Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s rap battle felt monumental—for “two seconds.” That’s how time feels now in the throes of technological determinism. Social media powered by AI warped their feud into fractal, inoculated, algorithmic mania. Toxic filter bubbles and echo chambers decided the winner and how to view fans of either side. And the insidious upheaval of hip-hop journalism in our digital evolution continues to grow increasingly problematic.
As a millennial, I, like many others, came of age with deep personal connections to traditional media outlets such as MTV and BET and magazines like The Source, XXL, and Vibe. These were not just news sources but our guides, our windows into the hip-hop world. They raised us. Then, a significant shift in news media occurred, marking the rise of digital platforms, social media, and the decline of print. This transformation, particularly evident in hip-hop, saw the emergence of rap blogs and culture-adjacent message boards during our late teens and early twenties. Platforms, driven by the ever-growing influence of Web 2.0, usernames, and engagement metrics, began to hold more journalistic authority than a byline.
Putting numbers to hip-hop culture at 50 years old, it’s a $16 billion industry. Battles have been part of its framework since its beginnings. When Drake battled Meek Mill almost ten years ago, pioneer hip-hop journalist Greg Tate wrote on social media, “Battle rhymes are good for the soul of rap music.” But throughout Drake and Kendrick’s feud, Drake relied on podcasters, internet personalities, and live streamers like Livingston Allen, better known as Akademiks, and Jamil “Mal” Clay in a journalistic capacity. The issue is that although they work in hip-hop digital media, they aren’t journalists.
Tastemaking and influencing aren’t the same as professional music criticism and news reporting that informs society. Fab 5 Freddy is a tastemaker and influencer. He was one of hip-hop’s first correspondents as host of the then “experimental” Yo! MTV Raps in the 1980s. He introduced hip-hop and even Basquiat to mainstream audiences, as well as Debbie Harry, to its five elements. Freddy interpreted a new art form and subculture as a pioneer. But what he does is different than what journalists like Tate, Touré, or Cheo Hodari Coker have done. Life, truths, and reality are inflexible and chaotic. An authentic journalist does not tell you how to think about these things. They analyze, chronicle, and offer the organization of them—so you’re informed enough to think for yourself.
For instance, I would say beef and battles aren’t interchangeable. In Coker’s book Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G., the chapter titled “What’s Beef” details a case for precedence for such a distinction. The dispute between Tupac and Biggie ended with both rappers dying in drive-by shootings six months apart. The lives of people closest to them were irrevocably changed. One theme that glares throughout Coker’s entire book is his observation about the mainstream media’s disparity in coverage and critical analysis of happenings in hip-hop.
Coker points out “Touré’s brilliant but scathing piece” in the Village Voice, which compares “Shakur’s life to an open-ended work of conceptual art.” Touré’s main argument was that Tupac’s compelling acting abilities never ceased, even spilling over into his musical persona and private life. While some may not agree, the piece underscores the role of critical analysis and commentary in offering narratives and various perceptions in hip-hop culture.
While in prison, in one of his most vulnerable interviews for Vibe, Tupac acknowledged reading Touré’s piece, which opened a dialogue between Tupac and the public. It resulted in Tupac’s “ego death”—his sentimental, imagined civic loyalty or obligation to the East Coast. Like his moniker, “MC New York,” he was once fond of even after finding acceptance in Oakland, California.
Tupac didn’t threaten Touré’s life over it either. He did, however, transform into a symbol for West Coast rap. In his own words— “reincarnated.” On “Ambitionz Az A Ridah,” he proclaims he’s a “legendary, musical mercenary. For money, [he’d] have these motherfuckers buried.” On the album cover of All Eyez On Me, he gestures “Westside” with one hand and holds up a 14KT gold, diamond-encrusted “Death Row Records” pendant in the other. And, believe it or not, neither did Suge Knight. They both saw Touré as a hip-hop journalist doing his job. Knight even agreed to an interview with Touré on the matter of Dick Griffey, Solar Records, and Death Row after Tupac’s conviction and imprisonment.
On every continent, groups of ancient humans disseminated cultural knowledge or news through drums, ballads, and songs. Then, we developed print technology for that, followed by journalism and music journalism. Everyone instinctually understood their role. It’s startling to think about this “technological determinism flashpoint,” where our unbroken chain of instinctual human collectivist behavior merged with technology and transmuted into something so alien and indifferent in as little as twenty-something years.
The rap blog NahRight emerged in May 2005. It was a basic WordPress site using the Kubrick default theme. It had little editorial content and direction, more music, and an eccentric comment section. Also that year, a high school dropout from Queens, New York, Lee O’Denat started the content-aggregating video blog World Star Hip Hop. By 2006, run by Nile “LowKey” Ivey, YouHeardThatNew appeared. Like sneaker collector forums, SOHH saw a massive surge in visitors. There was OnSmash, Miss Info, DJBooth, and Rap Radar. 2DopeBoyz, Pigeons & Planes, and Hot New Hip Hop. They went from being the millennial and Gen Z replacement for Limewire or Kazaa after the music industry crackdown on file sharing to its tastemakers, shot callers, and go-betweens with opportunities to generate estimated combined millions. For a time, they were gatekeepers.
