Rap Vanished From the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 40. Does That Matter?

For the first time in 35 years, there isn’t a single rap song in the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. The final holdout, Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s soulful hit “Luther," fell off the chart last week, leaving hip-hop completely absent from the ranking’s upper tier. The last time this happened was in February 1990.

“Cool fuck the charts,” wrote music critic Dylan Green on X, summing up one corner of the internet’s main responses. Others were less zen.

“This is what happens when hip-hop journalists started praising everyone with a mic instead of protecting the craft,” one user wrote. “They helped usher in people with no real talent, no respect for the art. Just clout and convenience. The downfall isn’t a surprise.”

“There’s so many great rappers rn that get overlooked in exchange for a lot of the gimmicky bullshit these agencies and labels are peddling—none of that shit is having motion and now we’re here," another added.

Some fans blamed the fallout from last year’s Drake vs.Kendrick feud, arguing that the beef fractured the rap community that was used to collaboration and spinning hits out of them.

“That stupid beef happened at the worst time. Nobody works with each other anymore, everyone picks sides… this is where we are now,” wrote @OGJOHNNY5. “Y’all fell for the biggest scam in history.”

No rap songs appear in the top 40 on the Hot 100 for the first time since February 1990.

Ending a streak of 35 years, eight months and three weeks (week of October 25, 2025). pic.twitter.com/ePVLyHFZlC
— chart data (@chartdata) October 29, 2025

But not everyone is panicking. Sam Hadelman, a music publicist, sees the moment as a reset that he’d be comfortable happening for about a year.

“I don't mean that this is exactly negative,” he says. “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 a lot of the developmental talent who are making a lot of headway and bringing themselves to the mainstream a lot quicker than we would have anticipated.”

Hadelman pointed to the rise of younger artists like OsamaSon, who he works with, Nettspend, and 2hollis, as evidence of hip-hop’s development period.

“I think you’re seeing a lot of people hunkering down and being smart—incubating their audiences to bring it to market," he says. "Think of it almost like a mom-and-pop shop. These newer acts are really successful mom-and-pop shops, and we’re going to see a moment where they really break through in the market extremely soon.”

Rap’s chart footprint has been slowly but surely shrinking for quite some time. Hip-hop’s share of U.S. music consumption peaked around 30 percent in 2020. By 2023, it slipped to just over 25 percent, and it sits at roughly 24 percent so far in 2025, according to Billboard.

This also isn’t hip-hop’s first existential crisis. In 2023, headlines warned that no rap song had reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 for nearly a year, a streak eventually broken by Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red," the lead single from her album Scarlet.

The conversation has surfaced again in the absence of rap songs on the high end of the chart, one of the biggest measures of mainstream music’s success. Instead, Taylor Swift and the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack own the top spots.

“But this all falls under the bucket of changing of the guard,” Hadelman says. "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.”

For now, all we can do is wait.

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