There's a masked rapper going by UUuTANG MASKMAN who has been flooding Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and YouTube with Wu-Tang-coded music since 2024, and the internet has questions. Something about his arrival on the scene has felt a bit off to me. Is he actually connected to the Wu-Tang Clan? Are his visuals AI-generated? Is there a real human being under that mask at all? I genuinely like many of the songs he's put out so I spent a couple of days researching and I'm still not fully confident in his true identity or motives, but here's what's documented and what isn't:

UUuTANG MASKMAN is not a member of the Wu-Tang Clan. He's not signed to Wu-Tang Records, and there's no indication RZA or the group's business apparatus has anything to do with him. What he does have is geography and aesthetic on his side. His bio places him in Staten Island, the borough the Clan built its entire mythology around, and he leans hard into that lineage. Song and project titles reference the 36 Chambers. The production chases that same dusty, RZA-descended boom bap sound and often uses the same samples from the original records. His 2026 release Santi Disciple of the 36th Chamber is a 23-track dedication project built entirely around that cosmology, with guest features spanning old Killarmy affiliates to newer names like Kinetic 9. 

The closer relation is Cappadonna, as UUuTANG MASKMAN's SoundCloud bio announces an upcoming project with him. Whether the collaboration actually surfaces is a separate question, and as of now it's a promise on a bio page rather than a released record. 

His recent videos are clearly AI-generated - the fingerprints of generative AI are all over them, and he puts promo codes for AI platform Dehancer in his videos - but that alone doesn't disprove his humanity.

Before the mask, this artist was already a known quantity under the name Kastro Zaytana which is the same name attached to his current Bandcamp handle and YouTube channel. Validated Magazine ran a full interview with him in 2020, photograph included, in which he laid out a specific biography: growing up in Staten Island, cycling through juvenile facilities in Bedford-Stuyvesant, nine years in prison, a conversion to Islam, a family rap group called Record Devils formed with his father and brother. His YouTube channel has videos going back to 2020 and 2022 with traditional shot-by credits listing real collaborators. None of that reads like a synthetic identity, it reads like a working underground artist with a paper trail that predates the masked persona by years.

And yet.... the photo in that Validated Magazine interview doesn't actually show his face. The photo is certainly not AI-generated, but it could be anyone under that mask. And a mask, by nature of it obscuring his face, makes it a convenient format for AI video experimentation since there's less of a real face for the software to have to get right. Furthermore, go listen to that video directly above this paragraph, the song he put out before reinventing himself as UUuTANG MASKMAN. His voice and delivery are entirely different. Is it that big of a leap to think that the vocals (at least on the more recent songs) are AI-generated as well?

What's even more interesting about UUuTANG and his connection, however tenuous, to the Wu is that Wu-Tang itself has been pretty advanced in their own AI usage.

Wu-Tang's video for "Mandingo," directed by Jason Zada, was made entirely using Google DeepMind's Veo 2 text-to-video generator. It dropped to significant backlash but the fact stands: a group in its farewell-tour era put out an official video built entirely by AI, not an underground unknown doing it on the sly.

Then there's Raekwon and Palantir, which is a stranger and longer-running relationship than most fans realize. Raekwon first visited Palantir's headquarters in 2010 and told people to look the company up. In August 2026, during the Clan's farewell tour, he went back. Palantir posted photos of the visit with CEO Alex Karp on its own account. Palantir has since become one of the more prominent and controversial names in AI and defense technology, and the optics of that friendship drew criticism given the company's government and surveillance contracts. I could spend pages on breaking down the evil that is Palantir, but the relevant point here is that a founding Wu-Tang member has had a documented, decade-plus relationship with one of the biggest AI companies on earth and against that backdrop an unaffiliated Staten Island MC building his brand around AI-assisted visuals doesn't look like an outlier. Rather, it looks like the surrounding culture the Clan itself has been building toward for years.

So what exactly can we conclude about UUuTANG MASKMAN at this point? Best case, he's an independent artist making the most of a limited budget by leveraging all of the AI tools available to him to promote his music. Worst case, he's another Fenix Flexin duping fans and serving as a depressing harbinger of the future of music and possibly even an "industry plant" (but plot twist, the industry that planted him in this case might be the AI industry!). Fingers crossed it's the former scenario, AI has already reduced my career to babysitting LLMs, I would prefer it not also do the same to another large part of my life.

The mix above is our Best of Common Sense, start there if you need a refresher or just let it run while you read.

The story starts, of all places, with Common doing Ice Cube a favor.

