To understand mumble rap I think it’s useful to consider the thoughts of cultural theorist Paul Virilio. They in turn saturate social media in an attempt to raise social status, a process that is itself highly disposable, and filled with bite-sized snippets of communication in the form of emojis and text abbreviations.

However, records like Funkmaster Wizard Wiz’s “Crack It Up” and Schoolly D’s “ P.S.K.- What Does It Mean?” serve as narrative driven ethnographic and autoethnographic studies, effectively, they are social commentaries based on real events, people and experiences.īrother D with one of the first socially aware hip-hop songs.īut what if the current cultural context is informing the production of mumble rap? In the contemporary western world daily life is fuelled by widespread consumption – of both products and images. These formative styles of gangsta rap might appear to celebrate drug dealing, pimping, gangs and the materialism of money, cars and jewellery. This context provides a narrative framework much reminiscent of earlier gangsta rap records popularised in the late 1980s by Eazy-E and his crew NWA, yet pioneered in the early part of that decade by artists such as Schoolly D, Funkmaster Wizard Wiz and Ice-T. Trap refers to the creating and selling of crack-cocaine, the “trap” being the dwelling within which it is manufactured, sold and smoked. But lyrically it is quite different to the semantics and linguistics of Southern pioneering trap artists like Outkast, Cool Breeze and Ghetto Mafia who developed their style in the mid-1990s.

I’m a lil tired of people taking this culture for a joke.īut what really is the problem with mumble rap?Īs a derivative of “Trap” (an umbrella term for hard Atlanta street rap), mumble is largely linked to the Atlanta scene. These comments really fuelled anger in the nation, and following some fiery exchanges, Pete Rock aimed a missive at Lil Yachty, his assumed alter ego Lil Boat and Young Dolph:

Mumble rappers list