Stereogum

There Are No Rap Songs In The Top 40 For The First Time In 35 Years

Sounding Board

October 30, 2025 11:03 AM By Tom Breihan

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Yesterday, Billboard deputy editor and Stereogum buddy Andrew Unterberger published a piece with some confusing implications: On last week’s Billboard Hot 100, there were no rap songs in the top 40. The same holds true for this week’s chart. It has been a very, very long since since we saw a Billboard top 40 with zero rap songs — 35 years, in fact. The last time that happened was the week of Feb. 2, 1990, when Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend” was sitting at #41, on its way to peaking at #9. This was the early crossover era, seven months before Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” became the first rap song ever to top the Hot 100. Up until very recently, rap has been a dominant force on the pop charts. But for the past two weeks, it’s been nowhere near the top. That’s weird. What does it mean?

As Unterberger points out, this is the indirect result of a recent Billboard rule change. A few weeks ago, Billboard instituted a new rule that moves hits into the “recurrent” category more often. This was a necessary step to remove the songs that never went away from the chart’s upper reaches, the situation that allowed new-jack radio staples like Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” to take up real estate for upwards of a year. But one of the songs that was cleared off Hot 100 was Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s previous chart-topper “Luther.” This allowed other songs to rush in and full those chart spots. And right now, those new songs are… not rap.

On this week’s Hot 100, you will find zero rappers in the top 40. There are plenty of rappers in the Hot 100, but to find them, you’ll have to go all the way down to #43, where NBA YoungBoy’s “Shot Callin” currently sits. There’s obviously a lot of competition for top-40 spots this week. After three weeks, all 12 songs from Taylor Swift’s The Life Of A Showgirl are still in the top 40. Seven songs from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack are up there, too, so that’s pretty much half of the territory currently occupied. But that raises more questions. Why is rap music currently unable to produce its own Taylor Swift or KPop Demon Hunters?

I’ve been looking at online reactions to Andrew’s piece, and most of them fall along predictable lines. Some people think that rap is dead. Some think that last year’s Drake/Kendrick Lamar beef was an industry-created ploy to hasten rap’s commercial decline, that Drake in particular is a victim in all of this. Some dismiss it as a cyclical deviation, a trivial blip that’ll quickly fade. Some think it’s a snapshot of Trump’s America. All of those things are kind of true — all except Drake being a victim, anyway — but none of them really spells out what’s happening here.

For one thing, rap superstars are harder to come by. In a lot of the recent moments that rap has been dominant, Drake has had a lot to do with that. Drake has continued to rack up hits after the Kendrick Lamar beef, but he hasn’t been releasing music as quickly as he once did, and his star certainly seems dimmed. These days, it looks like he’s more interested in being a streamer than a hitmaker. Kendrick, the clear victor in that battle, simply doesn’t release new music that often. When either of those guys do put out more music, it’s practically guaranteed to make a chart impact. But both of those guys are aging millennial superstars, getting into their late thirties. (They’re both older than 36-year-old Taylor Swift.) Thus far, no young superstar has been able to play the same guaranteed-hitmaker role.

Again, there are reasons for that. Plenty of people who were on track to become rap superstars are now dead. Others are in jail. (NBA YoungBoy, the man with the current highest-charting rap single, was one of those cases before he got a Trump pardon earlier this year.) Some, like Young Thug, are not in jail, but their experience with the criminal justice system has affected both their music and their persona in heavy ways. These are problems! In lots of ways, the music industry has been failing to develop young rap stars as artists, letting the work of virality carry them instead. That means that rappers are less likely to make craven pop-crossover attempts, which is probably a good thing. But it might also be helpful if these guys were more invested in keeping rappers out of trouble. It’s not some record-label boss’ fault that Lil Durk is currently implicated in a murder plot, for instance, but someone, at some point, should’ve probably discouraged that kind of thing a little more persuasively.

It’s also true that the Hot 100 depends partly on radio play, and non-Black radio stations just don’t play rap music very often. That’s not a Trump thing. That’s been happening. Maybe it’s happening more now, though. If you look at this week’s top 40, you won’t even see the once-standard pop song with a rap feature. That was starting to happen back in 1990, the last time there was no rap in the top 40, but nobody employs the tactic anymore. The phrase “Sombr featuring Ludacris” does not appear on this week’s Hot 100, or anywhere else for that matter.

