Videos by According2HipHop
In an exclusive conversation with Rock The Bells, Public Enemy frontman Chuck D addressed the recent—and historic—absence of Hip-Hop records in the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 40. For the first time since 1990, no rap songs are represented in the upper tier of the chart, a shift Chuck attributes to a “lack of curation, administration, and caretaking.”
According to Chuck, the genre’s mainstream output has fallen into a pattern of sameness that’s stifling creativity and diminishing Hip-Hop’s chart impact.
“When you have a cluster of people writing the same song, things are gonna fall on the floor,” he said. “Right now, on Billboard, you can’t point to a rap artist and say that’s their signature. It makes no sense to try to figure out what NBA YoungBoy is doing and try to follow that. He’s got that area locked up.”
Chuck praised other genres for maintaining variety and proper artistic development—something he believes Hip-Hop once had, but has drifted away from.
“Rock has it figured out—songs and acts that vary in subject matter. We have that in Hip-Hop, and we had a lot more diversity before. We also had curators who could say, ‘There’s an avenue for this Kwamé record, and there’s an avenue for that D.M.C. record,’ and people who were navigating and managing it all.”
Still, Chuck remains optimistic that Hip-Hop’s absence from the Top 40 won’t last forever.
“We will have songs in the Top 40 again. Right now, it’s like the hole in the hurricane.”
As of the October 25th chart, Kendrick Lamar’s “Luther” slipped out of the Top 40 after an impressive 46-week run. NBA YoungBoy’s “Shot Callin’” currently sits at No. 44, making it the highest-charting rap song at the moment. The last time Hip-Hop held such a small footprint in the Top 40 was in 1990, when Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend” was the lone rap entry.
Industry insiders point to multiple factors behind the decline, including Billboard’s new recurrence rules that cycle out older songs more rapidly, Taylor Swift’s chart domination—occupying the Top 12 spots with tracks from her latest album Life of a Showgirl—and Hip-Hop’s shrinking market share amid a cultural shift toward country and pop. A recent IG post by Damizza also highlights the music industry’s increasingly conservative direction in programming and promotion.
