Drake released his seventh studio album, Honestly, Nevermind, last week in a surprise drop. The new direction of the music has already sparked controversy in the rap music community.
Drake’s new sound has been deemed by some as his turn away from rap music as he moves toward more of a house/techno style. Long Beach rapper Vince Staples was recently welcomed to The Joe Budden Podcast for an episode in which the two rap artists discussed Drake’s new material.
“You think Drake putting out a dance album gets us closer to the elimination of rap music as a whole?” Budden asked.
In response, Staples brought up Drake’s 2017 album Big Fish Theory and described how the experimental project received a ton of backlash from fans. Although, he insisted that with the rise of the internet age, customers’ experiences are fairly similar, and it’s broken down regional barriers in music.
“Music has always been very visual,” Staples responded. “When I think about artists, visual things pop up… Michael Jackson it’s the moonwalk and 2Pac it’s a lot of aesthetic things. Of course, it’s the music, but the thing is we’re visual people.”
“When you think about where music is headed, everything is Instagram, everything looks the same, moves the same, dresses the same and talks the same. The genre shit is going to have to go out the window eventually. It’s too hard to separate culture because the internet has kinda pushed everything into the same little bubble.”
Drake has been something of a trendsetter for most of his career. He is predominantly a rap artist, but his pop orientation has broken down inter-genre barriers as he moves to other areas of music to incorporate into his own sound. It remains to be seen if that will be the case for the rap world as a whole, but Staples seems to think the social media age could spark the end of genres.
