What’s his name?

Yes, and it has gotten to the point where it barely even needs conscious top-down effort. It is self-replicating at this point. Everybody knows to be big it’s all about drugs, sex, violence, cold cruelty, contempt, and most importantly wealth and all its signifiers. I am a rapper and even my music is infected with this thinking much of the time. You look at 100 XXL Freshmen class contestants and they all fit the bill with few exceptions. Conscious hip hop is relegated to a subgenre that often focuses on internal, personal consciousness, the whole lib wave of self love and personal growth but never systemic problems. What percentage of rappers actually speak about root hip hop topics, a la poverty, police violence, crime, etc. often are from the perspective that that’s just “how things are” and that it will take Personal Responsibility ™ aka “Black Capitalism” to beat it. I am generalizing here and of course there are many exceptions but it’s the most popular genre with the most focus in the Western mainstream, of course it had to be co-opted and sanitized long before that was allowed.

I will also warn anybody watching that the thread leads to KRS-One, be wary listening to KRS he’s a hotep/hotep-adjacent. Homophobic, sexist, etc. Will have some poison sandwiched between some truth and some good. At least last I checked him out years ago.