Rap Was Supposedly in Crisis in 2025. But at JID’s Brooklyn Show, It Was Thriving.

The timing made it impossible not to think about the wider conversation surrounding the genre. In late October, for the first time in 35 years, there wasn’t a single rap song in the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” the last holdout, slipped off, leaving a chart that looked nothing like the one rap had dominated for decades. Predictably, the think pieces followed. Was this a crisis? A collapse? Proof that hip‑hop’s cultural reign was finally over?

Not everyone sees it that way. Music publicist Sam Hadelman framed the moment as a reset. 

“I don’t mean that this is exactly negative,” he explained to TSBK at the time. “I look at this stuff a lot like economic policy. I don’t see it as a current market indicator. Rather, I’m looking at the developmental talent who are making a lot of headway and bringing themselves to the mainstream a lot quicker than we would have anticipated.”

“This all falls under the bucket of a changing of the guard,” he said. “We missed a generation‑changing moment with Juice WRLD, Lil Peep, Pop Smoke, XXXTentacion. We missed that coronation, and there was this big lapse. The ecosystem had to redevelop itself. So it makes sense that there’s going to be a moment where hip‑hop isn’t dominating, because nothing can work until something new is brought to market.”

Outside the Paramount, the idea that rap was in a redevelopment phase seemed to be on multiple attendees’ minds. Jaden White and John Cunningham arrived early, braving the cold to secure a good spot. Both grew up on rap, and neither seemed particularly shaken by the charts. 

“I guess numerically is the only way it’s falling off,” White said. “But rap is as strong as it has always been. You just gotta really, really be tapped in with the underground and everything. There’s a lot of artists, different genres, different everything. I feel like it’s never going away.”

Cunningham agreed, even while acknowledging a disconnect at the mainstream level. 

“It just sucks that the more popular rap songs or artists, I feel like a lot of them have fallen off,” he said. “But like [White] said, as long as you’re tapped in, if you know the underground, those guys who are starting off, then I feel like you really will find great artists, great songs, at any point during the year.”

Atlanta rapper Young Nudy spent the last few years dropping project after project, focused on music rather than chart positions.

“To tell you the truth, I can’t really say,” he admitted when asked about the numbers conversation. “I built my own little world with this shit. I don’t even pay attention to my own goddamn numbers. I just drop music. Everybody should get to the point where you just do what make you feel good, what’s fun to you.”

Nudy thinks the obsession with metrics has drained some of the joy from the genre. 

“The numbers and streaming and all that shit kind of slowed the fun down with motherfuckers making they music,” he said. “So it kind of good and bad.” 

Looking ahead, his hope is simple. 

“It just need to go back to having fun a little bit. A mixture of everything instead of everything being stuck in one thing.”

During the show, the Paramount slowly transformed into a house party. Signs in the venue saying moshing was forbidden were ignored by largely 20-something crowd. Each set made people jump more aggressively on rap louder than the last.

And his show isn’t an outlier either. Monaleo’s recent stop in Brooklyn was packed wall-to-wall with energy. Kendrick Lamar’s history making tour with SZA was a cultural event, and even if you weren’t in the building for NBA YoungBoy, we all saw the clips. Sold out crowds, deafening call-and-response, and fans hyped every song of the night.

“The world is always a revolving door,” Lihtz, Philadelphia rapper and one of the tour’s openers, said. “Sometimes some things is going in, sometimes some things is going out. But give it time. Everything gonna reset.” 

Lihtz also sees a generational shift. 

“Some of the older guys look like they uninterested in the spotlight as much,” he explained. “They slowing down, not because they have to, but by choice. And I think it’s a new regime.” 

In his view, the next era of rap will be broader, more eclectic. And influenced by Afropop, Latin music, K‑pop, and global scenes that remix hip‑hop’s DNA.

“They calling it pop, but they still using the urban culture that we created and putting their own spin and rendition on it,” Lihtz said. “Maybe the rap that we know may not be the same, but it's still so much identity that's in all these other cultures that still derive and come from where we come from.”

At the end of the night, the idea of a genre in decline was hard to reconcile with the show that had just unfolded. Not because rap needs to dominate charts to justify its existence, but because it continues to do what it has always done when the spotlight shifts with its more creative people regrouping and finding new life in the places where people still care to see it thrive.

“If rap was to die out, that means it’s being forgotten,” White, a fan, said later in the night. “And it’s not getting forgotten anytime soon.” 

“We’re gonna hit a point where the Top 100 gonna be all rap songs again," Cunningham said. "I’m calling it.”