There is a peculiar flattening that happens when you open Spotify’s “Rap Caviar” playlist full of the same handful of songs, lacquered into algorithmic sheen. With the likes of Don Toliver, Kanye West, J.Cole and Yeat plaguing the algorithm, mainstream rap in 2026 has come to feel predictable and pre-decided: saturated with collaboration and governed by an audience that rewards familiarity over artistic risk. A new, questionable Lil Baby track will somehow gain traction, Travis Scott will have a (terrible) feature on everyone’s albums and Kanye West will be forgiven for any and all outbursts, as though controversy were just another promotional cycle. This is not to say mainstream rap lacks craft, but its conditions of possibility—playlist placement, brand alignment, endless soft surveillance of listener data—have rendered it curiously obsolete.
With the conversation of mainstream rap comes the conversation of the genre in its entirety. A few months ago, for the first time since 1990, no rap songs were in the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. And of course, questions arose: Has rap fallen off? Did it peak in 2016, the nostalgia-laden year of maximal invention? Well, I have come, as the patron saint of rap fans, to say otherwise. The question of rap and its “fall-off” feels like a symptom of algorithmic fatigue mistaken for a cultural decline. Its most vital energies have migrated elsewhere: the “underground” rap scene. A loose, and volatile, constellation has emerged—Osamason with his incessant homage, Che with blown-out 808s, Nettspend with his Virginian roots and fakemink: London’s savior. The underground rap scene is, dare I say, at its peak.
What distinguishes these artists from the mainstream is not simply alleged obscurity, but an attitude towards form or, in the mainstream’s case, form as content. To liken form to style or content, would be reductive; form is, perhaps, a praxis defined by decisions of rhythm, structure, inclusion, and the like. In the upper tiers of rap, form has hardened into expectation. A Drake song is recognizable before it is even memorable, its architecture preceding its feeling. The listener’s satisfaction seemingly lies in recognition, hearing Drake “function” as he should. Hence, form—a vessel for artistic expression—has now been usurped by algorithm and comfortability. Mainstream rap is now content. But in the underground, form is inherently unsettled. If the algorithm has created a hegemonic ideal of rap, the underground subverts it through intense experimentation with flow, lyrics, beat and visuals.
Moreover, it is important to consider what constitutes true mainstream dominance. In 2025, despite having zero solo entries on Billboard’s top 20, NBA Youngboy had one of the most successful tours across the United States. Youngboy has seemingly evaded the traditional mainstream, ruled by charts and algorithms, for something instead rooted in audience and a notably huge cult following. This suggests that the mainstream is less a stable category than a contested one. There is something to be said about the structural disobedience that lies within the genre. Rap, perhaps more than any genre, was never designed for ease; this is why the mainstream can never fully domesticate rap, only temporarily stage-manage it. When one hears mainstream rap, what we are hearing is rap under constraint, but, historically, the genre resists such. The underground recalls this resistance. There is something radical about not only the distortion and looseness of the underground, but the instability and interruption of the genre.
But one must consider how these subversions then circulate from small, knowing audiences to industry gatekeepers, and finally to a mass consumer audience. The underground sound of 2016 has flooded into today’s mainstream; subversion has become “influence.” But is it really influenced if a content-geared industry absorbs and then flattens the genre? Take Yeat, for example, a burgeoning rapper in 2021’s underground that has seemingly made it into the mainstream—his recent album, “ADL”? Flop. The mainstream is a commercialized regurgitation of all the authenticity that the underground has to offer.
Yet it is important to consider the ways in which the underground has failed to measure up. Nettspend, a white 19-year-old teenager from Virginia, rapping about Percocets and Miu Miu? What a dichotomy. There is something to be said about how Nettspend was able to debut on Billboard 200 at number 39, while his peers have not been afforded the same success. Or take fakemink, Algerian-Indian self-proclaimed savior of London and artist, rather than rapper. There is something to be said about how fakemink sees his art and output as extricable from the rap genre and label, as if to say that rap is not art. The question of performance, appropriation and who is permitted to circulate within a scene—even if they disavow it—is one highly pertinent to the rap genre.
So the story is not one of decline, but perhaps rap’s future is. If the mainstream feels exhausted, the underground, for now, offers a counterpoint. It is not pure nor coherent, but it evades capture. It evades “Rap Caviar.”