Hip-hop caught a bad rap - no pun intended - throughout the late 90s and the early 2000s for being all about cash, cars, and hoes. Music videos were an endless parade of stacked women in skimpy clothing dancing around pools or in hotels (think Chingy's Holiday Inn.. countless Nelly, P. Diddy and Ja Rule videos.. need I say more..) while men with 42 lb necklaces, blinding earrings, sunglasses (inside..?) and occasionally diamond encrusted teeth (grills whaddup) clustered around the camera, mean mugging and throwing money around just for the hell of it. (Did the janitors have to clean that up? I hope they pocketed some of it.) This gave birth to the anti-rap crusades, with endless publications critiquing rap music as misogynist, demeaning, violent, and a celebration of excess and greed. Black critics argued that the genre portrays the African community badly and creates horrific role models for black youth to emulate. White critics, too, argued that the music does nothing for society as a whole but sends the wrong messages and glorifies all the wrong things.
Whether or not you agree with these sentiments is irrelevant now, as those days are long over. The transition arguably came with Toronto's very own Drake, who ushered in the new era with the drop of his 2009 mixtape So Far Gone.
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