Just because a rapper isn’t as lyrical as you’d want them to be doesn’t mean they’re mumbling. When chatting with HipHopDX, Monch recalled, “As I was coming up, I remember we had cats yelling at Organized Konfusion, ‘You’re the reason sh*t is f**ked up now! Hip-hop used to be fun with the hippity hop and the ‘Ho! Wave your hands in the sky.’ Why y’all put so many words in the bars?”ĭamn, can the new guys do anything right? But then sometimes I’m not in the mood for Lil’ Yachty.”Įven well-respected emcees like Pharoahe Monch were not exempt from this kind of scrutiny, only it was for the exact opposite reason. I’m not trying to hear the triple entendres. “I don’t wanna hear multiple cadence flows if I’m just smacked in the club. “There’s a time and place for everything,” he said. His partner Desus agrees that if you can walk and chew gum at the same time, you can find a place in your playlist for both conscious and turnt styles of rap. That’s right, the same man partly responsible for Andre 3000’s success-a rapper who is widely considered a Top Five emcee-also had a hand in Future’s come up. The Atlanta-based collective cultivated the young autotune-loving protegee from the same studio that produced Outkast, Goodie Mob, and Organized Noize. If you’re not familiar with Rico by name, you’ll definitely recognize his crew: The Dungeon Family. So all these new age mumble rappers are doing, whether they know it or not, is borrowing from their hip-hop forefathers.Īnd honestly, can we really blame mumble rappers if the previous generation gave them the blueprint? Future has his cousin Rico Wade to thank for the fact that you even know his name. But either way, it points to the old adage that there’s nothing new under the sun. Make no mistake, rapping at this speed while staying in the pocket is no easy feat.

Very few of these lyrics are recognizable in the English lexicon, yet it worked. Take the former’s popular breakout single, “True Fushnick.” They actually dedicated whole bars to lines like, “The super the cola the fraja the listic expialadope Chip/When the mic is gripped in ridobidobip bip da be bong de dang, bo!” Still not convinced? Take a closer look at their otherworldly lyrics on Genius. The boom-bap instrumentals they used are worlds apart from the synthesized and irresistibly catchy trap beats of today, but it cannot be denied that those cats were literally mumbling on their songs. Ask real hip-hop heads about the rhymes of Fu-Schnickens and Das Efx. Ironically, mumble rap’s earliest origins can be traced back to hip-hop’s golden age of the 90s. Is Mumble Rap Really A New Phenomenon? History Would Suggest Not Let’s really delve into this mumble rap phenomenon and consider what’s at the core of rap’s most hated, yet undeniable, subgenre. And just because a rapper is a lyrical beast or superconscious doesn’t mean they don’t, at times, mumble (Busta Rhymes and Eminem, anyone?). But here’s an unpopular opinion: Just because a rapper isn’t as lyrical as you’d want them to be doesn’t mean they’re mumbling. When you piece it all together, it seems everyone has drawn a hard line on what qualifies as mumble rap. When I listened back to it the next day, I was like man, what the f**k is this? But I loved it.

“I remember being so f**kin’ high on this song, I couldn’t even open my mouth. In a conversation with Hot 97’s Peter Rosenberg for Complex, the Atlanta rapper recalls the night he made the track… sort of.

But the mumble rap conversation seems to always come back to Future and one song in particular: his 2011 trap banger “Tony Montana,” produced by Will-A-Fool. Some think the era’s Godfather is Gucci Mane, while others have even thrown Chief Keef’s name into the mix. There are several theories floating around about who actually created mumble rap.

Who are some mumble rappers