In August 2017, Drake’s record-setting streak of 431 consecutive weeks on the Hot 100 was finally snapped, according to Trevor Anderson at Billboard.
The eight-year streak started with the song “Best I Ever Had,” cementing Drake as a superstar. Drake’s streak also legitimized hip-hop as a dominant music genre. Including Drake, eight of the top 10 longest streaks on the Hot 100 are either a hip-hop artist like Lil Wayne or an artist with major hip-hop influence like Rihanna.
Thanks to artists like Drake, hip-hop’s popularity has surged in recent history, and according to Hugh McIntyre with Forbes, hip-hop has finally dethroned rock ‘n’ roll as America’s favorite music genre. Now more than ever, hip-hop is pop music.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of hip-hop’s popularity, there are pop stations all over America which do not play hip-hop at all. If there is a rapper holding the number one song in America, they will not play it. If a song features a rapper, they will censor their work and even edit them out. Even if the song belongs to the rapper, they will do a remix, strip the song of all of the rapper’s lines and replace it with the featured pop artist who is usually the singer of the chorus. For example, “See You Again” by Wiz Khalifa has been remixed to mainly feature Charlie Puth.
Stations who edit out rappers and hip-hop artists sometime use the tagline “Today’s Best Hits, Without The Rap” which draws controversy. As pointed out by Lauren Nostro at Complex Media, one such station is 94.7 in Washington D.C. In 2013, Complex reported the station justified their actions by saying “rap does not appeal to [our] demographic-women ages 18-49” and “typically, rap music appeals to a large male audience.”
This answer was not sufficient because there is no logic behind the radio station’s decisions. Hip-hop is the most popular music genre today thanks to its ability to appeal to all demographics. Thus, to assume hip-hop is geared towards men more than women is absurd.
The only justification I can deduce is some pop stations hate hip-hop because the negative perception hip-hop has carried since its infancy. Hip-hop has always been seen as “scary black” music performed by “scary black” men.
As Laurel Reinhart with Daily Nexus states, the negative perception of violence, drugs, and misogyny associated with hip-hop, at its core, “is a reflection of the way our society perceives black men.”
Hip-hop still scares the older generations of America, despite its dominant popularity. It is difficult for America to accept hip-hop as the face of American music.
On a certain level, the criticism some hip-hop artists receive is well-deserved. There are some rappers who are extremely controversial and rap about very taboo topics which will not, and should not, be played on the radio. However, there are plenty other rappers and other hip-hop artists who make radio-friendly hits ready for mass consumption.
Like all other music genres, there are wrinkles in hip-hop separating different styles. Chance the Rapper and Childish Gambino are far safer to play on the radio than Eminem and Lil Wayne, because each falls into different sub-genres of hip-hop. Overly simplifying hip-hop as violent, gangster rap strips the nuance away from the beauty of hip-hop.
In the end, radio stations reserve the right to play or not play whatever they wish. No one can force a country station to play hip-hop and vise versa. Unlike rock or country stations, though, a pop station’s niche is not one genre, but it is whatever the American people deem popular. America has spoken: hip-hop is what they want to hear.
The refusal to play any hip-hop by some stations is outright disobeying their listeners. It does not make any business sense or logical sense to block hip-hop from the airwaves, so I am still waiting for a station to justify this practice. For now, though, hip-hop seems to be too “black” for some stations.