Cube's first major show outside of Los Angeles was at the Regal Theater in Chicago. The crew showed up and realized they'd left one of the records they were performing to, back in LA. They needed to go buy it. Ice Cube, in a city he didn't know, was bailed out by a young Chicago rapper who happened to be opening the show and knew exactly where the record store was. That rapper was Common. "We didn't really know who he was," Cube later recalled, "and that's just one of those footnotes." It is one of the more poetic footnotes in hip-hop history, because within a few years those two men would be aiming very specifically at each other on wax.

The Song That Started It

In 1994, Common (aka Common Sense at the time) released "I Used to Love H.E.R." on Resurrection, a narrative track that personified hip-hop as a woman and lamented the culture's commercial drift. The song is a masterpiece of extended metaphor and one of the best tracks on one of the best rap albums of the decade. It is also, depending on how you read it, an extended critique of West Coast gangsta rap's influence on the direction of the genre. Ice Cube heard it that way, as did Mack 10 and WC, Cube's Westside Connection partners. They were not pleased.

Cube and Westside Connection fired back on "Westside Slaughterhouse," a track on Mack 10's 1995 debut album, taking direct shots at Common. Common reportedly heard the diss and initially let it go. Then he saw Ice Cube, Mack 10, and WC on BET dissing him directly to camera. At that point, letting it go was no longer an option.

The Call to Pete Rock

Common called Pete Rock. At the time Pete Rock was already one of the most respected producers in hip-hop, fresh off Mecca and the Soul Brother and "They Reminisce Over You," and he and Common had developed a working relationship. Common explained the situation and what he was feeling. Pete Rock's response was direct: "If you need my help, I'm here."

Pete made the beat at a friend's house using records he'd left over there, crate material he'd given the friend to practice with, essentially assembled from whatever happened to be available. "I couldn't believe that he would like it," Pete Rock later said of Common's reaction. Common liked it. He wrote over it and "The Bitch in Yoo" became one of the most devastating diss records of the decade.

The song was released in September 1996 on the Relativity Records compilation Relativity Urban Assault, then as a standalone 12-inch. Common did not ease into it. He attacked Ice Cube for commercializing his image, for the hypocrisy of claiming street credibility while making movies and selling products, for the contradiction between Cube's early political work with NWA and his mid-90s persona. He went after Mack 10 and WC alongside him. The record was pointed, specific, and lyrically sharp in a way that didn't sound like someone trying to win a battle, it sounded like someone who was genuinely angry and happened to be one of the best writers in the game.

Pete Rock was a little worried about what he'd helped create. When he later ran into Ice Cube, he braced himself. Ice Cube, it turned out, understood that it was a music thing. He was upset, but he was also an MC who had built his entire reputation on exactly this kind of combat. He knew what a real diss record looked like.

Cube did respond on Westside Connection's "Hoo-Bangin' (WSCG Style)," but the consensus of virtually everyone invested in the beef was that it Common was the clear winner.

How It Got Squashed

By 1997 the climate had changed. Tupac had been shot and killed in September 1996. Biggie was killed in March 1997. The lyrical war between the coasts had taken on an atmosphere that nobody who had started it had intended, and people who had been treating beef as a competitive sport were suddenly watching their peers get buried. The idea of a Chicago rapper and a Los Angeles rapper escalating a diss track exchange in that environment was something that nobody wanted to see play out.

Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam organized a peace summit on April 3, 1997, less than thirty days after Biggie's death, bringing together several feuding rappers. Common and Ice Cube were both there. Both had connections to the Minister through their respective camps. "Common's camp called it, Cube's camp called it," as one account describes it. "That was the grounds that they could lean on to have an intermediary." The two men met, talked, and squashed it.

Common later acknowledged on his song "Hungry" that the beef was resolved with the line "verbal vegetarian, squashed beef with Ice Cube," one of the more elegant ways anyone has ever documented the end of a rap feud in an actual rap song. They went on to appear together in the Barbershop films. They are, by all available evidence, genuinely cool with each other. Common admitted in a 2024 podcast appearance that he had feared the situation might get ugly and that the involvement of the Minister prevented something that neither of them wanted.

When I was making that Best of Common Sense mix linked above, it set off all sorts of red flags for Youtube's copyright checks. Virtually all of Common's catalog is licensed for use in mixes like this (if you go through the proper youtube channels at least), but "The Bitch in Yoo" is very specifically forbidden and I think that is more due to sample clearance than any concerns Com may have about resurfacing this decades-old beef: the song contains five separate sampled elements that each require independent clearance. Pete Rock's beat is built over a sample of "Light My Fire" by Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger and the Trinity. The track also samples music from the 1974 film The Education of Sonny Carson, lifts a portion of "Eye for an Eye (Your Beef Is Mines)" by Mobb Deep featuring Nas and Raekwon, interpolates N.W.A's "A Bitch Iz a Bitch," and samples Common's own "I Used to Love H.E.R." Five separate rights holders, each of whom has to agree on terms before the song can be legally distributed.

