The Anniversary
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #179. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Now this.
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“You know that thing online?”
“Have you seen that meme?” I kind of hate that question, because inevitably, the answer is yes. I have seen that meme, and I hate that I’ve seen that meme. I am interminably online and I’ve seen so, so many. So, when I ask you this question, please know that this question hurts my soul. But have you seen this meme?
Recently, this has spoken to me in a specifically personal way as I reached the one-year anniversary of stopping habitually writing about hip hop in this column. When I was writing about five albums every month, I felt on top of things in the hip hop world. I knew whether Travis Scott’s newest track was on point, and I was listening to Fatboi Sharif’s newest underground hit. I was in the zone. But now, I have turned 38, and all hip-hop news feels like that Tweet.
This specifically hit home on my personal discord, where nobody is allowed in and the only thing that it does is feed me r/hiphopheads weekly updates of new releases. And sure enough, I feel left out. Luh Tyler dropped Mr. Skii, Peso Pluma released the new classic ÉXODO and PlayThatBoiZay premiered his first album VIP, and I am very unsure about what 90% of those words are.
To be clear, I’m not an “old man yelling at cloud” here – I’ve just been out of the game for a year. But I’m also amazed at what year can do! It doesn’t feel that long to me that I haven’t been diving into this. I’ve paid enough attention – I wrote a whole column about the Kendrick/Drake beef almost six months ago.
But as soon as I dig in just a little bit, back into the messy, increasingly flooded stream that is contemporary hip hop, the more I realize that I left for a lot of different reasons, only one of which was feeling burnt out by writing.
In fact, I got old. I wasn’t exactly fighting it, but during the 2010s I felt like I could still connect with the youth culture, even as I entered my third decade. I could track the evolution of the form. I could find the new threads that were developing, and I could spend the time analyzing them and enjoying them, even if they weren’t my favorite thing.
But now, I have a new favorite thing, and it’s not caring. To be clear, I’ve spent a lot of my life not caring about things. I have not cared about fashion, reality TV, sports, romance novels. But hip hop? I’ve deeply cared about hip hop for nearly two decades, and I still do. 75% of my record collection is hip-hop and I won’t stop listening to artists I’m already familiar with. I loved Lupe’s Samurai and Vince Staples’s Dark Times and I am hype for that Clips reunion on the horizon. But I’m not sure I can keep up with whatever Cash Cobain is dropping anymore. My things to care about is stretched too thin, like too many skits on a mediocre ’90s “classic.”
To be clear, this is not a value judgement against any of these artists. They might be garbage, but they might be geniuses. You might be listening to the next Rakim, the next artist to revolutionize hip hop, or you might be listening to the next Tom MacDonald, a true garbage person. I just genuinely wouldn’t be able to tell you because, well, I’m out of the game.
It does feel good in a lot of ways. I don’t have to keep up on artists who I honestly don’t like, and I am listening to a lot of older classics, inside of hip hop and out – I’ve been a bit of a Buddy Holly era recently. But it also feels like I’m missing out on something. Someone somewhere is going to come along and be the next artist that will blow my mind, and I’ll be sad when I find them five, ten, fifteen years after the fact.
But what am I, a 38-year-old with a kid and a full-time job to do, listen to every new artist named Toilet Monster or Fuck Gorilla until I find the one that bangs? If one of you craven lunatics who reads my column DMs me and says, “Please for the love of god Noah, listen to The Fuck Crew,” I promise I will. But otherwise, I think at this lint I’m an old dog who ain’t learning new tricks. Instead, I’m going to throw MF DOOM on for another spin and leave the hip hop critique for the next generation.
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Noah Springer is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. You can follow him on Twitter @noahjspringer.
