Nishad+P’s+2018+OpEd+Article

=How Lil Pump Saved the Hip Hop Community, and the Entire Luxury Goods Market=



Popular Hip-Hop artist Lil Pump, has disrupted the entire Hip-Hop community with his use of repeating words and catchy beats. At only 17 years old he has surrounded himself with drugs, money, women, luxury brands and many other popular themes of the Hip Hop community. This has brought much scrutiny from older more traditional artists and older people witnessing this new wave of culture. I love the dude. He’s starting a new wave by doing things he likes and he’s damn good at it too. Not good at rapping necessarily, but since his name is still in the headlines and with his songs individually racking up hundreds of millions of plays, he’s killing the game. I like some of his songs, but it isn’t something to be proud of. Pump’s songs are catchy, but his lyrics do have the tendency to lower one’s IQ. However, he has done things many people don’t realize. His online presence and influence has more than benefited just himself. He has saved the entire Hip-Hop community. With Spotify filing for IPO and analysts realizing that their main competition is the bigger record labels, signing of new straight off the block nearly unheard of artists will be even more rare.

However, there is one platform that helped with the discovery of newer artists. SoundCloud is a platform where anyone can post audio files as a type of Twitter-style interface. In late 2016, SoundCloud was faced with a problem: shorthand of capital. It needed a solution quickly, and just as multiple artists discussed whether or not to buy it out, the buy out deal eventually dissolved into nothing. Once again there was a popular media platform that was rendered profitless; the same fate as Vine. However, in early 2017, “mumble rap” artists such as Pump, started to rack millions of plays on the platform. This boosted the media platforms traffic and with the introduction of a premium service, which saved the platform and the entire next generation of Hip-Hop artists. But Pump has done more than that. The luxury goods market owes him one. Post 2008 recession, the entire American economy had a noticeable shift. Gone was the lavish lifestyles of the early 2000s. Enter stage right, the “Self-Investment Economy”. Suddenly a wave of services such as juice bars, yoga studios, spinning classes, learning services, and other self-investment services started to appear. This hampered the luxury good market and it’s revenue was slowing slipping away to other smaller boutique companies promising to better the human, not better dress the human. Doomsday for high end brands seemed imminent. Suddenly new age rap started to develop a trend within lyrics and advertising. Gone were the days of baggy pants and durags taking the front page, and suddenly there was the bragging of owning luxury cars, clothes, and accessories. This was made clear that this was the new wave with Pump’s dropping of “Gucci Gang” a song that says those two words as seen a total of 53 times. This is seen with other rappers jumping on the wave of high tabs and extravagance. In 2016 Gucci’s profits totaled about 1.56 billion dollars. Next year in 2017 their profits jumped over 40% to 2.62 billion, perfectly inline with the “mumble rap” (Pump’s style) trend. With free advertising on social media and within artists lyrics, young money was churning the luxury engine once more. Gucci was taking part in an economical dream, selling Veblen goods. Veblen goods are luxury items that as the demand rises, so does it’s price. A complete contradiction of the “law of demand”.

The luxury good market is a huge one. Not only does it show the true capitalist means of first world countries, but through trickle down of revenue and services it contributes billions to the world markets. Lil Pump started a wave that helped millions. I do believe a creation of national holiday “Pump Day” and a carving of his face on Mount Rushmore is the next logical step. As Pump so brightfully puts it, “Esketit”.