The N.W.A sample alone is complicated territory, as Ruthless Records catalog clearances have historically been difficult and expensive, with multiple parties involved in any licensing decision. The film music from The Education of Sonny Carson adds another layer of complexity since film soundtrack rights and recording rights are separate.

You can find the live version from De La Soul's Live at Tramps, NYC, 1996 on streaming, and a few compiled versions that have surfaced on Common's catalog releases. The original 1996 Relativity 12-inch version seems to be one of those documents you have to seek out the old-fashioned way. 

There is one other version out there, a Havoc-produced remix that came out shortly after the original:

The mix above covers the best of De La Soul's catalog. The story of why that catalog almost didn't make it to streaming services is one of the more infuriating chapters in the history of the music business, and it's worth understanding before you hit play.

How It Started

De La Soul (Posdnuos, Trugoy the Dove, and Maseo), three kids from Amityville and Huntington on Long Island, released 3 Feet High and Rising on Tommy Boy Records on March 3, 1989. Prince Paul produced it. It was built almost entirely from samples: Steely Dan, Johnny Cash, Hall & Oates, the Turtles, Parliament, Funkadelic, Otis Redding, and dozens more lifted, chopped, looped, and reassembled into something that sounded like nothing that had come before it. The album went gold, received universal critical acclaim, and announced the group as one of the most creative forces the genre had ever produced.

One month after the album dropped, the Turtles - specifically Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, who had become something like professional sample litigants by 1989 - sued De La Soul and Tommy Boy for using a portion of their 1969 song "You Showed Me" on a comedy skit called "Transmitting Live from Mars." The case settled out of court for an amount reported to be somewhere between $1.7 million and $2.5 million depending on the source. The lesson the music industry drew from this was that sampling without clearing was now a liability. The lesson De La Soul's label drew from it, apparently, was that someone else's problem was more manageable than actually resolving the underlying issue.

The Streaming Problem

For most of the streaming era, from Spotify's launch in 2008 through to 2023, De La Soul's first six albums simply did not exist online in any legal form. You could not stream them. You could not buy them digitally. The albums that most serious hip-hop heads consider among the greatest ever made - 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul Is Dead, Buhloone Mindstate, Stakes Is High - were ghosts, travelling online only through some of the seedier neighborhoods like zShare and megaupload. Younger listeners who hadn't bought the CDs when they were in print had no legal way to hear them. The group watched their contemporaries' catalogs get streamed billions of times while their own work sat in a legal vault.

The specific structure of the problem is worth unpacking because it's not as simple as "the samples weren't cleared." Tommy Boy had been through multiple ownership changes from the original label to Warner Bros. to a Warner reacquisition to a Tommy Boy reacquisition in 2019, and each transfer complicated the question of who actually had the rights to authorize digital distribution. Tommy Boy's position, and Warner's before them, was that the original license agreements that covered physical distribution did not extend to digital streaming. Every time someone tried to move the catalog to streaming, the sample clearance question opened back up, and the sample clearance question on 3 Feet High and Rising alone - which contains hundreds of samples - was effectively an invitation to every copyright holder in the building to come get paid.

The first serious attempt to bring the catalog to streaming came in 2019, when Tommy Boy announced plans to put the first six albums online. De La Soul immediately pushed back. In a direct Instagram post to their fans, the group revealed that under the proposed deal they would receive ten percent of streaming revenue. Tommy Boy would receive ninety. The group urged fans not to stream the music if it went up, and the fans listened. The move was abandoned and negotiations broke down entirely.

The Reservoir Deal and the Resolution That Came Too Late

In June 2021, music rights company Reservoir Media acquired Tommy Boy for one hundred million dollars. The first call Reservoir made was to De La Soul. According to Reservoir EVP Faith Newman, the goal from the beginning was to restore the group's ownership of their masters and work alongside them to bring the catalog to digital platforms properly. A year of sample clearance work followed, led by Deborah Mannis-Gardner of DMG Clearances, who had previously attempted to clear the catalog for Tommy Boy and had watched those efforts stall when the label dispute made copyright holders reluctant to engage. With the dispute resolved and the group's ownership restored, the clearance work moved forward.

Some samples couldn't be cleared and were replaced with what the industry calls "replays" which are re-recordings of the original samples designed to be sonically faithful to what Prince Paul and the group had originally used. How many replays ended up on the streaming versions and which samples they replaced has never been fully disclosed, which is its own kind of small outrage, but the albums made it to streaming on March 3, 2023, the thirty-fourth anniversary of 3 Feet High and Rising's original release.

