Those kids arenвЂ™t trying to bring their genre back to the fundamentals. The SoundCloud kids like to call themselves вЂњunderground hip-hop,вЂќ and they clearly mean it in the Three 6 sense, not in the Rawkus Records sense. Three 6 were even moshing in their videos back when the only rap groups doing it were, like, Onyx and Flatlinerz. In the music that Three 6 Mafia were making in the вЂ™90s, you can hear everything that makes the current SoundCloud rap wave so different from what came immediately before: The violence, the tension, the rushed and sing-songy cadences, the lo-fi production values, the sense of mystery and chaos and darkness. And of the exceptions, nobody looms taller than Three 6 Mafia. There are older artists who exist as beacons to those kids, guiding lights who were showing the same fuck-everything impulses years before the rest of the world caught up.

But as with punk rock, there are exceptions. But thereвЂ™s something similar in its energy, in its willful assholery, and in its near-total rejection of all the finery of whatвЂ™s come before. ItвЂ™s too small, too referential, frankly too dumb to resonate the same way. The current SoundCloud-rap boom is not the fucking same thing as punk rock. In David Bowie and Iggy Pop and Hawkwind and Slade, the punks heard kindred spirits, people whose motivations were the same as their own. But those punk kids didnвЂ™t hate every band that had come before.

Johnny Rotten famously wore an вЂњI hate Pink FloydвЂќ shirt to his Sex Pistols audition, and the entire movement existed in direct opposition to the prevailing winds of rock history. The first wave of UK punk was a big, loud, obnoxious negation of almost everything that had come before, of all the tasteful вЂ™70s stuff that had been in the air.

Three 6 mafia t shirt