What Shitty Hip-Hop Fan Are You?

In reality, washed-up perpetual-twenty-somethings are mostly the same, brought up with unlimited data plans, 24-hour McDonalds and Pirate Bay, connected by a backlit screen enslavement in return for the feeling that someone somewhere is listening to them, that they have a voice.

How you use this voice is up to you. You’re able to revise a fully fledged character in the confines of saved drafts, believing that your choice to exist online, in real life, or both, will shape your identity. But rest assured, whether you choose to over-share, under-share, or completely shun the idea of entering text into a screen in favour of real life, someone out there in the world will be just as much of a shitty person as you are.

Why? Because stereotypes exist and almost everyone in the entire world falls into at least one category, even if they won’t believe it themselves. It’s our job to remind you that you’re not a unique little snowflake dancing on obscurity, you’re just a shitty human being with the same taste as hundreds of other people. We’ve done this before with What Your Shitty Music Taste Says About You, but this time we’re going deeper. We’re going into genres.

Rap fans are easy to stereotype because the majority never stop in their unrelenting quest to prove to the world that they listen to hip-hop. They’ll slather it over social networking timelines, boom it out of cars and phones, and inject its culture into their fashion choices, with each small-turn of sub-genre directing a slightly different path. Every type of rap music has a distinct fan-clique that follows it. Here are some of them:

THE CLASSICALLY IGNORANT RAP FAN

These are mostly sixth-formers, adulating an era they never experienced first-hand. Born in the mid-nineties and therefore not sentient until 2005, the classically ignorant rap fan will refuse modernity because duh, Ready to Die and Illmatic dropped in ’94 and they’re the only two records they’ll ever need. But rather than go hermetic into unreleased EPMD mixtapes, they actually just keep playing the same handful of tracks ripped from the radio stations on San Andreas and the Boys In The Hood OST. They’ll almost definitely fail to answer anything about the DNA of nineties hip-hop that can’t fit into a Yahoo Music listicle. If you’re lucky they’ll be able to pick out an Outkast track that isn’t “Ms Jackson”, “Hey Ya”, or “Roses”, but quiz them on other equally deserved pillar stone artists and collectives of the decade - Soulquarians, Diggin’ in the Crates, Hieroglyphics, or literally anyone that hasn’t been on a NOW compilation - and they’ll be left dumbfounded, mumbling something about how Nas changed the world.

THE INTERNET-BORN IDIOT

The Internet-Born Idiots are similar to the Classically Ignorant Rap Fan because they, too, treat the internet like toilet paper to their rumpapumping shit-stream of consciousness. But instead of using the past as a fleshlight, these guys think rap was born when A$AP first fingerbanged Iggy. Fondling their Twitter handle like an extended cultural relevance signifier, they’ll always have a screen name that references the title of an internet-success led rapper, because why not have a name that won't make sense to anyone outside of a small niche clique? Poppin’ a molly and sweatin’ with Trinidad James, now they’re celebrating Coke Boys ‘n’ Young Thug and pontificating on how the “Versace” remix “changed America”. If a cultural event happens, spot the idiots on your timeline, subbing in a vaguely entertaining meme-centric joke - Sorry, guy who died from Neknominate BUT… Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time! - to refer to a completely unrelated story in the hope that someone validates their existence before deleting everything when it only receives a single favourite from a spam account.

ALL-LYRICS-EVERYTHING

Some fans obsess over the words in rap music like A-Level Literature teachers obsess over the collected work of Yeats. That’s fine up to a point, because no one wants to be the dweeb walking round the corridors shouting “I woke up to a new bukake”. But without song-structure, production, flow, a hook, and everything else that makes a good song a great song, you’ve just got a snap-backed fool who knows how to use rhymezone.com talking nothing about nothing. Still, a community exists that’ll have you believe the world has no taste because their favourite song that includes plenty of multi-bars, metaphors and words that require a dictionary has only been listened to by five people. Thoughtful but overbearing, they’ll circle-jerk to the parlance of MF DOOM, could write academia on Aesop Rock and will belligerently negate their friend’s music taste for not agreeing that Atmosphere are any good. Dropping knowledge is cool because it requires thought, which is why All-Lyrics-Everything fans posit their identity above listening to Chief Keef and Rich Homie Quan, instead mostly using obscure laws of syntax to try convince people that Sage Francis is actually good.

TURNT UP STUDENTS

Turnt Up rap fans are too busy listening to DJ tagged tracks to care about lyrics that can’t be repeated four times in a row. Find them doled up in Commes Des Fuckdown, replacing vowels with consonants in their Twitter bio for no reason until TRAP GOD reads like TRVP GWD. To them, life is a blockbuster and emotions are Michael Bayed into the back of a dreamt up Maybach suicide, ashing blunts into one of many empty bottles of Tanqueray. In reality though they’re just reloading an imaginary glock on the dance-floor at a Student Union trap night that plays Migos’ “Hannah Montana” on constant rotation, drinking warm pints of Fosters and puffing Mayfairs in a designated smoking area. So, basically, turnt up to the point of Healthy and Safety. Which is definitely what all of Trap Lord is about, right?