Trugoy the Dove died nineteen days earlier, on February 12, 2023, at fifty-four, from heart failure. He never got to see the catalog reach a new generation of listeners.

The Broader Question

People have been asking for years why the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique which is comparably sample-dense to anything in the De La Soul catalog has been available on streaming services without incident, while 3 Feet High and Rising spent fifteen years in legal limbo. The answer based on what I could find through a decent amount of google-assisted research is that it comes down to who controlled the masters and whether the original agreements were structured to cover digital distribution. Capitol Records, which controlled the Beastie Boys catalog, made a judgment call that the existing agreements were sufficient. Tommy Boy and Warner made the opposite call. The music itself was the same level of legally complicated. The institutional decision about how to handle that complication was different.

What De La Soul went through is a specific and unusually well-documented version of a problem that has affected dozens of artists whose work was built on sampling. The streaming era was not designed with those artists in mind. The legal frameworks that govern sampling were built for a physical distribution world and have never been fully updated for digital, which means that the artists who built the most creatively ambitious records of the hip-hop golden era are the ones who have had the hardest time getting their work heard by new audiences. The group that arguably pushed sample-based production furthest, that turned sampling into something genuinely avant-garde on 3 Feet High and Rising and De La Soul Is Dead, paid the highest price for it.

The catalog is on streaming now. It took thirty-four years and a label acquisition and a year of clearance work and the death of one of the three people who made it. Put it on.

Public Enemy is the most important group in the history of hip-hop. Politically, visually, and sonically they defined the sound of hip hop in the leadup to it going mainstream. What doesn't get discussed enough when people talk about what made Public Enemy work is that they were the first rap group to understand that making the music was only half the fight. The other half was controlling how the music got interpreted, explained, and received by a press that was, in the late 1980s, mostly white, mostly hostile, and mostly confused. They solved that problem by bringing a journalist into the crew. His name was Harry Allen, and his title was the Media Assassin.

Harry Allen was born on November 27, 1963, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and grew up in Freeport on Long Island, the same general geography that produced a significant percentage of the people who would go on to build hip-hop's institutional infrastructure. In 1982 he enrolled at Adelphi University in Garden City and ended up in an animation class. One of his classmates was Carlton Ridenhour, who was then performing with a Long Island hip-hop group called Spectrum City. Ridenhour would later be known as Chuck D. Through Chuck D, Allen met Flavor Flav, Terminator X, Hank and Keith Shocklee, Bill Stephney (who would later become president of Def Jam) and Andre Brown, who would later co-host Yo! MTV Raps as Doctor Dre. He was in the room when all of it was being assembled, which is either very good fortune or the result of being someone that the right people wanted in their room.

Allen started writing professionally in 1987. His first published article was, by general critical consensus, one of the first pieces to seriously illuminate the political ideology behind Public Enemy. It explained, in language that mainstream journalism could engage with, what the group was actually arguing and why it mattered. The mainstream white press had been confused and baffled by PE's confrontational politics and deliberately aggressive imagery, and Allen provided the interpretive framework that allowed the conversation to happen at all.

The formal relationship between Allen and Public Enemy crystallized in 1989, when a Washington Times interview with Professor Griff, PE's soon-to-be-very-controversial "Minister of Information," produced a wave of accusations of anti-Semitism that threatened to destroy the group at the peak of their commercial and critical power [I couldn't find a paywall free link to the interview, here's the closest I could come up with]. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back had just come out. "Fight the Power" was being recorded for Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. The group needed someone who could walk into hostile rooms, hold the position, explain the nuance, and not get thrown off message by journalists who were either genuinely confused or actively trying to discredit the group. Allen was the natural choice. He took on the title of Director of Enemy Relations and became, in effect, PE's official liaison to the media that was simultaneously making them famous and trying to take them down.

What that job actually looked like is worth understanding. Public Enemy in 1989 was the most politically charged mainstream act in American music arguing on record about systemic racism, police violence, and the failures of American institutions at a moment when the mainstream preferred its Black artists either nonthreatening or silent. Every interview was a potential minefield. Every misquote was a weapon. Allen had to understand the music deeply enough to explain it accurately, understand the politics well enough to defend them under pressure, and understand the press well enough to know when he was being set up. He did all three. He also delivered the closing refrain on "Don't Believe the Hype."

