The Western Canon

In a frenetic hip-hop scene, West Coast rap harks back to its traditions.

- Carrie Battan

To be a hip-hop fan in 2018 is to be overwhelmed by change, particularly when it comes to its restless young talent. Just when you think you have a grasp on an artist like A-Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, a Queens native reshaping New York hip-hop, he suddenly pivots to a global-dance-pop style. Acclimate yourself to the barking antagonism of Tekashi 6ix9ine, a rainbow-haired instigator, and he suddenly embraces R. & B. Classify someone like Tyler, the Creator, as a relic of the petulant shock-rap era that his group, Odd Future, defined, and he unexpectedly matures into a clear-eyed and subtle stylist. Even the listening format is erratic: the genre now comes in epic twenty-five-song mixtapes, or in albums that barely break the twenty-minute mark. It is difficult to name another art form in recent history that has become so culturally dominant while being so thoroughly deconstructed, so fragmented and open to reinvention. It’s great fun, if you can get your bearings.

Some respite from this pace can be found on the West Coast, where tradition has a stronghold. In the wake of Kendrick Lamar, the lyrical sage and Compton native, who has become California’s biggest hip-hop artist since the nineteen-nineties, both Los Angeles and the Bay Area have produced a stream of invigorating young rap stars who keep their antennae tuned to the past as well as to the present.