Why Mumble Rap is the Perfect Music for Gen Z
In a sea of angry diary entries, Fight Club aficionados, and Ancap Instagram accounts, perhaps no words have been more emblematic of teenage non-conformism than “I was born in the wrong generation.”
We’ve all heard it before — the local guitar-slinging hipster whining about the “simplicity” of modern music — the “vapid” lyrics and the “predictable” chord progressions. Some of us might have even been that guy. And, I must concede, there is some truth to this argument: a lot of what’s on the radio right now is obnoxiously sugary, overproduced, and artistically empty. The biggest culprit, in many people’s eyes, is mumble rap — its musical simplicity and lyrical topics a threat to the art form and its popularity a sign of cultural decadence.
But I’m here to stake a claim for mumble rap, I’m here to say that it’s okay to enjoy “simple” music, and that, in fact, you should.
It’s interesting and useful to look at mumble rap in context of other bold yet successful music scenes. You got 1960s psychedelic rock in San Fran (which spawned acts such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead), 1990s grunge Seattle (Nirvana, Soundgarden), and even 1920s jazz (the roaring twenties and flapper culture). One of the commonalities between these scenes is a radical departure from musical conventions they all symbolized — psych-rock, for example, marked early experimentation with guitar effects and studio trickery. And this experimentation could, in turn, be attributed to the social landscape on which these genres were developed: 60s flower power having impacted the sound of psychedelic rock, 20s hedonism defining the spirit of swing music, and the late 90s edge bringing grunge to the spotlight.
I can already see you throwing your hands up and saying Okay, Lucas, we get it. But where does mumble rap fit into the equation?
Well, we first have to talk about the cultural context. The primary audience of mumble rap seems to be teens. And 2010s teens are living in a real weird time. You wake up to your iPhone X ringing wildly on your nightstand and vaguely recall begrudgingly setting an alarm for 6:30 AM (as well as receiving a notification stating “alarm set for 4 hours from now”). You went to sleep too late for your own good, likely because you spent two hours scrolling through your Instagram feed and double-tapping every photo you came across. Lying on your bed, putting off getting up, you open Instagram again and make your way through the gauntlet of stories your friends have posted: happy birthday messages, photos of the Amazon on fire, that one spam post about Instagram invading your privacy, reminders that climate change is gonna kill us all, reminders that it’s a hoax, photos of police beating people, photos of people beating police. Opening your phone is like peeking into a room full of screaming people pointing to photos of your own dead body.
This generation’s zeitgeist isn’t LSD, ripped jeans, or Gatsbyesque parties: it’s the never-ending stream of insanity we hold in the palm of our hands. We’re too informed. We’re forced to think too much. There’s too much that we have the responsibility to change.
But then, a moment of solace, a ray of light through the dark. Your friend turns on his Bluetooth speaker and in comes Playboy Carti. “No cap and gown, I ain’t go to class,” he says. “I’d rather die before I come in last.” Accompanied by a cyclical, mind-numbingly repetitive synth sample, you and your friend speed down the highway and leave your troubles behind.
I think part of the reason mumble rap gets a bad reputation is it’s an exceptionally stripped-down form of music typically consisting of a rapper, a sample, and a booming 808 bass. But if we look at it from a broader point of view, it makes perfect sense that this music exists in this form. When regular guitar rock got boring, the youth started playing with sound effects; when sound effects got boring, the youth starting cranking their amps and writing angry rock And now that bands like Imagine Dragons have beaten rock into a horse that’s been dead for four LPs, the youth seem to be dropping the genre altogether, abandoning guitars in favor of the sweet, infectious tunes the likes of Pi’erre Bourne or Travis Scott. Music is an extremely reactionary art form — whatever is cutting edge is whatever sticks the finger to “dad” music; and can you think of a genre more antithetical to dad-rock than trap rap?
But that’s just a matter of musicality. What makes this genre a sensation among young people is the escape it provides. Where the music itself is antithetical to “lamer,” older genres, the sentiment these rappers put forth is antithetical to the hyper-informed, oversaturated, restless technocracy we currently live in. In a sense, our generation needs the kind of straightforwardness mumble rap provides — we can most definitely do without the substance abuse, but the whole “screw it, I’m gonna party” attitude is likely what makes it appealing to so many people (especially considering the end-of-the-world level of news and politics we’re exposed to daily).
The music only serves to strengthen this cultural significance. In a world where we have thousands of years’ worth of lengthy poetry at our fingertips, it’s refreshing to hear Lil Pump repeat “Gucci gang” ad nauseam. In fact, a lot of this music regards multi-faceted mental health issues with striking simplicity, such as when Juice Wrld famously sang “You made my heart break/you made my heart ache.” The truth of the matter is that 21st-century hopeless romantics don’t have time to worry about the bells and whistles of poetry; instead, we just want to hear it said plain and simple, no frills and no tricks.
So, here’s to simplicity, here’s to repetitiveness, and here’s to mumble rap. The world might be a fiery mess spiraling down into an abyss, but we’re making a party out of the end of it and you bet Playboy Carti’s gonna be playing in the background.
https://www.complex.com/music/2019/08/playboi-carti-new-album-whole-lotta-red/
