There's too many pockets to have a defined leader in rap these days. Los Angeles has YG as the obvious leader of the commercial scene, and the alternative scene has Kendrick, but their goals are so rampantly different. YG honed his sound in and developed a style after being influenced by his generations icons... 50, Gucci, Soulja, Wayne, etc. Whereas Kendrick makes songs directly in the style of other people "This is my I Am Trying To Be Andre 3000 Song" etc. The Bay, as per usual, is a highly populated and talented and ignored scene of real talent.
Atlanta is currently undergoing the Futuristic movement, where a lot of the acts blowing up like Rich Kidz, Thug, Future, and others have been rapping for almost a decade now. It's been a regional sub-current beneath the "Crunk" generation who held the mainstream recognition and rarely allowed the others to come up alongside them.
Chicago is torn because Keef obviously was the biggest thing to happen to their scene ever and remains such, but there's all the regional subtext of neighborhoods, stylistic intention, 'lyricism', 'authenticity'. Chance is probably the other biggest rapper in Chicago technically, but I can't take him too serious because he's SOOOO indebted to Kendrick and his music suggests he's going to go further and further out of making rap for the genre and making rap for a commercial audience.
And then you get into the fact that majors are literally signing up bad clones left and right. Take Dej Loaf for example; Noz on a podcast offered that she used to be your generic post-Curren$y 'college rapper', the same way OG Maco used to make similar music. I haven't heard the evidence, I don't need to. But she's been instantly signed off the buzz of one hit, whereas there are tons of rappers in the Detroit area who can't get the attention she gets, like Icewear Vezzo or Doughboyz Cashout. How much of it is a certain amount of the labels being in adamant denial of an artist's progress in a region?
But of course, the flipside is that the artists aren't necessarily progressing just because they get buzz and regional success. Iamsu finally dropped an album, but his rapping never evolved past those initial Drake meets Wiz attempts, and his production style has fallen apart. But then again, he also hitched his star to Sage The Gemini, who's a massive national success with his hit singles, even though nobody in the critical audience gives him HALF the rapt attention of these Dej/Maco types.
And the other aspect of that is that in this decade, the rap audience has become so contemptuous of the genre its supposed to like. They love their rappers so overtly WEIRD and want to avoid having to deal with the dreck of rappers adhering to cliche and the monotony that comes with some of them saying the same shit with only slight variations. They want some sort of unique quality like they claimed they kept finding in Wayne, but Wayne's talent was in lyricism and in technique. He didn't overtly do wild and crazy things, those were just bumps in the road while he stayed his course and did whatever the fuck he wanted. Its why I'm more enthralled with Quan than Thug on the Rich Gang tape, because Quan's finally really developed a style he's been working on for about a year or two, and he's doing great in it, whereas I still feel Thug is not there yet.
