Text: Li Dan
Rap variety shows have long become a regular program every summer, but this summer, the "sense of death" of this track is particularly heavy.
"New Rap 2024" is a hot search, but the discussions that netizens are interested in have nothing to do with the content of the show itself; "Rap Dream Factory" is of good quality, but the influence of the show is not enough to radiate to audiences outside the small circle; Station B, Tencent Video and Mango do not have any short-term plans related to rap variety shows.
There are no rap newcomers and no hit song with a high degree of singing, the excitement of the rap circle is the rappers, and the rap variety show has nothing.
From Nomi to Pharaoh,
"New Rap 2024" exploded but not completely?
iQIYI's rap variety show has advantages that are difficult for other video platforms to match. Whether it is the knowledge of the rap field, the experience of content production, or the reserve of rappers and industry resources, iQIYI can be the leader.
Although the "New Generation of Rap" launched by Station B once took advantage of the victory to pursue the "New Rap" series in 2020 and gained a super high reputation for the program, in the end, only the "New Rap" series has persisted until now. However, now that the "New Rap" series that has left Che Che is almost meaningless, "New Rap 2024" lacks his dominance, which makes many viewers sigh, "The taste is wrong." ”
Last year, Che Che, who had already resigned from iQiyi, still served as the convener and host of "China Rap Showdown 2023". As a result, in the middle of the recording of the program, Zhang Zihao, a rapper representing the new force, was eliminated, and the enraged netizens went directly to Che Che's wife's Douyin comment area to complain. So much so that after the sixth issue, Cha Che never appeared as the manager again, and completely disappeared from the stage of "Peak Showdown 2023".
This year, the director of "New Rap 2024" in front of and behind the scenes has been completely replaced by Zuo Jin. According to Che Che, Zuo Jin has partnered with him for many years and is fully capable of being the director of the "New Rap" series. But maybe the rap circle is really a female-unfriendly and xenophobic circle, Zuo Jin is obviously not familiar with some rappers, everyone rarely interacts with her on the show, and she can't suppress hot dogs, Xie Di and other rap circles at all.
The distance between Zuo Jin and the rapper can continue to get closer with contact, but the difficulty is that the "New Rap" series no longer has the vitality that led rap from underground to the ground in the past. "New Rap 2024" has no stage out of the circle, only "abstract culture" out of the circle.
The first hot topic sparked by the show was to let the participating rappers line up for urine testing at the registration site, followed by the "secondary school outfits" of many rappers in the audition and fermented in Xiaohongshu. After the audition, one of Nomi's DISS songs "Thank God" unexpectedly became popular on Douyin. However, Nomi's popularity did not benefit "New Rap 2024", after all, "Thank God" was a product that Nomi made in anger after being eliminated from the show.
It wasn't until the day of the recording of the finals that "New Rap 2024", which had not been out of the circle during the broadcast, became a hot search again because of the beef between the Living Dead label and the Digighetto label, dominating social media such as Weibo and Douyin for two consecutive days.
It's a pity that these hits have nothing to do with "New Rap 2024" itself in the final analysis, you might as well assume that Nomi, Xie Di and Pharaoh participated in "Rap Dream Factory", and these hits can also accumulate on "Rap Dream Factory" at any time. The "New Rap" series is no longer the "comprehensive people" model it used to be, but "people praise the comprehensive".
There are both Jay Chou and Wang Hedi,
"Rap Dream Factory" is only fans still watching?
The problem of "Rap Dream Factory" is roughly the same as that of "New Rap 2024", it has never been able to dig out a new batch of rappers who are in charge of their own new stars, nor has they been able to create a rap stage that will circulate all over the Internet through these rappers.
On the one hand, the stage performance is the most intuitive part of the music comprehensive and the most able to attract the attention of the audience, and the wonderful stage performance can quickly catch the audience's attention and make the program gain higher attention; Stage performances, on the other hand, are easily edited into short videos that are widely disseminated on social media. If a performance clip sparks a lot of discussion and retweets, it will not only attract more viewers to watch the whole episode, but also increase the popularity of the show.
However, since the broadcast of "Rap Dream Factory" and "New Rap 2024", none of the stages have been out of the circle, but the guests participating in the show are constantly using their popularity to feed back the show. Among them, the biggest gimmick of "Rap Dream Factory" is to invite Jay Chou to join, for example, #GAI说周杰伦是音乐KING#, #周杰伦首次录制说唱节目#, #说唱梦工厂这期有周杰伦#等热搜话题.
In the show, the rappers participating in the competition and the label managers who guided the rappers have revealed that the original intention of coming to the show was to chase the star Jay Chou, jokingly saying that this variety show is a "fan meeting". In addition to Jay Chou, Wang Hedi's joining also fulfilled the wishes of some rappers, especially some female rappers, who shouted excitedly when they saw Wang Hedi's humanoid standing at the show, "Ahhh ”
And for many viewers, Jay Chou and Wang Hedi are also the fun of their comprehensive pursuit. However, Jay Chou and Wang Hedi are nominally guests of "Rap DreamWorks", but in fact they have not been stationed at the recording site of the variety show for a long time, resulting in some viewers specifically selecting the number of episodes in which Jay Chou and Wang Hedi appeared, which affected the average broadcast volume of "Rap DreamWorks".
