10 Facts About Rap That People Don't Talk About Enough

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Occasionally, artists can use a mixtape as a springboard to major label stardom perfectly, establishing an aesthetic and persona that they're able to follow through and expand upon with proper albums. Think of the way Jeezy's Trap Or Die or Drake's So Far Gone became an instant calling card without overshadowing the albums that came later. But increasingly, it feels like the only artists whose albums aren't bested by their mixtapes are the small number of superstars who don't make mixtapes.

Maybach Music Group in particular has been afflicted with that pattern of late, with Meek Mill's debut album losing some of the luster of his DatPiff blockbuster Dreamchasers mixtapes, and Rick Ross's Rich Forever tape feeling like more of an event than its major label companion, God Forgives, I Don't. For artists who are already signed but still have to throw a mixtape out there before the album, it sometimes serves as an advertisement that's better than the product they're hoping to sell.

Rappers can walk around in public with Styrofoam cups and not attract the kind of police attention that a lit joint will get. But just because it's not as much of a legal taboo doesn't mean there's not risk involved. What's shocking about how many of Texas's hip-hop legends have died under circumstances where syrup addiction was a known factor is how young they all were. Pimp C and Big Moe died at the age of 33, and DJ Screw was even younger.

But because it's easily acquired, and is consumed much more easily, and more pleasantly, than a needle in the arm or even smoke in your lungs, it's become frighteningly uncontroversial in the hip-hop community. We still don't know how much sizzurp had to do with Lil Wayne's recent health scares, but hopefully it won't take something really serious happening to a star of his magnitude for hip-hop to get a wake up call.

Deep down, we all know it. Every few years, Punxsutawney Dre pokes his head out of the studio, thinks about finally letting the world hear what he's been working on all this time, sees his shadow, and thinks better of it. Last time that happened, we got closer than ever to an honest release date, with two Top 40 singles. But "Kush" was a rehash of past glories, complete with a fake Nate Dogg hook, and "I Need A Doctor" was a depressing pop crossover with a Skylar Gray hook and Eminem all but taking over the record to beg Dre to put out the album.

The album Dr. Dre would've released in 2011 would've been a crushing, Chinese Democracy-level disappointment. And while you can tell yourself that Kendrick wrote some incredible verses for it, we're better off just getting those on Kendrick's next album. Let Detox live on in our imaginations.

From the late '90s to the mid-2000's, being a rapper in Atlanta was a little like being a rock band in late '60s London: if you were the hottest thing in the city, you were probably also about to take over the world. Year after year, from Outkast to Ludacris to Lil Jon to T.I. to Young Jeezy, whoever ran the A soon enjoyed massive mainstream success. But ever since Gucci Mane fell short of extending his reign over ATL to the rest of the country, the disconnect between popularity in Atlanta and popularity throughout America has continued to widen.

2 Chainz has gotten further than anybody lately, but he's from the previous generation, actually older than T.I. or Jeezy. And his peak moment of mainstream exposure, when he could show up on 2 Broke Girls and the "Gangnam Style" remix, seems to have already passed by. Of the next generation, Future has been the most ubiquitous on urban radio, but he's still got a ways to go to make it up to the A-list.

As 2Pac's vaults were lucratively emptied out in the decade following his death, rappers gradually abandoned the practice that made those recordings possible. Many MCs kept tracking multiple verses every day, sometimes with even greater speed than Pac ever did, but in the Lil Wayne model of spilling them out the public as quickly as they were recorded, on mixtapes, features, and even unsanctioned studio leaks. These days, only a few rappers seem to acknowledge any capacity to edit their output, or hold onto a song for a while—Jay-Z's admission that parts of Magna Carta Holy Grail were a couple years old was met with shock and confusion in some corners, that a song that would've sounded perfectly good in 2011 was kept under wraps until 2013. But there's something to be said about knowing when to let a song sit for a while for reconsideration and revision, and not just the diss tracks you lost your nerve about pulling the trigger on.

The furor a couple years ago over Drake rapping live on Hot 97 while reading lyrics off of his Blackberry exposed a lot of freestyle purists. But more than that, it exposed their naivete. Listen to some of those classic "freestyles" that Biggie or Jay spit at Hot 97 and try to tell yourself those amazing lines came right off the dome. Hell, some of those lyrics ended up on album tracks mere months later, with little or no variation. The truth is, freestyling is its own discipline that only a small percentage of rap's greatest writers excel at. If most great MCs were forced to go completely off the dome, without using any recently composed and memorized bars, they'd probably sound a lot like Lil B, except they wouldn't be spitting "based" freestyles on purpose.

The shift from brick-and-mortar CD stores, the ones that made gangsta rap a major commercial force in the dawn of the SoundScan era two decades ago, to digital sales has had a lot of indirect effects on the music industry. One of those is that certain listeners are more likely than others to get their music on the iTunes store. And whether it's simply those demographic differences, or the fact that they haven't given away most of their music on free mixtapes, there's been a definite shift towards not just the always popular Eminem but also Mac Miller and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (to say nothing of the white R&B singers who've run the charts this year, Justin Timberlake and Robin Thicke). After all the hoopla about French Montana returning Bad Boy to rap glory, Machine Gun Kelly ended up with the label's best-selling hip-hop release of the last couple years.

In 2005, a lot of rap artists released their first million-selling albums: Young Jeezy, The Game, and practically the entire city of Houston. But by then, album sales had already started to crater, with rap getting hit harder than most genres. And for the next few years it would only be long-running established artists moving those kinds of units: Jay-Z, Kanye, 50, T.I., Eminem, the usual suspects. Even 2006's biggest new artists, who have since gotten bigger, Rick Ross and Lupe Fiasco, have never moved a million copies of any one album. It's pretty clear: gold is the new platinum.

Drake ended the drought in 2010. But since then, only three rappers have followed in his footsteps. And when you consider that Nicki's second album actually missed the million mark, that means Drake, Macklemore, and Kendrick are the only leaders of the new school currently coming off of platinum albums. 

Once upon a time, you didn't have to be a superstar to get away with releasing a solo single. Now, not only does every other song feature another artist, but it's usually one of the same handful of artists every time. Not that long ago, the game was ruled by stingy collaborators like 50 Cent and Eminem, who worked primarily with their inner circle of labelmates and only occasionally with outside associates.

But that all changed in the Lil Wayne era, when pretty much every major label artist could get a Lil Wayne verse on pretty much any single, and nearly all of them did (or a T-Pain hook, or more recently, a Chris Brown or Nicki Minaj feature). Not only has this one-size-fits-all A&R approach made radio more homogenous, it's also flattened out the differences between artists, reducing most breaking and mid-level MCs to whatever qualities would work best on a song with Drake.

Major labels aren't the ironclad barrier of entry to a successful rap career that they once were, with cult heroes like Tech N9ne making millions and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis ruling pop radio on an independent label budget. But those were long-building coups, with the artists finding their audience without the help of the RIAA. Drake and Wiz Khalifa built up huge fanbases before signing to their current labels, with many at the time claiming they were making a mistake by not staying independent.

Given the kind of success they wanted, though, they made the right decision. It's hard to imagine Drake having the same chokehold on the rap game without the Cash Money machine helping him corner the radio market. If Wiz had stuck with just Rostrum without an Atlantic Records co-venture like Mac Miller, he'd probably have a respectable career, but probably not a #1 single or a gold album.