Recency Bias
Hey,
This past weekend was a great one. I found some new music that I enjoy, I got a farmer’s tan, and even though Atlanta United and the Atlanta Hawks #Atlanta’d I still enjoyed myself for both games. Regardless, the highlight of this past weekend was overwhelmingly the Verzuz battle between Bow Wow and Soulja Boy.
Bow Wow flexed his child rap muscles to perform all of the various remixes and guest verses he had amassed throughout his career. Soulja Boy rebutted this by performing all of the classics he made in FruityLoops before it was rebranded. But the main focus of the battle was Soulja Boy’s claims that all of Bow Wow’s songs he chose to perform were old. That’s not to say that Soulja Boy’s songs weren’t old as well, but that’s what he chose to focus on. Other than his new TikTok single “She Make It Clap”, every song was released before Donald Trump became a politician, but I digress.
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Maybe it was Lil Romeo’s appearance, or maybe it was the one shot of Ciroc that Soulja Boy did, but Big Soulja couldn’t get over the fact that somehow Bow Wow’s attempt at a battle was discredited because he was performing music from the early 2000’s. The irony is that every single artist invited to perform at a Verzuz is undoubtedly going to perform “older” material, but that’s neither here nor there. Unfortunately, many hip hop fans feel the same way that Soulja Boy does. Compared to other genres, hip hop is notoriously bad at falling victim to recency bias and having an obsession with devaluing music that’s not current. We demand all of our favorite artists to keep dropping new stuff which doesn’t allow hip hop artists to rest on their laurels, but it also tends to lead to rushed projects and surprise rollouts.
We live in an era where we’re constantly clamoring for a new Kendrick Lamar album despite all of the timeless content he’s provided so far. We pressure veterans like Nas and Jay-Z to continually come out of retirement and provide us with new music. And we discard hip hop pioneers as if they’re food products with expiration dates on them. So while U2, The Rolling Stones, Guns N’ Roses and Metallica are able to still tour and make huge sums of money on the road, we’ve relegated artists such as Master P, Pastor Troy and Three 6 Mafia to token guest appearances and documentaries about the past. Sadly in hip hop, you either die a legend while your fame and notoriety are at their highest, or you live long enough to transition into family-friendly sitcoms and films.
And we have social media to thank for all of this.
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