Rap isn't just for the young

Veteran rappers are thriving, releasing acclaimed albums and winning Grammys, showing hip-hop grows with its artists and fans alike

- Kibo Ngowi

On the 2006 released song It’s Okay (One Blood), American rapper The Game raps, “You 38 and you still rapping? Ughhh.” The Compton emcee, born Jayceon Taylor, was 26 at the time and later said that the line was aimed at Tony Yayo of the G-Unit rap collective he once belonged to.

Two decades later he would find himself on the music podcast Drink Champs confronted with the question of how he felt about that line in hindsight having reached the age of 42 while still rapping himself.

“That was too early, that came from a young nigga,” he sheepishly admitted to podcast host N.O.R.E. “When I was 26 and talking about a nigga who is 38 I never thought that day would come.”

We all get humbled by the reality of our own aging at some point, that is if we're lucky enough to live beyond our youth, but this moment reflected more than the humbling of one aging emcee. It reflected how for most of its history rap music had been perceived as a young man’s game. But as the legendary radio DJ Ibrahim Jamil “Ebro” Darden once pointed out, that’s mainly because rap music and the hip-hop culture of which it forms a part is young in itself.

It was only in 2023 that hip-hop celebrated 50 years of existence, having emerged out of the Bronx, New York around 1973. That’s a far cry from, say, jazz or country which have been widely recognised as genres of music since at least the 1920s. It’s no wonder then that hip-hop has been viewed as exclusively a part of youth culture for most of its history. It’s simply because it hadn’t existed for long enough for different generations to grow old with it.