If you can’t find the emergent rap stars in 2022, you might be looking in the wrong place. A recent Billboard feature about hip-hop’s status as a market leader suggested that a generation of rap stars is aging out and few new ones are filling the void. But scan lists of the most streamed artists of the year and, between the boldface names of artists like Drake, Future, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar, you will find a few whose presence feels less inevitable. The metrics for stardom have always required specific machinery, but that machinery has been altered in the 2020s, thanks in large part to changes in streaming infrastructure. The digital paths we came to recognize in the last decade tended to aim at an eventual level-up: leveraging a base on SoundCloud into radio play, or turning a viral video into a TV spot. For some in this latest generation, that kind of signal boost is beside the point.
To be fair, it is true that hip-hop is facing some critical challenges that have curbed its star power in recent years. Its lyrics have become a favorite tool of the carceral system, both stateside and abroad. An obscene number of young rap stars have been killed by gun violence and opioid abuse — though, importantly, that rise has been commensurate with record deaths in both categories nationwide over the same period, according to The Gun Violence Archive and the CDC, respectively. (As usual, rap is merely reflecting the values of American culture.) Meanwhile, a few of rap’s biggest names have tanked their own careers in public lately. DaBaby talked his way into oblivion. Questions remain about Travis Scott’s culpability in the deaths of concertgoers during the Astroworld festival in 2021. His mentor Kanye West, or Ye, spent months effectively self-identifying as antisemitic, before capping the year with a note of praise for Hitler that seemed to stun even the notorious far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
But beyond these complications, the idea that rap stardom at large is dwindling must come down to the model used to measure it. For most of pop history, the household name has been fashioned by a combination of radio plays and TV appearances, awards show nominations and “it” moments — signifiers that add up to an artist as a cultural force, prominent in ways that can’t be ignored. And by those standards, there are still those whose ascendancy has been presented in familiar terms. Lil Baby, Gunna and Jack Harlow, each riding a comfortable upswing, all scored hit albums and singles this year. Megan Thee Stallion remains an A-lister, her name and music at the center of discourse despite the chaos of her situation. Polo G and Playboi Carti made such dominant showings in the early COVID era, they were able to take 2022 off and still feel unavoidable. 21 Savage, coming off a long break, reaffirmed his status with Drake at his side.
But at the fringes of that more recognizable sphere of celebrity, a new kind of star has been hard at work: the platform-conscious niche star, whose massive fanbase only looks small when compared with total ubiquity. Hip-hop has some precedent for such figures, embodied in those regional successes who operate without much concern for crossing over. And the diminished visibility of many of these niche stars has at least a little to do with their aversion to press, or the press’s aversion to them. But if you believe there’s a meaningful distinction between what is outwardly omnipresent in culture and what is reaching people — between what is promoted and what is actually beloved — the fringe rap star is a living test of this principle, the kind of artist whose success manifests in being actively listened to by 100 people, rather than casually heard by 1,000.
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