The current US Top 30 has no songs that could be officially described as rap or hip-hop – for the first time since 1990.
That’s 35 years ago, when George Bush the first was in the White House, when Nelson Mandela had only just been released from jail and Taylor Swift was a one-year-old infant.
Talking of whom, part of the reason hip-hop has been sidelined is the presence of a whopping 10 tracks from The Life Of A Showgirl in the US chart - unlike the UK, there are no restrictions on how many album tracks can be registered on the Billboard countdown.
However, Megan Thee Stallion’s Lover Girl is a new entry at Number 38, and further down the chart, there is Tyler The Creator’s Sugar On My Tongue and YoungBoy Never Broke Again with What You Is.
Part of the reason for the absence of hip-hop is that Luther, a 2024 collab between Kendrick Lamar and SZA, which has so far spent 46 weeks on the chart, was removed by Billboard last week under a new rule.
This says that tracks that drop below Number 25 after their 26th week on the chart are to be cleared out. Presumably, this is an attempt to unclog the chart from long-running hits that hang around for months or even years, preventing newer songs/ artists from reaching the Hot 100.
Whether the absence of hip-hop from the Top 30 for the first time in 35 years is significant remains to be seen. Partly, it’s due to the fact that there hasn’t been an album release by an A-list rap artist since Drake’s Some Sexy Songs 4 U in February. But there has also been the presence of a number of long-running mainstream hits, such as Alex Warren’s Ordinary or Benson Boone’s Mystical Magical – something that Billboard’s rule change is intended to deal with.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned Drake is threatening to drop his next album, Iceman, sometime in late 2025. The absence of hip-hop from Billboard will surely only be a temporary one.