The career outside Public Enemy is substantial in its own right. Allen wrote about hip-hop culture, race, and politics for VIBE, The Source, The Village Voice, Spin, and Essence across multiple decades. He hosted NONFICTION, a weekly radio show on WBAI-FM in New York, for years. He was an early and serious thinker about the internet as a cultural and political tool, writing about its potential as a medium for Black voices at a time when that wasn't a common conversation. He worked in the public affairs department at Rockstar Games from 2004 to 2006, specifically in the crisis communications role that required explaining Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to people who hadn't played it and had decided to be outraged about it, which is a very specific skill set that his years with Public Enemy had prepared him for perfectly. He ran the blog Media Assassin at harryallen.info for years as a platform for his ongoing cultural criticism. In September 2025 he was appointed an MLK Visiting Scholar, which is the academy catching up to what the culture already knew.

The one thing that connects all of it - the PE work, the journalism, the radio, the Rockstar stint - is the same conviction that runs through "Don't Believe the Hype" and through every interview he ever gave on the group's behalf: that the story being told about Black culture in America by the mainstream media was incomplete, frequently wrong, and worth fighting. 

Ishmael Butler grew up in Seattle's Central District, graduated from Garfield High School in 1987, and went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst on what turned out to be a temporary basketball scholarship. He played Division I ball, discovered that his actual gift was not basketball but the combination of jazz knowledge, lyrical instinct, and a specific kind of cool that is impossible to manufacture, and dropped out in 1989. He moved to Brooklyn, made some demos, and eventually connected with Craig Irving, a Philadelphia native who had been rapping with a group called the Dread Poets Society and was spending time in DC at Howard University, where he met Mary Ann Vieira, who was originally from Brazil by way of Silver Spring, Maryland. Irving brought Vieira into the picture, Butterfly brought them both into his Brooklyn world, they recorded a demo for Pendulum Records, and Digable Planets was a group. What followed was two albums, a Grammy, a label that didn't know what to do with them, and a legacy that keeps paying out.

Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space) came out on Pendulum/Elektra in February 1993 and announced the group as something genuinely different from everything else that was happening in rap at the time. The album sampled Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Curtis Mayfield, and Herbie Hancock and turned them into something that hit both the hip-hop block and alternative radio simultaneously. "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)" was the single nobody expected to be a hit - a slow, jazz-drunk record with a descending bass line and three MCs who sounded like they were in no particular hurry - and it went Top 20 on the Hot 100, won a Grammy for Best Rap Duo or Group, and put the group on the covers of music magazines that hadn't been paying much attention to hip-hop. The problem with a crossover hit is that everyone who didn't know you suddenly knows you for one thing, and the expectation that you'll give them the same thing again is the first trap a good group has to decide whether to step into or step around. 

Digable Planets stepped around it. Blowout Comb came out in October 1994 on Blue Note the jazz label, which is either the most logical or the most commercially suicidal home for this group depending on how you look at it. The album was harder, stranger, more political, and more explicitly rooted in Black radical tradition than anything on the debut. The insect names were gone: Butterfly became Ish, Ladybug became Mecca, Doodlebug became C-Know. The cheerful jazz-hop of "Rebirth of Slick" was replaced with something that cited the Black Panthers and the Five Percent Nation and sounded like it was made for people who were paying close attention rather than people who wanted to hear "Cool Like Dat" again. Blue Note did not know what to do with it. The label's promotional apparatus was built for jazz records and for the legacy catalog, not for a politically charged hip-hop album that defied easy categorization. Blowout Comb was undersupported, undersold, and largely overlooked at the time of release. It is now widely regarded as one of the great hip-hop albums of the 1990s, which is exactly how this kind of thing tends to work.

The group dissolved in 1995. Butler moved back to Seattle and eventually launched Cherrywine, a solo project that released one album, Elevated in 2003, before he co-founded Shabazz Palaces with multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire. Shabazz Palaces signed to Sub Pop and has released a string of albums that represent some of the most adventurous and genuinely strange hip-hop being made anywhere starting with Black Up in 2011 and continuing through Robed in Rapids in 2023. Doodlebug has been leading the Philadelphia live hip-hop ensemble Cosmic Funk Orchestra since 2000. Ladybug Mecca released a solo album and has maintained her own musical career, and her voice got a second massive life when Snoop Dogg and E-40 sampled her bars from Blowout Comb's "9th Wonder (Blackitolism)" for the 2006 hit "Candy (Drippin' Like Water)" -- a song that introduced Ladybug's voice to a West Coast audience that may not have known Blowout Comb existed. Separately, Butterfly's line from "Rebirth of Slick" - "We be to rap what key be to lock" - was sampled by E-40 on "Yay Area," the opening track from My Ghetto Report Card in 2006, which put Digable Planets into heavy rotation in the Bay Area for a generation that came to them from the opposite direction.

The group has been touring periodically since a reunion in 2005, including a 30th anniversary Blowout Comb tour.The mix above is the best of both albums along with some of their solo projects and everything that makes them worth returning to.