Compared with iQiyi, Youku is a newcomer to the rap track, and has never launched any rap variety shows before. But the smart "Rap Dream Factory" has united with a kind of dream music D.M.G, and gathered a group of rappers who have risen since 2017, such as GAI Zhou Yan, VaVa, Mao Yanqi, Ai Re AIR, Bridge, Good Morning, Sheng Yu D-SHINE, etc., which is equivalent to robbing iQiyi's "source of life" from the source.
In terms of the concept of the program, "Rap Dream Factory" is also clearly different from "New Rap 2024", with the main theme of "Seeing China in Rap, Highlighting Cultural Charm and Confidence." "I hope that rap music can return to China's local heritage, with less English, more dialects, and no dirty words. GAI Zhou Yan also mentioned more than once in the show, "Ordinary people can also rap." ”
As a result, the audience saw the nearly 40-year-old tutoring school principal, nightclub hot mom, and school law student in "Rap Dream Factory...... In this way, the grassroots atmosphere of the program has become stronger, and the national character has been relatively enhanced, reflecting the inclusiveness of the music comprehensive more comprehensively. However, the result of the enhanced inclusiveness of rap variety shows is not the strengthening of vertical advantages, but the solidification of the audience chassis of "Rap Dream Factory", and the fan groups of Jay Chou, Wang Hedi and Dream Music have mastered the right to speak outside the show.
It is not so much that this is a rap variety show, but that this is a new season of "China's Got Talent" created with the theme of rap, but it is not as versatile and exciting as "China's Got Talent".
Messed up into a pot of porridge rap circle,
Is it really time to go back "underground"?
Pharaoh's DISS "Little Senior" is undoubtedly the most dazzling existence in the rap circle in the first half of this year, not only surpassing "New Rap 2024" in topicality, but also better than "Rap Dream Factory" in terms of communication breadth.
On June 16, members of the Living Dead Yang and Su released a new album "Ideal Country", in which the song "Muggle" was questioned by netizens because it rhymed "Digi" with "low-level" in the DISS rap group Digighetto. In the early morning of June 22, Digighetto members MacOvaSeas and Sake released the DISS song "Not Like Us", using the lyrics "Height is a disability, use body to find a sense of existence" directly pointed to Yang and Su's lack of rap strength and attract attention by fitness. On the afternoon of the same day, the Eight Thieves, a former member of the Living Dead, released "One Plus One is Less Than Two" to fight back.
At the same time, the two major rap labels have successively released sharp-tongued DISS songs, including "Inner Eight", "Corpse Freestyle", "Meet Sun Chenyu", "King and Little Soldier", "Idol and Fan", etc., officially opening the biggest beef in the rap circle this summer.
After Digighetto member tomboydontkill joins the fray, he satirizes Yang and Sue's old-fashioned songs in DISS, and mocks no nightclub willing to play Yang and Sue's songs, "You've listened to Yang and Sue, what else can I say." And in order to fight back against this DISS, Pharaoh released "Little Senior" through his Weibo account @殺人誑魔 Sage, ironizing Digighetto's music that can't be more earthy.
"Little Advanced" unexpectedly successfully appeared on Weibo hot search, this beef slowly deviated from the original track, and the rap of "one burst and exploded" evolved this music exchange into breaking news to each other, singers, fans and netizens successively exposed the black history of the two major labels, and even involved in socially sensitive events such as pornography, gambling and drugs.
Although a series of changes have brought huge attention to the rap circle that has been silent for a long time, and it has also brought traffic to "New Rap 2024", it has also further threatened the already precarious rap circle and faced the risk of "returning to the underground". For video platforms, the uncontrollability of the rap circle is one of the key factors hindering the development of rap variety shows, but paradoxically, this factor has also helped rap variety shows attract more pan-circle audiences.
While playing abstraction becomes the rapper's secret weapon, the pure beef between the living dead and the Digighetto awakens the rapper's dirt, pretend, and chaos, revealing the so-called "Harry Circle Normality". It's just that the "Harbin circle normality" is definitely not in line with the current mainstream values, so it can be seen that "New Rap 2024" and "Rap Dream Factory" are both committed to breaking this "normality".
In other words, a large part of the shortcomings and limitations of these two rap variety shows come from the shortcomings of the rap circle itself, no newcomers are out in the rap variety show because it is difficult for newcomers to get ahead in the current rap circle, and there are no rap songs with high popularity in rap variety shows, because there are not many rappers in the rap circle who are serious about making songs.
If there are "New Rap 2025" and "Rap DreamWorks 2" next summer, the weakness of rap variety shows will not improve, unless the market can wait for a rap newcomer who has truly changed the pattern of the rap circle.