Bow Wow Is Tired of ‘Trash Ass Music’ Ruining Hip-Hop

There’s been a lot of talk about how no hip-hop album or song has hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 or Hot 100 chart this year. Music experts have weighed in with multiple reasons why the genre hasn’t dominated the way it normally does. However, now we’re finally getting the opinion we’ve all been waiting for: Bow Wow. During a red carpet interview at Sunday’s BET Awards 2023, the “Bow Wow (That’s My Name)” artist blamed the lack of chart-topping hip-hop on “niggas putting out trash ass music.”

“Serious—everything sound alike, everything repetitive, same tempo—it’s just roll out the bed, everybody can do that. It wasn’t like that,” he said. “And now we finally getting to a point to where I feel like now it’s about to shift back into the real shit.”

Normally, this is where I would get off some jokes about Bow Wow because those are always fun. However, this time, he’s not wrong. The BET Awards featured an epic tribute to hip-hop, with artists from every generation, genre and region showcased. Something that became apparent throughout the show was how the newer acts didn’t quite have the same stage presence as the OGs. Some of the new music felt disposable compared to the classics we still love. In 50 years, when we’re celebrating Hip-Hop 100, will all the “Yung Spaceships” and “Lil Grilled Cheeses” of this era be remembered? It doesn’t feel like they have that kind of staying power.

“You really gotta have talent, you really gotta go,” Bow Wow said. “I think people are starting to get tired of it now, that’s why you don’t see nothing charting. Ain’t nobody doing nothing different. So it’s time to shake the game up and get it back to what it need to get back to. I ain’t heard nothing that I say, ‘I’mma hear this 30 years from now.’”

He went on to add that the artists he thinks will be around for years to come are “Drake, Kendrick [Lamar], and, I would say, [J.] Cole.”

With Drake recently teasing new music, it’s likely that we’ll get a hip-hop No. 1 sooner rather than later, but the genre as a whole definitely needs to spend more time on artistry and lyrics, and less on building brands and being social media influencers.