The change isn’t unique to the Hot 100, either. Anecdotally, I’ve been noticing a lot fewer rappers getting booked at big pan-genre festivals like Coachella. The Apple Music chart, which has historically been way more oriented toward rap than the Spotify one, doesn’t have any rap songs above #8 right now. (That’s where you’ll find NBA YoungBoy’s “Shot Callin” again.)

Some of those shifts are probably happening within the genre itself. Right now, plenty of the musicians on rap’s bleeding edge are making music that’s absolutely not built for mass-market acceptance. Playboi Carti has had some genuine pop-chart success in the past few years, but his skitter-jibber rage-rap descendants have not. The mainstream is not particularly eager to embrace experimental weirdos like Nettspend or 2hollis or Bladee, and if those guys do start crossing over, who’s to say that their music will still be recognizable as rap? Those prospects that I just mentioned are all white guys, too. That’s another factor.

The fact is that rap music is still all over the top 40; it’s just not being made by rappers. People rap on those KPop Demon Hunters songs. Taylor Swift still sometimes sings over trap beats. So does Morgan Wallen. Justin Bieber’s “Yukon,” currently the #36 song in America, is lyrically made up of rap-style flexes; it’s just that they’re being sung by a pop star. There’s plenty of rap-adjacent R&B in the current top 40 — Leon Thomas, Kehlani, Chris Brown and Bryson Tiller, Ravyn Lenae, Mariah The Scientist. Joji’s “Pixelated Kisses,” now at #38, even has a blown-out Playboi Carti type beat. If the rest of pop music is just steadily absorbing rap’s sonic innovations, isn’t that just an updated form of colonialism?

If you look just outside the top 40, you’ll find plenty of examples of rappers answering the question of how to cross over. NBA YoungBoy’s “Shot Callin,” an energetic and immediate burst of melodic hardness, is one such answer. Another is BigXThaPlug and Ella Langley’s country-rap crossover ballad “Hell At Night,” now at #50, and that one is arguably more country than rap. Look deeper and you’ll find Tyler, The Creator’s retro electro-funk jam “Sugar On My Tongue” (#51), Doja Cat’s disco-pop-plus-rapping “Jealous Type” (#53) and Cardi B and Kehlani’s rap&B love song “Safe” (#57). Doja and Cardi are both crossover pop stars, artists with multiple #1 hits, who released recent albums that didn’t really connect on a pop-chart level. It happens.

Gunna, Metro Boomin, G Herbo, and Loe Shimmy all have songs on this week’s Hot 100. So does Kid Cudi, whose pretty-terrible 2008 mixtape track “Maui Wowie” is currently enjoying the same kind of random-ass TikTok revival that’s led to Radiohead’s “Let Down” and Rihanna’s “Breaking Dishes” appearing in the lower rungs of this week’s Hot 100. It’s just that none of those songs, apparently, is currently as popular as Tame Impala’s “Dracula.” That’s some weird shit.

More than any genre in the history of American popular music, rap music became a dominant commercial force by retaining its identity as predominantly Black music. White people have made tons of rap music, often quite successfully, but we’ve never become the primary force. For multiple generations, rap has functioned as an engine of artistic expression and economic mobility for people who don’t often get to have either of those things. If that’s fading away, that’s cause for concern, especially if the stuff that is popular draws on rap’s sonic language.

But then again, maybe what’s fading away is just the viability of Drake’s hard-drive data-dumps. Right now, rap isn’t even just one world; it’s a series of different overlapping worlds. Rap has a ton of different thriving undergrounds, and those undergrounds don’t necessarily have to serve as farm teams for Hot 100 acceptance. My 13-year-old son still refuses to listen to anything except rap in the car, and his selection makes no sense to me. It goes MF DOOM into Lil Tecca into “Ten Crack Commandments” into Lil Uzi Vert. I think that’s great. Middle-aged men like me got to enjoy the Clipse reunion album this year, and we’re about to get new records from Danny Brown and Armand Hammer. If this music matters to you, then it matters. If the music doesn’t translate into crossover top-40 hits, maybe that’s somebody else’s problem.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791715&forum_id=2.#49388331)

chatgpt says 21% of niggas have migration background but maybe its higher now and anyway, lots of nigga youth get killed off and shit, niggas at the higher levels like the red lobster CEO are migrants

basically nigga americans will get displaced by migration, its 180 they literally voted for it

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791715&forum_id=2.#49388373)