RAPping up The Modern Decades of Music: The 2010s

       Welcome back to my blog where today I will wrap up the decade themed posts with the 2010s. In this post, and the posts to follow, the genre of music I will be discussing heavily is modern day rap/trap music. In this post specifically, I plan on looking at two artists I enjoy, but haven’t been in the rap industry as long or aren’t as well known. In the posts to follow, I will be doing “artist spotlights” where I pick a single artist from this genre and highlight their career along with my personal opinion on their music. As explicit as rap music may be, my friends and I easily bond over this style and once in a while the lyricism is actually meaningful. The two artists I will feature in today’s post are Roddy Ricch and NAV.

       Rodrick Wayne Moore, Jr., or better known as Roddy Ricch, was born on October 22, 1998 in Compton, California. Moore grew up in Compton as well as Atlanta, GA, for some time and began singing/rapping at the age of 8. By 16, Moore was making his own beats. Roddy Ricch began to truly establish himself as a major artist in the game during late 2019 and early 2020 when he featured on a plethora of hit songs as well as released his debut album “Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial” on December 6, 2019. The album spent four non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 which was “the longest time spent by a debut rap album” since 2003. I consider this album to be one of my favorites of 2019/2020 with my favorite song off the album being “High Fashion.” The most well known song off this album is easily “The Box” which held the Billboard Top 100 for 11 weeks. Its also worth noting that even if you know this song and haven’t scene the music video, click the link; it’s very well directed for a rap music video.

       Navraj Singh Goraya, more commonly known by NAV, was born in Toronto, Ontario, and is of Indian Punjabi descent, a surprising background for a modern day rap artist. Goraya was first introduced to music in the third grade when his “mother bought him a boombox in the third grade” and also when “his uncle, who was a popular singer in Punjab,  brought him to a studio.” In high school, he began producing his own beats for other underground Toronto artists, and also became popular on the music sharing website, SoundCloud.  NAV’s career kickstarted in 2016 when he collaborated with rapper Travis Scott on “Beibs in the Trap” off Scott’s Album, Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight which NAV cowrote and solely produced. Since then, he has released five projects, went through a “two month retirement,” and continues to be successful in the industry. My personal favorite song by NAV is titled “Vicodin” off his album Bad Habits.

       Although NAV and Roddy Ricch are not considered as generation defining artists quite yet, but they are surely staples of the rap industry today and will continue to garner success over the next years to come. It’s interesting to see the path that music has taken from my very first post about classical music to the current preferred genres of today. As I’ve mentioned before, music always sets a mood and provokes memories that sometimes we forget we have. Since rap is usually always playing around me and my friends, I can usually associate different songs with different moments that I’ve shared with them. I am excited for the upcoming week to highlight a singular artist and talk about them in depth.