One more thing before you go. "Dedicated" is a Digable Planets track that didn't appear on either studio album but eventually surfaced on the 2005 compilation Beyond the Spectrum: The Creamy Spy Chronicles. It is Butterfly saying out loud what the group was about and what it meant -- the kind of record that sounds like someone taking stock. We'll let it have the last word.

This week the internet served up one of the more infuriating political conspiracy theories in recent memory, and it involves hip-hop, a defunded foreign aid agency, country music, and a man who once released a rap song about a dead gorilla. Let's go through it.

Where This Came From

On July 30, 2026, conservative commentator Benny Johnson posted on X: "Rap music has vanished from the top charts after USAID was defunded. Instead, country music has DOMINATED for 40 straight weeks. Ella Langley 'Choosin Texas' just shattered records for time spent at #1 -- dethroning Whitney Houston & Mariah Carey. American Culture is winning."

The claim is this: when Elon Musk's DOGE operation shut down USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, which was primarily a foreign humanitarian aid organization, it somehow also shut off the tap that had been secretly funding hip-hop's dominance of the American pop charts. Without that government money propping it up, rap music collapsed, country music surged, and Ella Langley from Hope Hull, Alabama became the beneficiary. American culture is winning.

This was not a fringe post among the boomer and right wing adjacent communities. Joe Rogan engaged with the claim on a July 2, 2026 episode of his podcast which garnered 1.7 million YouTube views, asking, "People are pointing out that right now it's one of the rare times where no rap music is on the charts. And they're saying, how does this coincide with USAID? Was USAID actively promoting rap music?" Tim Pool told his listeners in late July that "rap music just vanished from the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in 35 years. Strange, a couple of months -- so this would have been about four months after the shuttering of USAID -- rap disappears from the Billboard Hot 100. Interesting."

One X account called End Wokeness posted data showing that rap music's share of the Billboard Top 10 dropped from 34% between 2020-2023 to 17% in 2025-2026, while country music's share rose from 7% to 27%, and captioned it: "USAID was shutdown. Coincidence?"

It is, in fact, a coincidence. And not even a very good one.

[Also as a note, I normally would link to all of these but I refuse to send even the handful of you reading this over to those sites. I put in direct qutoes so you can always drop them in google to find the direct tweets and videos.]

Who Is Promoting It and Why

The people pushing this claim are not hip-hop fans who stumbled onto something troubling. They are right-wing media figures who have spent years arguing that hip-hop is not authentically American, that it represents a cultural imposition on white America, and that its commercial dominance was always somehow suspicious. The claim fits a pre-existing narrative about government manipulation of culture and the superiority of country music as an expression of "real" America, which is itself a claim with a long and ugly history that we don't have enough space to fully unpack here.

One of the more revealing X posts in the thread came from a user named Steve Franssen, who wrote: "ATTENTION PROUD WHITES: Everyone who hated rap in the 1990's and 2000's is VINDICATED. Rap isn't music. It's government PISS that was funded by USAID to dumb down Middle America." When contacted by media outlets, Franssen said his post was a joke. Whether or not it was, it captures what the actual underlying argument is about. This isn't a media criticism story. It's a culture war story wearing media criticism as a costume.

Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Joe Rogan, and End Wokeness are not music journalists. They are political content creators whose business model runs on grievance and on the specific demographic that was uncomfortable with hip-hop's dominance and is now using the chart data as validation. That is what this is.

What Actually Happened

Hip-hop's market share had been declining since before USAID was defunded in 2025. According to data from Soundcharts, hip-hop's share of Spotify's Top 50 had been falling since 2020. Hip-hop peaked at 30 percent market share in 2020 and had been slipping since well before Elon Musk entered the picture.

The specific chart phenomenon of rap's absence from the Hot 100 top 40 has a much cleaner explanation than a government conspiracy. In October 2025, Billboard changed its methodology to weigh paid subscription streams more heavily than ad-supported ones, which set the stage for the Hot 100 to not feature a single rap or hip-hop artist in the top 40 for the first time since 1990. That rule change - not DOGE, not USAID, not Elon Musk - is the primary mechanism behind the chart shift. Paid streaming subscribers skew older and whiter than ad-supported listeners, which means the new methodology inherently weights the genre preferences of one demographic more heavily than another. Ella Langley benefited from that rule change. She also made what seems to be a genuinely good country record according to fans of the genre, something I'm willing to accept their word for.

R&B and hip-hop still remain the most popular streaming force in the first half of 2026 when taken as a whole, even as other genres gained steam. Latin, K-pop, and other foreign-language artists have also seen exponential growth. The music didn't go anywhere, the chart methodology changed and the chart reflected that. 

