

Of course I do.

When you know, everything needs to earn its keep.

Back then, I didn’t know that wearing sparkly blue eyeshadow to my corporate job affected things like “optics.” I didn’t know that I couldn’t just scrub a makeup wipe across my face after I turned twenty-five and expect to wake up the next morning with pimple-free skin. I didn’t know that the sticky glitter paste would only be used once and therefore, was a poor use of money.

Somewhere along the way, I began picking up things that helped me hide the hollows of my undereyes and the hormonal acne on my chin. I look at every item with intention, with a pragmatism that seemingly erupted out of nowhere one day, my dreamy youthful ignorance evaporated into thin air.

I simply stopped waking up every morning thrilled by the prospect of adorning my face with an untouched hue.

The goal simply became getting through it all everyday. It’s not about the damn makeup. It was actually never about the damn makeup.

Begrudgingly, I set down the eyeshadow.

Like a zombie, I grab the items I came to the store for off the shelves as I make my way around the store. There’s a sad pile in my hands.

1. A concealer that has made me look less gray in the face after even my most sleepless of nights.

2. Micellar water, because it’s the only thing that will remove said concealer without making me break out.

3. Hair thickening shampoo, which is relatively new in my rotation, because I can’t tell if my part has always been that wide or if it’s all in my head.

The lady behind the counter cheerfully rings me up. I’m irrationally jealous at her bold, purple eyeliner, flicked into a neat wing at her corners. The skin around her eyes is taut and smooth, the perfect canvas for her artwork.

I’m not sure what comes over me, then, but I grab a chunky, glitter-filled lipgloss out of the impulse bin to her right and set it in front of her before she sweeps the bottle of hair thickening shampoo beneath the scanner.

She pauses and gives me a tiny smile as she passes it beneath the red laser.

“Good choice,” she says approvingly.

I smile back at her without thinking about it, the first time all day I don’t have to plaster it on.

Maybe it’s a single use product. Maybe it’s a no use product. Maybe I’m beyond the time in my life where I wear it everyday.

Mostly, though, maybe not everything you love needs to earn its keep.

After a little while, the radio transitioned to other artists who had a similar vibe. I zoned out on my way to Solidcore while bopping along.

And then, this song popped up.

I hadn’t heard it before. The beat drop is fun, catchy and I could imagine a crowd of people dancing beneath flickering lasers at a show on a summer night. In addition to the French DJ, there’s Baltimore-born dance music legend Ultra Naté, who provides vocals for the song.

And then there’s someone named Imael Angel.

14.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify?

“Movin’ to the Sun” is their most streamed song, but there are several others with millions of listeners too.

I was sitting in the Solidcore parking lot two minutes before class, frantically looking for more information about this person. As I was walking in to the studio and the lights dimmed blue, the realization hit me like a gut punch.

That’s not a human being.

It’s an AI generated persona.

Imael Angel doesn't exist.

Part of me was in disbelief that I didn’t loathe the track. The song was originally created by a Hungarian hobbyist named Bernadette Gango under the name Imael Angel via AI music creator platform Suno. HUGEL took that AI generated song, rebuilt it scratch and brought Ultra Naté in to do the vocals.

But the lyrics, the melodic structure? It’s all from the AI generated version of the song by Imael Angel. That’s why they’re credited as the second artist on the song.

And it’s been #1 on the Beatport Top 100 Songs & DJ Tracks chart for 12 straight weeks.

12 weeks.

Look, I work in corporate America. I know how it goes with AI. Boardrooms across the world are worshipping it blindfolded. I’m not obsessed with it, but I’d be dumb not to say that it’s ultimately helped me become more efficient at work.

But that’s corporate America. I don’t care about it. I give them time, they give me money.

Music, on the other hand, is art. I’ve held the longstanding viewpoint that AI has no place in art. At least, not in such a way that someone credits an AI generated musical persona like they’re a goddamn human being.

For EDM, this is likely just the beginning.

The dance genre is uniquely vulnerable to AI integration. For one, it’s electronic. Though there is a real human behind the decks in a club, the songs primarily rely on digital inputs versus live instruments. Many tracks also rely heavily on pre-made building blocks and sample packs. The songs have patterned, structured formulas.

1. Intro

2. Build Up

3. Drop

4. Breakdown

5. Drop

Take all of that, add on some short vocal hooks that tend to be pretty abstract already and you’ve got yourself a pretty compelling recipe for where AI can succeed.

The EDM community - and major players within it - appear decently split across their use of AI in the industry in a way that they’re not in some other genres.

Diplo, who has created many successful tracks without AI assistance, argues that musicians must adapt to having Suno and Udio as part of their toolkits.

I don't even need a voice anymore. I can get the best voice from AI. I don't need anybody to sing the song anymore. - Diplo, April 2026, Music Radar

David Guetta famously experimented with AI-generated vocals at a live set. Steve Aoki uses AI for lyric generation when he has writer’s block.

More of a new age tech house artist, Mau P uses it in a more technical manner, like for AI-assisted stem separation. That is effectively the corporate version of using AI to diagnose a technical bug vs. having it write the whole code for you. Meanwhile, John Summit was against it for the purposes of production, stating that his latest CTRL ESCAPE album was done fully without AI. deadmau5 has also spoken out strongly against generative AI.

In general, there are some serious concerns about the dilution of the EDM ecosystem. Proponents argue that people will get left behind if they don’t adapt. It’s hard to say if that’s true or not - I guess it might depend on what an artist wants. EDM and house tends to be best enjoyed live and we know from the success of music festivals that people want to see a human being behind decks, reading the room, and spinning exclusive tracks for them. So maybe AI generation of the music itself doesn’t matter if you can energize a crowd and your goal is to become successful in doing that. The genre may face some additional “is it really music if it’s electronic?” heat but not every DJ is trying to fight that battle.

