What is the cut of age to retire from being a rapper. You notice other genre's of music, you can be 60, 70 and even 80 performing. You have B.B. King, Rolling Stones and James Brown still performing.
So, could y'all see Busta Rhymes or Lil' Wayne performing at 63 years old?
you cant act "gangsta" for the rest of your life...eventually you have a wife, kids, family and those things become the most important parts of your life. i think that is why alot of them are using rap as a platform to bigger things like fashion, acting, and other business ventures. rappers like P. Diddy and Dr. Dre dont really rap much any more, they make their money making beats, selling clothes etc. if you havent built some type of platform to keep you in the limelight, you will just fade away.
there weren't any 70 year old rockers in the 70s or 80s. The music has to be old enough for some of its top performers to be old. As far as new guys go, isn't Rick Ross about 45?
And this is why hiphop will always be treated as a disposable music, not worthy of the same kind of respect as classical, jazz, rock, country, etc.
There's no respect of elder acts in hiphop. You're considered over the hill.
I see 12, 13 year old kids all the time rocking Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Guns and Roses, etc. shirts.
In hiphop, you have a "shelf life" and that's it.
It's sad, but it shows that the average hiphop "fan" is really nothing of the sort. Just someone jumping on the latest trend.
It's true, but alot of these kids rep the older bands b/c the newer music is not nearly as good. Maybe the alternative could be true about rap.....I really don't know I'm not a rap fan.
If young people are better rappers than older people, I guess it's not the kind of art form that you get better at with experience? I mean, most jazz musicians start to find their voice around age 30 and hit their prime at 40. If rappers hit their prime at age 20, what does it say about the music? That it's more important to be young and cool than to be good at the craft? The reason I compared it to jazz, is because I suspect that in actuallity rappers should be getting better with age. They should be refining their control of rhythm, building their vocabulary, and starting to talk about real subjects. A 40 year old rapper should be able to give us more insightful lyrics with a more polished delivery, assuming they kept practicing and experiencing life throughout their 20's and 30's.
Rapping and Old Age?
