In the past, when rappers fell off, they faded into obscurity. Not anymore. These days, I might think just as much about rappers whose new music I couldn’t give less of a fuck about as rappers in my daily rotation. Just today, my dad called me to get off his take on Fat Joe and N.O.R.E’s beef with a TikTok food influencer, silently watched my group chat debate a clip from a 2 Chainz appearance on Kirk Franklin’s series on manhood called Den of Kings, and clicked on a post captioned “Blueface Went on Instagram and exposed all 3 of his babymamas” before I even rolled my ass out of bed. Admittedly, a lot of this is my own fault for engaging with a 24/7 hip-hop news cycle run by anonymous content-farming accounts, but what isn’t is the internet becoming a land of over-the-hill artists feeding the algorithm and selling out for checks.
I thought about that as a surge of robotic tweets and screenshotted IG stories hit my timeline this week of hip-hop all-stars of the 2010s and early 2020s casually posting their midterm election wagers. Through the prediction market app Kalshi, where it’s possible to bet on pretty much anything—you could throw some bucks on a Category 4 hurricane making landfall, or if the US military would overthrow the president of Venezuela by a certain date—the undisclosed ads were made even more squeamish by the (AI?) wording.
“voter turnout seems like it’s goin bass way,” wrote YG, attached to his $999.98 bet on a win for LA mayor incumbent, Karen Bass. “im putting somethin lite on her to take it home.”
Offset said, “I like my odds on Keisha,” as he tossed five racks on Keisha Lance Bottoms to become the governor of Georgia.
Goofiest of them all was 42 Dugg’s long-winded reasoning for picking Abdul El-Sayed to be victorious in his Senate election race in Michigan: “I’ve been studying the polls lately and it looking like to me that el-sayed has a clear shot for senate. voter turnout expected to be high & i be using AI to give me this lock,who yall got money on sayed or rogers.”
To Dugg’s credit, he was a winner: “Told ya ,that’s was easy money,” he said in a celebratory post. (X, which I didn’t realize still has rules in the Elon era, took down a few posts because they “violated the Rules.”)
