“There’s a recent strain of rap music that has the purists up in arms just as much, if not more, than Macklemore does. Influenced by experimentalists like Kanye West and Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane, a new wave of artists from Chicago and Atlanta have been pushing rap into aesthetic spaces it has never been before. Often using Autotune to warp their voices in ways traditional rappers never could, they bleed one word into the next, blurring the line between rapping and singing. Folks like Future, Chief Keef, Z Money, Rich Homie Quan, Young Thug — these guys puts far more focus on melodic vocal delivery, and far less on word-by-word lyricism, than any rappers the genre has ever countenanced. Is the music they’re making still hip-hop? For now, I’d say so. But who knows?”