THE MIDDLE CLASS KID FROM THE HOOD

“Nah mean, sahn”, types a pale-faced young adult with all the gall of a street-fiend hustling on the corner of Busta Rhymes’ spot in Brooklyn, assumedly forgetting that he’s typing into the Hip Hop Heads subreddit from a Macbook Pro situated in Esher. This is the Middle Class Kid who likes to believe they’re from the hood, despite having a fridge full of Innocent fruit juice and a TV with all the Sky+ packages. They spend every night puffing on copious amounts of a plant they call piff in a park in a Neighbourhood Watch suburb and the most they know about hip-hop comes from the blog-centric artists that they picked up on after trading in a pair of boat shoes from Superdry for five snapbacks in different colours.

THIRSTY THIRSTY THIRSTY

It’s easy to tell when a rapper is on their promo game, because they’ll threaten your timeline with shout-outs from people that literally matter to no one outside of their immediate friendship group. Clicking on some of these retweets you’ll be transported to a whole new portal of the web where people spend every second of every day tweeting rappers asking for a RT, a follow, a shout-out, a dick-suck or a titty-fuck to validate their shitty existence. Sort of like a rap-game version of the people that reply to every Obama tweet asking for a follow-back without realising that the lizards bought him a shed-load of followers. Just look at all the eggs in his following list. What an amateur. This crew aren’t just restricted to the internet. You can find them lingering around whatever blog-current rapper or loosely connected friend is currently playing a low-key show in the hope of getting a picture that they’ll simultaneously post to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They’re probably followed by Lil B and despite never creating anything they’ll roll with the job title of Creative, which is actually a perfect signal for the rest of the working world, thanks!

THE CONSPIRACY THEORIST

Gangster rap was created by the FBI, Dr Dre invented Burning Man, and yes, Biggie Smalls and Tupac are 100%, no arguments, sunning themselves on a beach in the South Pacific. Sure, there are no definite sources, but what do you expect, that’s the government. Born out of an infatuation for YouTube videos that prove Rihanna is part of the illuminati because in a freeze-frame of “Umbrella” you can see that a folded umbrella is in the exact shape of a triangle, they’ll have a story for everything. Really though, the main conspiracy is that rappers put triangles in their videos for any reason other than fucking with people like this.

THE KANYE STAN

This is your boy and although he can clearly talk enough for himself, Kanye Stans will infinitely big him up. Catch them on KanyeToThe.com, mutually masturbating to the work of Yeezy, debating whether they could date someone who hated Kanye, and arguing over whether Mike Dean actually visits the forum.

THE DRAKE FAN

With the release of Nothing Was The Same, Drake is finally up there in the ultimate fan stakes despite never producing anything that has changed the face of music. This is a dangerous place. Noisey’s Drew Millard tattooed a Drake lyric on his body and now he hates himself.

THE ORIGINAL STAN

But really, the Eminem Stan is still the Original Stan, proving that every other Stan is just a wetty with a keyboard, rather than a psychopath with deep underlying personality issues and a cocktail of pills, which really, is what it’s all about. You’re not a real fan until you’ve made the FBI monitor your hero.

THE FIRST TIME FAN AND LONG TERM HATER

Dedicating your time to hating is solely a hip-hop and Bieber/Directioner trait. You don’t get Bombay Bicycle Club fans sending death threats to the Maccabees. But the first-time fan and long-term hater is almost applicable to any genre of music. They’ll finger-point the mainstream as the reason why their favourite artist is only listened to by five people, but as soon as they actually do get famous, they’ll ditch them and hate everything like, are you an idiot? This group of people will also believe that artists owe them something, vehemently hating Mac Miller for going psychedelic or Kanye for not re-making “Through The Wire” like they want people to never change and stay the same forever.

RURAL UK HIP HOP HEAD

Like a properly weighed bag of Cheese or a can of fizzy Ribena, UK Hip Hop Heads are hard to find, probably because they’re too stoned to break out of their duvet den of Chilli Heatwave Doritos and discarded Juicy Jays wrappers. Mostly found on the cul-de-sac of provincial towns far from London, they’ll support UK Hip Hop forever because they’re too rural for grime music, and too British for boombap. Find them on your Facebook, incessantly uploading Jump Off TV and High Focus videos, or driving down the A30 in a hot-boxed Nissan on the way to Londis to buy bare munch. When it gets to Summer time, they’ll hit up a pill-heavy festival like Global Gathering, a scene best summed up by UKHH God Verb T in 2013 cut “Old and Grumpy” with the lyric: “Sitting spaced out / confusing your mind / there must be better things you can do with your time. You’re getting fucked up / cool, that’s exciting. Gang of weird kids on horse tranquilizers” - confirmation that at least someone involved is aware.

GRIME’S LAST SUPPORTERS

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment that grime died; Dizzee collaborating with a ginger-haired real-life painting called Florence, Skepta jumping on a track with Diddy, every song released since 2006 being shit - but Grime fans believe in eternity. To them, it’s like they’re in a prolonged state of mourning, refusing to visit a morgue every once in a while with Boy in Da Corner and Wiley’s greatest Westwood freestyle in hand, but continuing to live and breathe as though nothing has happened. Pumping around a rotating treadmill of the same handful of artists, they’ll tell you that Meridian Dan’s “German Whip” isn’t the start of a grime resurgence because raw grime beats and MC’s never left, open your eyes. Cute, because we can all only strive to see everything in existence with as much positive beauty as someone who thinks this year is Scrufizzer’s year (despite saying the same thing last year, and the year before).

Follow Ryan on Twitter: @RyanBassil

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