It's juvenile, it's nursery rhymes, it’s Fruit by the Foots, and it's personified in the music videos. Like those gummies with rainbows of colors in them all morphed together. So what is this sound? Bubblegum came to mind but it's not like bubble gum pop, it’s ice pops, gummies, gummy worm rap. I’m talking about how when mumble rapping became the thing, we didn't just get mumbling we got these beats that sound like you're in a deep pink video game or a sparkly hello kitty themed insta filter, and I love it. It epitomizes the beat of this song, many Lil Yachty songs, and many songs that are typically deemed “mumble rap.” Yet, what I’m talking about has nothing to do with the rapping. You have Yachty with his bright red braids playing the recorder next to Shelley (DRAM) whose entire face is a smile. Let’s literally look at it with the music video. Let's look at the song Broccoli by Shelley FKA DRAM featuring Lil Yachty. Music like this deserves its own discussion or at least shouldn't be just called “mumble rap.” Walk with me. What interests me in terms of the music of rappers like Lil Yachty is something that is lacking when mumble rap is defined: the beat. Who comes to mind when we hear the term “mumble rap”? How about the aforementioned Lil Yachty. I will add too because it is important that this was a genre that grew out of trap and was made viral largely by SoundCloud, for this reason, the term is often used interchangeably with “SoundCloud rap.”
"Mumble rap" is often used as a derogatory term in reference to a perceived incoherence of the artist's lyrics.” “Mumble rap” puts “little emphasis on lyricism” and that is because the emphasis is on the melody and the sound of the song as a whole. According to the esteemed Wikipedia, “the term was first used to describe rappers whose lyrics were unclear, but the use of the term has expanded to include rappers that generally put little emphasis on lyricism or lyrical quality. In light of this, rigid genre separations feel arbitrary.įor part I of this discourse, I have been ruminating over an aspect of a certain type of music shoved into the microgenre: “mumble rap”. Yet, in this age of information, an age with accessibility for emerging artists to every type of music spanning years, genres, languages, and cultures, the lines separating genres are blurring and fading. It’s hard to get rid of genres because they can be useful in discussion and description. Are they still accurate? Useful? Relevant? Realistic? I don’t particularly like the restriction of categorizing music into specific genres, though I am conditioned to consider them when I think of music. Genres. I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of music genres. So we have a rap mixtape that people were complaining wasn’t a rap mixtape because it didn’t sound like “mumble rap” which some people who call themselves true rap fans say is not real rap? Sounds a little like it's not the music that’s the problem, but rather the boxes we’re trying to shove the music into. It was the song that strayed from the then-current popular trends of the rap genre the least. Low-fi, SoundCloud vibes, with features from the two biggest names in “mumble rap” at the time, Lil Yachty and Young Thug. Those same people looked at the seventh track, Mixtape, and were like, “yes, that's what I was looking for, this is a real rap song.” Looking back I feel that was the reaction because the song was just very of that time.
When Coloring Book, the third mixtape by Chance the Rapper came out in 2016 I was seeing a lot of people criticizing its style or saying it wasn't hard enough.
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