Mumble Rap: New Wave of Hip-Hop

The year is 2017, and along with evrything else in the world music is rapdily evolving. Hip-Hop/Rap music is the most obvious example of this. Rap seems like its becoming more and more intelligible. I'ts commonly known as 'mumble rap'. Urban Dictionary defines mumble rap as, "A style of rap that originated in the South and spread to other places like Chicago and the New York/New Jersey area. The style usually consists of "mumbling" rap lyrics and sacrificing pronunciation clarity. The mumble style likely is influenced from the following elements: the Southern drawl & pronunciation, the drinking of the drug "lean" which can slur speech patterns, and the wearing of gold teeth which affects pronunciation."
 Although this style of rapping is becoming extremely popular, it's still not gaining a whole lot of respect from the Hip-Hop community. Hip-Hop radio stations have a part in this too. Lil Yachty was highly criticized for his appearence on Hot 97 FM radio where they often play a beat and ask their guests to freestyle. Freestyling is when rappers rap along to a beat and makeup the lyrics as they go and is a very cherished pratice in Hip-Hop/Rap's history.  Lil Yachty Struggled behind the mic and didn't really know what to say. Twitter blew up making fun of him and questioning his status as a rapper. He has also been criticized for saying he doesn't like one of the most respected names in Hip-Hop history, The Notorious B.I.G.'s music. Because of this mumble rappers are called disrespectful and criticized for not recognizing the roots of Hip-Hop. Lil Yachty later was feautured on the song 'Neon Lights' by Taylor Bennett and before his verse said, "(I'm tired of people) talkin' 'bout 'this is the way you got to do it', and you go to respect this type of person, and you got to listen to that type of person. I'm doing it the way I wanna do it."
But even more of this generation of rappers aren't freestyling, and i don't think they need to. No matter how much heat rappers like Lil Yachty take for being different, they are still selling music and charting on Billboard. Old school Hip-Hop fans might not like their methods and that includes me a lot of the time, but they have that artistic freedom and they should be able to make music the way they want. Rapper Ugly God talks about Lil Yachty's hate, saying, "They’ll talk so much stuff about his music, and then he’ll drop more music. And they’ll talk (smack) about that. What doesn’t make sense to me, if you feel like he’s trash, why (would you) listen to something else he dropped? If you hate it, you wouldn’t even pay any mind or even pay attention to him.”
The first time an old school rapper criticized the new wave of the genre, was Ice-T in 2008. Ice-T let his feelings towards Soulja Boy's hit 'Crank That (Soulja Boy)' by saying, "That (guy) single handedly killed Hip-Hop." Soulja Boy was only seventeen at the time.
Is this new movement of Hip-Hop/Rap justified by the sound simply changing? Or is it disrespectful for these new rappers to say old music is wack and they're music is better? I think you could even argue that it's changing so much that it should be considered it's own genre and not Hip-Hop.

Sources

http://hiphopdx.com/news/id.42631/title.ugly-god-on-mumble-rap-its-a-disrespectful-word

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7O9gnurSB8

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Mumble%20Rap

http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/7625631/rise-of-mumble-rap-lyricism-2016

Bennett, Taylor. "Neon Lights." By Taylor Bennett. Restoration of an American Idol. Tay Bennett Entertainment, 2017. LP.