We’d used Web 2.0 to revamp hip-hop media. It fueled our creativity, advanced careers, and even revolutionized civic life as we matured. It was even influential in Barack Obama becoming the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. They’re all examples of technological determinism. However, the raw collectivist nature of Web 2.0’s engagement and accessibility had become too tempting not to exploit. As Jeff Rosenthal of “The Blog Era” podcast told Rolling Stone and the New York Times, behind the scenes, “[T]here were some self-inflicted wounds [by bloggers themselves], as well.” Cooperative communities posting and discussing hip-hop—hyperconnectivity—had monetizable value. An artist could also leverage their popularity and visibility within them to negotiate deals and contracts.
A user known online as “Nation,” also from Canada, became a sort of intern for NahRight. In an interview, he says about choosing the name that he was also still in school at the time and didn’t know how long “this whole thing would last,” so he at least wanted to have the option to work a “normal” job afterward. “This was before the internet, which is what it’s become now.” Drake reaches out to him during this interim, and the parasocial relationship develops.
“I was never trying to be the greatest ‘music journalist,’ either,” Nation continues. “It was only when I realized I was making people like Elliott Wilson nervous and was getting wisdom and direct mentorship from some of the greats that I realized what was at stake.” In a twist of irony, Nation’s grandiosity and self-entitled superficial association with hip-hop highlight one of the many insidious ills of digital media eroding music journalism today. The clout-chasing, status-seeking, and alleged engagement farms that run rampant now. One could argue that AI-powered Web 2.0 significantly impacts and shapes how we interact, consume information and behave.
To be clear, the Elliott Wilson, as in the now 53-year-old often self-proclaimed “GOAT of hip-hop journalism,” like Coker, has added showrunner to his accomplished skillset. Wilson, who’d co-created Ego Trip magazine, served as an editor at The Source, was the editor for some of XXL’s most memorable issues, and managed to have a career in hip-hop spanning over 30 years. He’s also co-authored two books. Wilson signed on to Uproxx Studios as Editorial Director amid the Drake-Kendrick feud in April. He’s “persevered through all the eras,” as Jadakiss would say. Playful or not, the underlying audacity of Nation’s overestimation of his contribution to society is one of the many side effects of hyperconnectivity on the human mind. The technological Dunning-Kruger effect is another aspect many exhibit daily online by dismissing the phenomena we’re able to observe as “not that deep” or not on the topic. But it is what technological determinism looks like today.
Subliminal persuasion is the compelling unseen force within Web 2.0 that temps so many. Strategies like engagement farming with exhaustive intricately woven layers that are too mind-numbing to unravel. But it’s responsible for the current state of low-quality hip-hop journalism. It warps our human need for interaction into economic goods, almost like agricultural commodities—hence “farming.” Glazing is the ingratiating act of overcomplimenting. When internet personalities do this with other celebs or brands over social media, it’s often part of another strategy known as “rage baiting.” Many felt Akademiks and Mal did this—while acting in a widely misperceived journalistic capacity—in favor of Drake during the battle.
In “Push Ups,” Drake and Akademiks benefit through mutual promotion, using Akademiks’ “What top five you smokin’ on, Kendrick” soundbite to boost engagement from hip-hop fans. You can observe technological determinism, where Web 2.0 shapes users’ behavior and our society’s development. Since the blog era that reared Drake, he has mastered and normalized blurring an established ethical line between influence and actual journalism. It’s been almost ten years since the release of the collaborative commercial mixtape from Drake and Future, “What a Time to Be Alive.” Its title was thought up for Drake by the meteoric culture writer and millennial Ernest Baker.
It’s been almost two years since Drake and 21 Savage’s collab “Her Loss.” While promoting the album, Drake spoofed an edition of Vogue, which the magazine sued for copyright infringement. A case settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. By the time we’ve reached today’s 2024 battle with Kendrick Lamar, Drake’s resurrecting the symbol for West Coast rap Tupac through “AI necromancy” for his “Taylor Made Freestyle” diss. Many hip-hop fans like myself saw this as breaking unwritten rules of engagement in a rap battle. In a cease-and-desist letter obtained by Billboard, Tupac’s estate also felt “deeply dismayed” and would “never have given its approval.”
Recently, NPR’s Planet Money spoke to Mark Bartholomew, a law professor at The University at Buffalo School of Law, about it. He points out that Drake violated California law when he published “Taylor Made Freestyle,” featuring an AI-powered Tupac. His rights holders (Tupac’s estate) are in California, and California has some of the most robust laws protecting an individual’s identity in different forms, even after their death. Remember, revitalizing his music career after prison—despite being a native New Yorker—Tupac embraced and declared his allegiance to California, making it his home.
