Salty hip-hop heads have been complaining about the declining quality of lyricism in rap music from just about the minute someone wrote something more complex than "Rapper's Delight," but over the past decade those concerns have seemed a bit easier to understand, pretty much ever since Cam'ron made it acceptable to rhyme a word with itself. But understanding those concerns isn't necessarily the same as sharing them—I love Cam'ron, as well as Waka Flocka Flame, whose favored vocal technique is yelling non sequiturs over beats, and Future's "Karate Chop," where his raps are an incomprehensible blur of Auto-Tune and stoned slurring.…
[ Read more ]