For the first time in decades, rap has disappeared from the top of the charts while country music is surging. Has rap simply exhausted itself—or is something bigger going on?
Pigweed and Crowhill trace rap’s evolution from the relatively harmless early days of hip-hop to gangster rap and increasingly explicit music, and compare its treatment of sex, crime, rebellion, and regret with rock and outlaw country. Why does Johnny Cash shoot a man in Reno and end up regretting his life, while gangster rap so often turns the outlaw himself into the hero?
Then we enter Conspiracy Corner. Record companies, private prisons, USAID, the CIA, cultural manipulation, fake digital popularity—could powerful institutions have helped push rap culture in a particular direction? There are enough strange historical precedents to make the theory interesting. But there’s a larger question underneath it all: Are cultural movements actually orchestrated from above, or do institutions merely amplify movements that are already happening?
Plus, we review a suspiciously inconsistent six-pack of Baykeeper IPA and ponder the enormous cultural distance between “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” and Cardi B.
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