As for USAID: the agency's actual mandate was international humanitarian assistance: food aid, disaster relief, public health programs in developing countries. The conspiracy asserts that somehow, with its roughly $40 billion annual pre-Musk budget, USAID had been propping up the American rap industry, to the detriment of other, more "American" genres. There is no mechanism by which this is possible and no evidence that it occurred. The claim is not even internally coherent. USAID was not a domestic culture agency. It did not fund American record labels. It did not promote domestic music on domestic charts. The timeline correlation that Rogan and Pool found so interesting is real. USAID was shut down and then rap dropped off the charts but it is also meaningless, in the same way that the number of films Nicolas Cage appeared in correlates with swimming pool drownings, which is a famous statistics joke about why correlation is not causation.

The Part Nobody Is Saying Out Loud

Hip-hop is fifty years old. It is one of the most thoroughly, purely, unmistakably American cultural creations of the twentieth century, more American in its origins and its DNA than country music, which has its own complicated debt to Black American musical traditions that its current champions prefer not to discuss. The argument that hip-hop required government support to compete with country music on American charts is not just wrong as a factual matter, it is an insult that happens to be dressed up in chart data.

"Choosin' Texas" is a real song with real fans who really like it. It spent twelve weeks at number one on the Hot 100, and Drake's "Janice STFU" is currently at number four on the same chart, which is a detail the people promoting this theory have not been eager to mention. Country music did not win because hip-hop was defunded. Hip hop is not defunded, and it is not going anywhere.

The man who is being credited with killing hip-hop released a SoundCloud rap song about Harambe the gorilla in 2019. That should tell you everything you need to know about how seriously to take his influence on the genre.

Full disclosure before we get into this: I did not know who Disco King Mario was, beyond just having heard the name in passing over the years, before this debate surfaced on Rob Swift's Instagram. I know who Kool Herc is, Grandmaster Flash, and Grand Wizard Theodore, because I've supplemented my fading childhood memories from the 80s with multiple viewings of the Scratch documentary and because these are the names that get cited every time someone tries to explain where hip-hop came from. What I did not know, before Rob Swift put it in front of me, was that there was a fourth name that some people believe belongs in that conversation. 

Who He Was

Mario Williams was born in Edenton, North Carolina on July 1, 1956, and moved to the Bronxdale Houses in the Bronx sometime in the 1960s. By 1971 he was one of the most prominent DJs in the borough, known for two things: the best sound system anyone had heard at a park jam, and the ability to secure venues like schools and parks that nobody else could get access to. That second part matters more than it might sound. The early history of hip-hop is a story about space, about who could get into which rooms and on whose terms, and Disco King Mario had access to rooms that Kool Herc and Bambaataa couldn't get into yet.

He was a member of the Black Spades, one of the largest street gangs in the Bronx at the time, which both protected his events and connected him to Afrika Bambaataa, who was also a Spades member. What followed from that connection is documented in Yes Yes Y'all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop's First Decade. The short version from that book: Mario brought Bambaataa along to his events as an assistant DJ, loaned him equipment, got him into venues, and on at least one documented occasion saved Bambaataa from losing a battle with the Funky 4+1 by loaning him a Macintosh amplifier that blew the competition out of the room. DJ Baron from the Funky 4+1 is quoted describing the moment directly: "Bambaataa had one up his sleeve: Disco King Mario had loaned Bam a power amp... all of a sudden you couldn't hear us no more, 'cause Bam borrowed his amp from Mario and blew us out of the water."

Mario also recognized and mentored Busy Bee Starski, one of the great party rockers of the early era. Busy Bee himself is quoted in the same oral history: "I went from Disco King Mario to Breakout." Mario died on May 21, 1994, at 37, from complications related to addiction which is the reason, according to many who were there, that his name never made it into the official canon. You can't advocate for your own legacy from the grave, and the people who might have advocated for him were dealing with their own situations in the years when the history was being written.

The Debate

Rob Swift of the X-Men (aka the X-Ecutioners) posted about Disco King Mario on Instagram, questioning whether he belonged in the same conversation with Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Grand Wizard Theodore as a founding father of hip hop. Pete Nice (aka Prime Minister Pete Nice of 3rd Bass, and more relevantly here, one of the more serious hip-hop historians and archivists working today) pushed back. The specific terms of their exchange are on Instagram and I'm not going to put words in either of their mouths beyond what I can confirm, but the general shape of the disagreement is a familiar one in hip-hop history debates: Pete Nice's position is that Mario's contributions to the founding of the culture are documented and significant enough to warrant founding father status; Swift's position, from what I can gather, is more skeptical about whether "founding father" is the right designation for someone whose role was more as an enabler and connector than an originator of any specific technical innovation. If you go purely by the comments in the instagram posts, Pete Nice's argument seems to have the largest backing from folks who were around at the time.

