Baltimore Rap Scene
There’s something going on with Baltimore Hip Hop that I’m not sure we always get here on the west coast: hardness. The music is hard. There’s no other way to put it. It truly makes you uncomfortable. Not in the way Lil Nas X’s music makes you uncomfortable (shout-out to Nas X, an excellent artist), but really uncomfortable. It opens your eyes to a part of America we like to pretend doesn’t exist.
Vice reported on this back in 2015, but we’re not Vice. So that didn’t count. And you don’t read Vice, you read BBM. And we don’t post giant banners in front of our articles warning you that “This story is over 5 years old.” And maybe we will when we have stories over 5 years old. But as of now, our oldest story is a month old. But rather than ponder the age of the articles on this site, I implore you to check out some Baltimore hip-hop artists if you have yet to do so.
I’m not going to sit here and lie to you: I am not a long-time fan of this city’s music. I literally just figured out that they had such a major hip-hop scene while doing research for the magazine. Turns out, if you go on Google Trends and search hip hop searches, Baltimore, Massachusetts comes up as the most active place in the United States. But, straight up, a lot of what I found was fire. What also stood out to me was how the vibe isn’t like anything we hear on the radio over here in Portland, and I listen almost exclusively to WE. Not that the radio has ever been the greatest source for deep diving in any genre. Baltimore’s scene offers something fresh and different. The talent spans from well-known artists to the ones with barely any YouTube plays.
What’s nice about jumping into Baltimore hip-hop is the feeling that each artist has fully bought into the lifestyle. That’s one thing that hip-hop largely shares with its equal and opposite musical brother: Country. Think about it; these are the two main genres you hear people exclude from their music catalogs. “Oh yeah, I listen to everything. Well, except (country/rap).” Seriously. And then you can almost guess where their politics lie as well. With each of these genres, there is some level of lifestyle buy-in behind them or at least an implication of that. Obviously, you have a lot of people who become famous in either genre who don’t really represent what a lot of the die-hards feel the genre is all about, but that’s my point. A lot of hip-hop and country fans put stock into the kind of person they believe is making the music and where that person is coming from. Much more so than, say, an EDM-fan who is probably there just for the sonic experience. I’ll never forget when I was watching a Cymatics (music production/sample company) interview with Xilent (EDM producer) where the co-founder of Cymatics asked Xilent how he was able to support himself financially while he was coming up as an artist, and Xilent answered (and I’m paraphrasing), “Well, luckily, my parents supported me.” And the co-founder of Cymatics responded, “Yeah, my parents supported me too.” So there we see what it takes to make it in EDM. Of course, did every EDM artist’s parents fully fund their music career? Probably not, but the more you look into them, particularly the ones that got big while young, the harder it is to believe that it’s not a common occurrence within the genre. And, outside of that, I’m sure it’s bled into other genres of music these days. Making it as an artist is incredibly difficult. Really, it always has been, but with the pay structures surrounding streaming music these days, you pretty much need millions of streams every month to make a decent living.
Anyways, if you want to listen to something that feels like it has deeper ties to a community; like the people making the music truly understand what birthed the genre, check out some of these Baltimore rappers. I’m not going to write blurbs about them because, frankly, I just don’t know their music quite well enough yet.
