The new generation of rap has given birth to the era of mumble rap. Future’s woozy flows and Young Thug’s bouncy melodies are just the tip of the iceberg, but Slink Johnson and Soren Baker discuss the history of mumble rap and analyze the current climate of the art form on “The Grey Area.”
“Mumble rap phenomenon has taken on a life of it’s own,” Baker says to start the conversation. “It’s very popular. Young Thug is one of the biggest artists in the game. And for me, I have a lot of theories on it in a sense of why people have such a problem with it.”
Black Jesus, as a fan of hip-hop, says that he can’t profess his love for all rap, but is careful about what he criticizes. The rap generation battle has been brewing, especially in the time of mumble rap when people like Pete Rock and Joe Budden throw shade on the newer artists.
“I don’t like to always shit on it because I don’t want to be viewed as the old head that can’t get with the new music,” Johnson shares. “I understand times change and styles change and people do different things, but when it get to the point when you can’t understand what a motherfucker said, it’s really unnerving. C’mon man, I’d rather just hear the producer make a nice lil album full of beats that I can bump because I can’t understand shit that the rapper is saying.”
Baker traces the phenomenon of mumble rap back to Twista and Bone thugs-n-harmony, who ravaged through the 1990s rapping at breakneck speeds. While their message might have been hard to decipher on first listen, that didn’t stop the artists from rising the ladder of hip-hop greatness.
Johnson says he doesn’t think of that music in the same way as today’s mumble rap.
“The thing about Twista and Bone-thugs-n-harmony was they rapped fast and if you listened, you could actually pay attention,” he shares. “If you listen, you can actually hear, understand what they’re saying. Especially Twista. Twista is an exceptionally skillful rapper. He can rap super fast, but all of his words, if you slow down, if you slow it down and listen, all of his words come out audible, clear and crisp. You can make it all out.”
Baker agrees.
“The genius of what he does is it’s also always on beat,” he adds. “There’s a lot of other people that’ll rap fast that are not on beat. Twista, unless he’s doing it for stylistic purposes, he’s always on beat, which is why I think he’s one of the best rappers ever.”
Johnson says that perhaps it’s hard to enjoy the newer generation because, along with the fact that you can’t understand what they’re saying, the fashion has changed and is hard for older artists to accept. There is also a glorification of prescription drugs like Xanax and Percocets that creates barriers in relating to the music.
A third factor that distances mumble rap from other rap subgenres is perhaps content. Or lack thereof.
“When I do take the extra effort to really pay attention and listen, the thing that has amazed me is unlike Bone and unlike Twista, using them as examples and as comparisons, I don’t think lyrically that this generation has the lyrics, the potency that Twista and Bone had,” Baker suggests.
“I agree, man. I think there are some, there are several skilled lyricists of this generation who aren’t getting the shine they deserve,” Johnson responds. “So it would appear that they aren’t there. But they’re there. The people that are getting the shine are the people with no substance, just talking about some bullshit. What happened in the club. Don’t get me wrong, you can rap about what happened in the club and make it sound interesting, but you ain’t talking about shit a lot of times, ‘I drop money/I let it rain/(mumble, mumble)/Give me brain!’ It’s what? Like, my nigga. But there are some people who have real deep lyrics and a deep message and very imaginative when it comes to putting their rhymes together. But it’s not a lot, this is the swag culture. Everything is how it looks more than the real substance. I remember at one point, rappers really had to write their lyrics. That’s not to change the subject to ghostwriting, but it’s substance.”
Baker expresses frustration with rappers who don’t appreciate song structure and insist on freestyling instead of taking time to craft their lyrics.
“People tell me this all the time, ‘Oh, I don’t write.’ Or, ‘Oh, I don’t care about writing my lyrics, I just freestyle.’ But that’s not necessarily a good thing,” he says. “Just ’cause you can do something off the top of your head, it’s not usually good. That’s why in a game, they have plays that they run because, this is structure, this is practice. When you’re just going in and freestyling, they don’t do that in the NFL.”
Johnson seconds the thought and calls for all rappers to have their team together and ready for the big leagues.
“You gonna come in with your package together,” he says. “You’re gonna have your personnel in the right place. They gonna do what they need to do. You’re not just gonna put 11 niggas on the field and say hey, go score. There’s more to it.”
Baker refers back to some of the legends who scrapped the art of writing down lyrics to make his point that it’s a difficult task to create a complete song.
“People have to understand, when you do this and you are trying to freestyle, that you lose a certain sense of song structure, you lose a flow, you lose topics, you lose all these different things and that’s something that allegedly when Biggie did it and allegedly Jay Z did it and more recently the most famous dude that started this whole wave of Lil Wayne doing it, you see that those dudes were able to stick to a song structure, stick to a theme, stick to all this stuff,” he says. “A lot of these dudes, they’re just rapping. They throw a chorus on it and the song title don’t mean nothing.”
Both Baker and Johnson say that the production of the music has taken center stage over lyrical content. Combined with a nice melody, the music isn’t so bad. Young Thug is a mumble rapper who they both appreciate and makes them think about more than a hard beat.
“The beats are incredible and that made me listen a little harder,” Johnson says. “And I can understand what he’s saying probably about 94 percent of the time. But the guy, he’s so melodic. The way he puts his verses together, you might not understand what he’s saying all the time, but it’s so melodic. Like that motherfucking, ‘RiRi,’ it sounds like a fucking dog barking, but I like the way that dog bark.”
While mumble rap has dominated the charts, the duo ponders how long the trend will last. Baker points out that Migos, although they storm the nation with catchy tunes, do inject some sort of social commentary into their work, even if it’s not their radio singles. He and Johnson hope others will take note.
“Maybe the tide of rap will change with the next few years, the way the social climate is changing in America, maybe the tide of rap will change for the better,” Johnson asks. “Maybe not. But right now, all this mumble mouth, mush mouth shit, if you’re gonna do that, put some songs where I can understand what you’re saying too on your album. Just do that for me as a fan. Don’t come every album, you just high and you just drunk like a gallon of codeine and you just gonna give me (mumbles) and put a beat under that shit and expect me to buy, nigga. That’s some bullshit. I’m gonna pirate that.”