So is he a "founding father?"

I certainly don't have the years of work in researching the issue that Swift and Pete Nice do, but I'm going to sum up what a couple of days of research in between work and parenting duties came up with:

The case for Mario as a founding father rests on a few specific claims: he was doing park jams in the Bronx earlier than his better-known contemporaries; he secured venues and built the infrastructure that allowed the early scene to develop; he directly mentored and enabled Afrika Bambaataa, one of the three figures universally acknowledged as a founding father; and he was recognized by his peers, in their own words and in documented oral histories, as someone without whom the scene looked different.

The case against, or at least the case for a different designation, is that "founding father" implies a specific kind of origination that is hard to pin on Mario specifically. He wasn't the first person to do park jams. He wasn't the innovator of any particular technique that changed how DJing worked. What he was is something more like an essential node in the network, the person who built the connective tissue that allowed the founding fathers to do what they did. Whether that makes him a founding father or something more like a founding patron is perhaps semantics, but semantics is where rap nerds thrive so here we are.

The best I can conclude is that the reason Mario isn't cemented in every conversation about this topic has as much to do with the fact that he died at 37 as anything else, and the people who were positioned to tell his story were not the same people who wrote the official history. That is a pattern in this music's history and it applies here.

Go read Yes Yes Y'all, go look at Rob Swift's Instagram, and go check out the Hip Hop Golden Age piece by Niya Falls. You might not come away from it with a clear answer on the question at hand, but you'll likely learn a ton more about the origins of hip hop.

El Da Sensei, formerly one half of the Artifacts alongside Tame One (RIP), has been celebrating the 20th anniversary reissue of his 2006 solo album The Unusual with a string of videos revisiting some of the songs. Shooting videos for songs from 2006 is a great way to sound dated, but El's verses and flow are so timeless that just filming with a more modern camera is really all that's needed to stay relevant. "Hold On" is the latest of these releases, with fellow Jersey native Illmind on the production.

I've written enough about El in the past that I would just be repeating myself, so just hit play on the video and "Hold on!"

We're Back. Sorry About That.

Long time readers know we've been running this site since 2004 on what can only be described as the most optimistic hosting setup imaginable. Somebody's closet, a prayer, and a shared IP address. That finally caught up with us. The site was down for a couple of weeks, forcing my hand to migrate to an actual professional host now so that particular adventure is behind us.

One casualty worth mentioning: we had to move to a new comment system in the process. The old comments are gone sadly, including a response from a member of the Timex Social Club that was possibly the coolest bit of feedback we've ever gotten here.

While the site was down I leaned into something I'd already been building out: the 33jones YouTube channel. The goal there is simple: start with the mainstream mixes to build an audience, then bring in the indie artists we've always covered here and get them in front of more people. If you're an artist and you'd be willing to record a drop for an upcoming mix, please reach out.

The channel already has best of mixes for KRS-One, Mos Def, Kool G Rap, the Fugees, and A Tribe Called Quest, plus Top 50 lists for NY Rappers, NY Producers, and California Producers. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be posting Best Of mixes for Pete Rock, RZA, Busta, and Ice Cube. All of it lives at youtube.com/33jones or hit the Mixes link at the top of the page.

New articles start back up right after the holiday. Peace!

With the state of the music and culture these days, I don't throw around the word "rapper" as loosely as I may have in the past. In 2026 there are plenty of people making rap music, but not everybody can rap. This lady who I had never heard of prior to a couple of days ago, earthsignchels, she can rap.

The Chicago artist, born name Chelsea, dropped "Daddy Died" earlier this month and it's been making its way around the internet slowly but surely. She's been putting in work since at least 2023 from what I can dig up, before landing a deal with Columbia. 

"Daddy Died" is not a subtle song, the title tells you exactly where we're heading and it still hits pretty hard with her delivery. There's a COLORS performance version that started circulating and that's the one people are primarily picking up on, as the stripped down visuals of that one I think hit better on a mobile screen. But I'm netbangin' on an actual computer with a big ol' monitor, so I am linking the original cinematic above instead.

The comparison that came to me immediately, and I suspect most others though I have not done a deep dive on xTwitter to confirm this, is that her delivery on this track hits the same way Nicki Minaj's verse on "Monster" did in 2010. Nicki had three minutes on a Kanye record and by the end of it nobody was talking about Jay-Z or Rick Ross. earthsignchels has four minutes of her own song and still manages to make you feel like you just witnessed something that's new and about to be significant. That kind of presence isn't taught.

Keep an eye on her, the catalog is still small but the ceiling is wide open.