unreality rap

hugovk commented on the word unreality rap

unreality rap, n.

The Guardian, 28 April 2016:

From Clipse to TI, the trap was rap’s reigning metaphor during the first decade of the 21st century, a reference to the place where drugs are sold but also the idea of that life as a dead end (along with the related idea of luring and enslaving the clientele, mostly members of the dealer’s own race, class, community). In Drake’s decade, the 2010s, fame itself – the escape-route alternative to crime pursued by gangsta rappers – has become a trap of its own. The godfathers of gangsta, NWA talked about “reality rap”; Drake’s self-invented genre is unreality rap, or perhaps hyper-reality rap. Both the mise-en-scène and the topics of his songs – penthouse suites, after-show parties, VIP rooms, award shows, inter-celebrity dating, internet gossip, the proliferation of the public self as an image and a meme – are remote from the world most of us inhabit. We gawp at it from the outside. Drake’s art is all about achieving access to this hyper-real world – a realm of front, rumour, bravado, optics, public relations – and then bemoaning how unreal it feels to live inside it. The glittering insubstantiality of the music – which resembles Harold Budd, Aphex Twin and Radiohead circa Kid A as much as Timbaland, the Weeknd or DJ Mustard – is the perfect aural match for the mirrored maze of modern celebreality. The airless sound evokes the sealed vacuum of loneliness-at-the-top.

May 5, 2016