I think if I found merit in anyone’s take, it’s probably Mau P’s. AI as a regulated efficiency tool is a game changer. AI because you don’t want to pay someone royalties for a vocal feels…wrong. Especially when you’re a millionaire.

As for me, I ultimately found the lyrics to “Movin’ to the Sun” quite eerie after sitting on it for a while. This article which is referenced on the song’s Wikipedia page says this interesting thing:

The production is sharp and clipped, leaning into a minimalist aesthetic that contrasts with the expansive, almost hallucinatory lyrical imagery. - Rita Triplett, May 2026, Sweet + Sour Magazine

But the lyrics are very obviously AI slop:

I'm movin' to the sun
I did it all the time
I'm goin' to the sun
I'm so bad in the dark
I got the fire in the light
I got the fire in the light
I got the fire in the sky
Oh, that night, that night

You can argue that it’s house music and that it’s not actually meant to be that deep.

But it certainly hits a little different when you know that it was generated by a robot.

And it didn’t help Lolla’s case that Lil Uzi Vert couldn’t make his major slot time on Saturday, though he ultimately arrived with Diplo at the EDM main stage, Perry’s.

I’m not complaining - I love most music genres, and I usually go to festivals to discover new acts. Ultimately, I’m happy I went to Lolla because I caught Freddie Gibbs and Lil Simz, who were both incredible and highlights of my time in Chicago.

But it kind of made me wonder what was going on with the genre after a relatively under-the-radar 2026.

The top of the singles charts have been pretty dry of rap lately, too.

(We all know what happened in 2024…)

Real, raw storytelling in rap isn’t really the crux of the genre anymore. You’ve got lots of artist using catchy hooks and, frankly, going off of vibes, but true, curated art remains to be a mainstay in recent years. Not to mention, artists that rap well are sort of sticking to the things they always have or they’re going so far left field that it sucks.

Let’s look at some of the major names this year.

• Drake released 3 albums simultaneously: one R&B focused, the other rap, and the other dance. These actually did pretty well, unsurprisingly, but I’d hardly call his rap-focused album much newer than stuff he’s put out there years ago.

• Tyga released a disco (?) album - if we want to call it music. Pitchfork gave it a 0.

• Future released an album that received decidedly middle of the line reviews - also just his usual stuff.

• T.I. released an album that he’s been working on for five years for the kids to call it “an album that sounds like it was made by an an unc.”

• J. Cole’s The Fall-Off debuted at #1 on Billboard and was a technical masterpiece - but a lot of people felt like it didn’t meet the hype it had generated pre-release.

Here’s the thing: rap has historically been a young person’s genre. Many of the artists above are pushing 40 or already there and beyond. To be honest, I loved Iceman, but I’ve also been listening to Drake since middle school.

Perhaps the issue lies in that. Large scale music preferences change generationally. Social media has shifted the way music is consumed substantially. People like things that are trend-worthy, catchy, can be lip-synced, regardless of genre. People also like the dopamine rush of satisfying dance music drops - we have squirrel-like attention spans to thank for that.

Does that mean rap is dead?

Despite what folks are saying and what large festival lineups look like, R&B and rap remain the highest streamed genre when you look at market share - but it is declining yearly.

Many sources lump R&B and hip-hop together, which is a conversation for another day, but the overall story is that still really popular. No other genre - not even pop - touches this percentage of market share.

It’s just not as much as it has been in the last several years.

There’s been a shift. Genres like EDM and reggaeton are picking up in popularity at a meteoric rate. John Summit was a headlining act at Lolla. He had 295.1 million streams in the first half of 2026 alone - a whopping 59% increase from last year. Bad Bunny played a historic Super Bowl halftime show after finishing 2025 as Spotify’s most-streamed artist worldwide, with 19.8 billion streams. Pop artists that put on shows - complex choreography and set designs - have continually risen the bar for live performances, an area that rap music isn’t really known for.

And don’t even get me started on the country music dominating Top 10 charts across the US right now.

As for me, not that it’s any indication of any widespread trends, I spent an entire day at the Yuma tent at Coachella - something I would’ve never dreamed of doing years ago - because I couldn’t stop dancing. I’m not a raver by any means, but as EDM comes to the forefront, I’m beginning to realize how fun it is, how new and innovative it can be.

So I don’t think that rap music is dead…yet. I think there’s a real threat that it loses mainstream heat, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, some fans might consider that a good thing. There were some genuinely fantastic records that were released this year.

Perhaps, rap is just losing its monopoly on youth culture. Hip-hop spent decades fighting its way from a subculture into America’s dominant popular music. Maybe we’re witnessing the end of that particular era.

But losing mainstream supremacy could create room for something creatively healthier. When every label isn’t desperately trying to manufacture the next version of whatever rap sound is charting, scenes can start innovating again. Regional sounds can develop. Artists can make records for rap audiences instead of optimizing songs for TikTok.

Maybe rap doesn’t need to be the center of popular music to be healthy.

Sources:

• Billboard, No Rap Songs in Hot 100 Top 40

• Luminate - 2026 Midyear Report

• Luminate - R&B/Hip-Hop Streaming Share Analysis

• Luminate - 2023 Year-End Report

• Luminate - 2025 Year-End Report

• Luminate, Music Reports Archive

• Lollapalooza

• Coachella

• John Summit streams

• Bad Bunny streams

• Billboard Hot 100