Mumble rap
| Mumble rap | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Mid-2010s, United States |
| Typical instruments | |
Mumble rap is a derogatory term used to describe a vague subgenre of hip hop music, originating in the mid-2010s in the United States.
The term was coined by Wiz Khalifa in a June 2016 interview with WQHT, stating, "We call it mumble rap. It ain't no disrespect to the lil homies, they don't want to rap. It's cool for now; it's going to evolve." Artists commonly referred to as "mumble rappers" include Desiigner, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti, and Young Thug.
A perceived lyrical incomprehensibility, or lack of lyricism, has been attributed to "mumble rap", hence its name. This claim has been challenged and largely refuted by critics of the term.
In September 2016, record producer Pete Rock responded to Lil Yachty's claim that he "honestly couldn't name five songs" by Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. by strongly criticizing "mumble rappers" and their fans.
Jasmine Alise, of Vibe magazine, points to 1990s rap groups such as Das Efx and Fu-Schnickens as early proponents of a cartoonish, nonsensical style, indicating that the alleged unintelligibility of "mumble rap" is not unique to recent artists.
Justin Charity, a staff writer at The Ringer, argues that the term "mumble rap" is unnecessarily reductive and does not in fact refer to one specific type of music. He points out that neither Lil Yachty nor Young Thug, two of the artists most often scapegoated in conversations about the subgenre, actually mumbles, which "is the red flag that the term isn’t a useful subcategorization." Charity also notes a lack of aesthetic similarity between artists considered "mumble rappers," indicating that while "mumble rap" can be used to describe an amorphous contemporary phenomenon, it is also used as "a reclaimed pejorative that fails as a musical description, and that gets trickier to define the more rappers it encompasses."
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