Lyrics don't matter anymore
My comment responding to this post:
Lyrics dont matter anymore.
These kids have grown up with only ever knowing the streaming world and instant access to music. Music is just disposable vibes now, like soma from the book Brave New World. There's no point pondering a song if you have millions of other options to play to get your quick dopamine hit.
A Take Care, To Pimp a Butterfly or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy can only exist in a CD world where there is normalised culture around physical friction and paywalls to listening to and experiencing music physically. Hence why artists needed their albums to be whole listening experience.
Post-WLR / Post-Covid music is about what artist can abstractly paint the best vibe and scene for the listener instantaneously. It's about expression, status, tonality, aesthetics, stimulation and persona. Everything except logic and intelligence, as these sectors of the human experience are outsourced to AI and technology, the human senses are the only thing left to entertain.
Meaning, storytelling and substance like older iterations of hip hop and pop music can't be comprehended by their soma coma nihlism. Gen A can't comprehend chronological information / storytelling without getting cognitive dissonance from a lack of stimulation. Which is fine I guess, just the world we are moving towards.
So Gen A and late Gen Z's "quotables" aren't words or "bars," but rather expressions. When Nine Vicious says "I'm in LA now, I feel like a Laker," it's just a basic throwaway bar to any traditional hip hop artist, but because of the way he expresses it in a old Young Thug way, he characertises the bar like a slithery passionate melodic snake. That expression is the "quotable." Or Yeat's 2021 adlibs "TONKAAAA" "HeeYYEyy" etc. It's the characters these bars inhabit which becomes memorable, not the lyrics themselves.
So I think a better solution for artists who want to re-create that same feeling they had from their fav 2010s< hip hop artists is to translate everything you liked about those artist's albums and distill it into the taste buds of Gen A, cus thats all music is at the end of the day, a spiritual and political language. So if you're not connecting with the new language of the youth what r u doin