If you haven’t noticed thug rappers have been on the decline since 2003 since 50 Cent saturated the gangster rap genre, ultimately turning off many rap fans. This change in public opinion, if you will, opened the flood gates for a new genre of rap, we’ll call suburban rap. This new genre, spear headed of course by Kanye West, Pharrell, and later Lupe Fiasco, catered directly to suburban kids. Now before we go any further let’s take a second to categorize the typical suburban kid in 2008, which is radically different from the “suburban white kid” hip hop was so against in the 80s and 90s.

Suburban kids today are not just white, they are all colors. They usually don’t come from wealthy families, but are usually low to middle class. They have friends of all races and religions and in contrast to the suburban kids of the 90’s, they listen to more than one genre of music. Remember in the 90s if you were black and listened to anything but rap you were a certified weirdo. Now with the Ipod and internet making all music more accessible having an eclectic taste in music has become uber cool. Now what does any of this have to do with the success of Kanye?

The Message Board Theory
I haven’t bounced this theory of anyone, so it may sound a little crazy, but I’ve always thought Kanye’s success is a direct product of someone whose spent any amount of time on a popular hip hop message board. You see the hip hop message board today is like the barber shop of yesterday, except on a much, much, much larger scale. It’s simply a place to trade ideas and of course illegal music, which if your barbershop is like mine, the bootleggers are in full effect there too. But I think anyone with half a brain whose a rapper, can observe what’s hot and what’s not and develop a style that will speak to those dissatisfied with the current state of hip hop. This is in fact, I believe what happened with Kanye.

Now I’m not saying he was logging on to Okayplayer in the late 90’s-early 2000’s trying to develop a style, but its a good probability he was doing the message board thing before hitting it big. We can even make the argument that during that time period known as the “bling” period, there was a growing amount of suburban kids who were growing tired of the materialism in rap and would vent their frustrations on their favorite hip hop message board. Now it wouldn’t take a genius to notice this emerging market and many suburban rappers via myspace sprang up to take advantage of this void. Fortunately for us, only really Kanye had the right mix of suburban and street cred (not like that street cred) to actually sell the tastemakers. But wait did I just say that?

Here’s the thing about message boards, they are usually frequented by suburban kids, who are either finishing high school or in college. Since if you were really ghetto you wouldn’t have internet or be going to college in the first place right? So this would also mean that the suburban kids have become the new tastemakers and not the ghetto children. And this in effect is what has happened to hip hop culture. I’m not saying its a bad thing, cause I can’t stand most of these thug rappers or these backpackin’ nerd rappers for that matter. But the point is any struggling rapper could learn a few things by visiting a message board.

[sidebar: What do I think would be the next style in hip hop? Wouldn’t you like to know.]