Bartholomew thinks that Tupac’s estate might also have a case under federal copyright law if Drake and his team input copyrighted Tupac material into AI software to produce his artificial voice. Drake’s music career spans almost 18 years, starting with his 2006 debut mixtape, Room for Improvement. Like Tupac, is Drake also a tortured mind? Or as Touré put it, after “all the contradictions and posturing bullshit, it’s really about nothing more than never for a single moment being invisible.”
Touré meant Tupac’s performance artist “always on” approach of contentious and politically charged sophistication. I mean, tortured in the sense that, like Tupac, Drake, too, always in character, uses his pain as a source of creativity. Only his approach is introspection and vulnerability. As professional actors, the two are talented at being emotionally expressive. Brilliant actors often respond to real life’s inflexible truths and reality’s harshness in creatively charming ways, producing a sense of controlled realness that highlights said acting abilities. As much as Drake often gets clowned for being corny, there’s another way of seeing those moments. They may struggle to appear relatable. “Dark Triad Personality” comes to mind: narcissism, subclinical psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. The only difference is that Drake has had 18 years in the music industry, honing it into a wealth-creating entertainment engine worth hundreds of millions.
We once revered Web 2.0 as having the great promise of equalizing our society. The problem with wealth-creating engines is that they require massive amounts of money. While America’s is the greatest in history, it evolved to work against our interests. It prioritizes the well-being of corporations and financial institutions over us, the general population. At the beginning of 2024, the World Economic Forum concluded that AI is warping our global order into an inoculated fractal, algorithmic destabilization.
In journalism, you try to narrow the news central development’s angles down—in this case, technological determinism. You pinpoint facts and figures like how many people it affects, where, whom, and to what extent. Tupac wasn’t a villain. Here, neither was Drake, his team, or Kendrick and his. Mal and Akademiks aren’t. You can’t call Nation, NahRight, or rap blogs one. They’re all victims of circumstance. Of life, its truths, and reality’s inflexible chaos. Within this flashpoint of technological determinism, the Dunning-Kruger effect. And, like many, none of them are actual journalists—or news writers. So, where are hip-hop journalism and its writers? That’s a good question.
It’s like HBO Film’s updated version of Fahrenheit 451 because it, too, is a victim of technological determinism. According to Fast Company, 61% of Generation Z and millennials have read an actual book in the past 12 months, but only 57% identify as readers. In the movie’s title sequence, it looks like literacy’s meaning, value, and purpose to the human spirit and the value of symbolic thought are warping into Bradbury’s bleak dystopian future of his 1953 masterpiece. But as sleek and updated as the movie was—even with Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon, and Sofia Boutella—its plot was convoluted, suffering from “presentism.” Because of our real-life opioid-like dependency on social media, we can’t even empathize or fathom Bradbury’s 1953 poetic message about the power of human cultural transmission through reading—how we pass ideas down from one generation to the next.
During Kendrick and Drake’s battle, the East Coast experienced an earthquake of 4.8 on the Richter scale and a solar eclipse. Greg Tate, who’d been covering hip-hop since 1981, was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize, which speaks to my point about technological determinism. Dallas Penn, a tastemaker who, in some circles, as a pioneer blogger and internet personality, meant to hip-hop’s internet generation what Fab 5 Freddy does, passed away at 53. Mister Cee, instrumental in Biggie going from local street corners to an international East Coast icon, passed away at 57. The battle and Drake’s ‘wealth-creating entertainment engine’ overshadowed all this. Reading is becoming more part of an identity and less of a behavior. The fact that there’s more media coverage of this rap battle than these intricately woven layers of human concern aren’t controversial should bother you.
This AI-warped fractal, inoculated, algorithmic mania, toxic filter bubbles, and echo chambers are doing what we desire them to do: organize our hyperconnectivity of ideas we think we want to share globally as a civilization with superhuman speed. The dilemma lies in the fact we don’t know what these ideas are until we experience them. Journalists once served this function at “superhuman” speeds despite news stories being transient and disposable while deadlines sizzle like lit fuses. They were missing from this battle and all the music news happening during it. Because, unlike blogging, mainstream media as a wealth-creating entertainment engine costs a lot of money to produce. And artificial intelligence was never meant to enhance or replace human-powered thinking; it’s intended to explore how to do it better. Perhaps, obeserve the effects of technological determinism.
However its outright upheaval of hip-hop journalism will only accelerate the decline of our society and its many cultures, leading to significant implications for democracy in the United States and globally. So, if being able to observe technological determinism and its effects on hip-hop journalism aren’t that serious, neither is human civilization thinking for itself.
