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>I understand how an artist can fall behind the times or lose
>their creative juice, but how do people become bad rappers.
>Take Nas for example, he will never duplicate his 90s form, in
>terms if creativity and vitality, but he's still a competent
>(if boring) rapper. Now look at Common; the nigga is
>objectively terrible...so much so, that it's hard to convinve
>people who aren't familiar with his early material that he was
>a ever a good rapper.
In general, rappers rap less now on a per song basis. There's more pausing, stopping, adlibbing, etc. And Listening back, Common was almost always a little abnormal with the pausing and pacing of some of his stuff. It is just a matter of what he pauses before or after now. The stuff he said before at least felt more powerful/profound back then. And he's always had corny/funny lines that he had to know were corny when he was spitting them.
Part of that is on us...expectations, boredom, bias, having more songs on our ears than before when we heard the older stuff, and nostalgic miscalculations do a lot to ruin new music. And even with huge hard drives, clouds, and high-capacity portable music, our minds can only hold onto so much new material. And yes...if a rap cat is only allowed so much space to expand sonically and/or subject-wise, he's gonna get stuck trying to basically remake his old songs and still give off the impression of energy, excitement, exploration, and enigma...that's one hell of a creative challenge.
That's at least partially why cats who have more room to make different types of music about some different subject generally last longer with more love. Otherwise, you get boxed in. And if your box gets smaller, you're stuck being the 40-year old street rapper, mob boss/gangster, good guy, sucker mc defeater, weed rapper, or whatever people decide your role is in their libraries. You see/hear cats fighting the box all the time while still trying to benefit from the fans being in the box gave them. Jayz is a master of trying to tell you where he's at and how you're lame if you don't roll with whatever lane he's in for a song, album, or even a verse. Snoop just does whatever he wants and he keeps it simple enough for you to get when he's cool snoop, west coast gangster crip snoop, macking snoop, by the way I'm married with old ass kids y'all snoop, goofing off in the studio snoop, Jheri curl r&b memorial snoop, or reflective snoop. Good thing he quickly dropped rasta snoop.
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