Trawling the internet, particularly sites like Tumblr or Reddit where users have free rein to post unedited thoughts and bad photoshop jobs, you’ll come across all kinds of gibberish. Pictures proliferate, meaning forms through memes and apparently unintelligible rap lyrics can take on new life of their own. The internet is an often silly, inane place, full of human mistakes and automated meaninglessness. But, much like language itself, the very fact that the internet is supposed to contain useful things makes it ripe for subversion, to create things without much use, or sense, at all. Well, it was built for sense, really-as a means to communicate, connect, share information. Because the internet was built for nonsense. It suits internet forums, YouTube videos, Twitter and memes: it suits an age where we collectively bring sense to things, when meaning is scant. Traditionalists might call it non-sense and they’re probably right-but not in the dismissive way they think. Rappers like Young Thug or Lil Yachty, the exact lyrics of whose bars are hotly debated on Genius forums, are simply relying more on form than content to affect their listeners, asking the audience to fIll in where they don’t want to defIne. And it’s far from the only art form that’s relied on spouting nonsense-quite literally-to creative ends. In such an ever-evolving genre as rap and hip-hop, language is constantly renewed, referenced and revived. But quite aside from the conversation about its value, the tendency towards obscuring meaning by scrambling language is hardly even new to begin with. It’s not surprising that “mumble rap” faces such stinging criticism claiming the new is deficient in comparison to the old is a line of argument that’s marked discussions about art since as long as we’ve been having them. “I know for a fact that nobody knows what these dudes are saying!” he continues, before launching into a highly auto-tuned flow of ad libs and gibberish over heavy beats accompanied by stock visuals of cash, strippers and fast cars. “These foo’s ain’t spittin’ no type of dope shit but that’s not even the bad part: they’re not even saying words anymore!” he laughs. Called “No Words”, the video begins with a harsh criticism of the delivery of so-called “mumble rappers” like Future or Desiigner whose lack of enunciation makes their lyrics almost unintelligible. In 2015, the rapper Hopsin released a video satirising the trend for newer artists to slur their words to the point of nonsense.
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