Nov 4, 20264 min read

Quick Take: Rap Needs Fun Again

A Dallas star with five years in the game says he should not be at the top yet. The uncomfortable part is how much of his diagnosis checks out.

OMYGOTTI

Toronto hip-hop artist | 730K+ Facebook

What BigX Actually Said

BigXthaPlug did not hedge. Asked by Shannon Sharpe on Club Shay Shay whether rap is dying, the Dallas rapper answered yes without hesitation, in an interview that premiered on October 28 and has been clipped and argued about all week. His evidence started with himself. He pointed out that he has been rapping for five years and argued there is no way he should already sit at the top of the genre.

He extended the point to the charts, saying there is no way somebody with a TikTok song should hold the number one hip hop song in the world, and he named the standard plainly by asking how newcomers end up in the same categories as Drake and Future without putting in comparable work. His summary of the modern game was blunt. He called it a money game.

The Money Game Point Is Real

Strip the headline away and the economics argument is hard to dispute. When a fifteen second clip can manufacture a career overnight, labels rationally chase the clip instead of the catalogue. Artist development, once a slow and expensive craft, now competes with a feed that rewards whoever is loudest this week. BigX is not guessing about this system. He is one of its biggest recent winners, which is what gives the criticism weight.

His new album Better Over Time arrived October 30 with GloRilla and Lil Yachty among the guests, a year after his country leaning I Hope You Are Happy put him beside names like Luke Combs and Shaboozey. A rapper who has crossed over that successfully and still says the ladder is broken is describing a structure, not nursing a grudge. When the winners complain about the game, the game has a design problem.

Drill And The Aggression Trap

The second half of his diagnosis aimed at drill. BigX argued that when drill took over, it changed what young artists believe is required of them, that everybody now feels they have to be aggressive and play the gangsta role before they are allowed to be artists. He was careful to send no disrespect to drill rappers directly, but he held the line that the sound cost hip hop something beyond its intended targets.

There is a fair counterpoint, which is that every generation of rap has had its danger music and the culture always metabolised it. The difference now is the algorithm. Aggression clips well, conflict clips better, and a young artist watching the feed learns the lesson the numbers teach. BigX is arguing the incentive itself is the problem, and on that he is closer to right than his critics want to admit.

Fun Is A Skill, Not A Gimmick

His prescription was simple. He said the music needs to be fun again, and reached back to an era when a Snoop Dogg collaboration with a pop star raised no questions about anybody and his standing. That memory is doing real work in his argument. Fun in rap was never the opposite of skill. The most replayable records in the culture are often the ones where elite technicians sound like they are enjoying themselves.

That is the standard worth defending, because joy is harder to fake than menace. Anybody can posture for a camera. Very few can make a crowd move and keep the pen sharp at the same time. If the next wave is graded on that combination again, half of the problems BigX listed start fixing themselves.

My Verdict

Rap is not dying. A genre that still produces this much argument about its own health is nowhere near a flatline. But BigXthaPlug is right about the distortion. Five year careers at the summit, TikTok coronations, a money first development model and an aggression requirement for entry are real pressures, and pretending they are just old head complaints wastes a warning delivered by a young winner.

Take the warning and skip the funeral. The fix he named is the oldest one in hip hop. Make it fun again, make it skilled again, and let the top be somewhere you arrive after the work, not somewhere the feed drops you by accident.