Friday Roundup: Hip-Hop Is Dead Internet Discourse

Is our cultural zeitgeist the byproduct of an auction ground?

This week, Gamma CEO Larry Jackson took time off from fueling Kanye’s fraught redemption arc to file a lawsuit in New York Civil Court seeking to uncover the identity of whoever’s behind two sites calling him a fraud. Music Business Worldwide reports that the sites accuse “SCAMMA” of buying bots and inflating sales for Kanye, Mariah Carey, and Usher, as well as using the money he raised for Gamma, a multimedia company founded in 2023, on a lavish lifestyle. I’m not sure what to believe, which feels like a pretty static state these days.

Earlier this week, Trevor Noah shared a clip from his podcast about a service that artists pay to manufacture their online hype, creating a world where Tressie McMillan Cotton concluded we have “a false idea of what trends are.” In April, marketing agency Chaotic Good revealed their “narrative marketing” approach, and we learned that some of the discourse around their clients, like rock band Geese, is manufactured. Journalist Cassidy Sollazzo recently wrote a Fader report about marketing agencies that work with prominent social media accounts to promote their clients, creating an unpleasant reality where trending social media accounts “have become passive channels for music marketing without audiences even realizing it.” Publicist Cam Litchmore noted, “Everything appears in the same feed: a fan account, a critic, an algorithm-laced playlist.”

Marketing studies have revealed that Gen Z is nonplussed by traditional advertising. They’re the only generation to date who were born into this wired world, and simply don’t buy into traditional digital advertising techniques. Apparently, to reach them, marketing companies are straight-up hiding advertisements in fandom.

The dead internet theory surmises that AI and bots have replaced organic digital engagement. And now, even the humans we see may have ulterior motives. Which media personalities are sharing their real opinion, and who’s spewing payola-sponsored marching orders? What’s buzzing or fading organically? How much can we trust sales figures in an era of botting? The barrage of promo and smear campaigns running these days makes it very difficult to have an accurate assessment of an already fragmented music scene. The algorithm is fractured into an incalculable number of microscenes, and impure, paid-for opinions have corroded many of them; is our cultural zeitgeist the byproduct of an auction ground? Maybe capitalism’s done it again.

This digital warfare derives from the political arena. Russian intelligence has been terrorizing America for decades, including on the digital stage. They got caught vying to influence the 2016 and 2024 Presidential elections by creating fake social media accounts to steer public sentiment. And researchers John D. Gallacher and Marc W. Heerdink revealed how Russia created fake pro- and anti- Black Lives Matter accounts to inflame discord between the people and the establishment. In 2010, the United States Senate Intelligence Committee alleged that the Russian firm Internet Research Agency crafted a social media campaign to suppress the Black vote in America. The Trump administration has adopted the practice, repeatedly being exposed for using pro-MAGA bots on social media.

Some evil geniuses in the marketing world saw how effective this digital manipulation was and decided to use it for pop culture. Who knows when it first became standard practice, but we certainly can’t take anything at face value in 2026.

Drake’s recent trio of albums debuted in the Billboard 200 top three. As I’ve said previously, this album barrage is a grand-scale version of what he did in 2018 with Scorpion. After Pusha T put him on the Summer Jam screen in blackface, he sought to offset the sting of defeat with sheer volume. Like his 100gigs data dump, his recent trilogy put too much on our headtop. But that inundation had also stirred incessant engagement, all creating the illusion that Drake’s the only topic worth discussing.

But Twitter user JoeCatt made a thread (and TikTok video) breaking down the “simulated relevance” by apparently buying bots to Google search him thousands of times at both 3 pm and 11 pm. This comes after he sued UMG for allegedly inflating “Not Like Us” sales figures and made a big show of blowing up a botfarm at the end of his last ICEMAN livestream. Maybe he got all of his personal use out of it and needed to destroy the evidence. It all brings to mind what 50 Cent said about the suit: “they did everything Drake sayin’ they did. But, they did it for Drake too.”

This week, Drake was also the center of another alarming development that corrupts discourse: social media accounts that straight-up lie. A rumor emerged that UMG was trying to force Drake to reverse his long-held anti-Grammy stance and submit his recent albums for award consideration. People discussed it all day, with not enough people questioning if it was even true. It turns out that it was posted by a Twitter account that intentionally falsifies stories for engagement.

Rap news accounts on social media move in scary, suspicious accordance with each other, and few, if any, of them verify information before posting it. For them, staying in the algorithmic fray trumps truth. If they’re wrong, they’ll just delete the post; they’ll rarely issue a correction. But even if they delete their lies, it’s often too late to undo the harm done. I see their “effectiveness” every time I correct a friend who tells me “I heard” an unfounded rumor that was shared online. How much of our perception of musicians is fueled by lies?

Schools have to make media literacy a mandatory part of the curriculum. But even if that happens, those learned music fans will have to ponder whether what they’re consuming is paid for. This dynamic should be a boon for legacy media, which ostensibly has more audience trust than a random social media account. But those outlets have become just as bad about chasing the algorithm.

It feels like all this nefarious marketing is fishing for the fan who doesn’t do music discovery and needs reasons beyond the music to invest in an artist. But that cohort has already done immeasurable harm to hip-hop discourse. Many of us simply love good music and could do without the armchair A&Ring, obsession with numbers, and conversations focused on everything but the quality of the music. If we can’t trust the root of the hype and hysteria online, we should probably devalue it altogether.

In the meantime, the internet’s oversaturation has made artists and marketers mutually desperate to cut through the noise. And most people running culture accounts (or who just have a lot of followers) don’t see anything wrong with getting a bag. When that dynamic compounds into hundreds, if not thousands of people making covert marketing deals, it results in today’s a false algorithm.

More Thoughts

What will Jay-Z’s Roots Picnic set be like? I’m headed to the festival this weekend. I’m very curious what his setlist will be ahead of his upcoming Yankee Stadium shows. I also wonder if he’ll debut new music and/or diss Drake? This reminds me of seeing Kendrick Lamar’s 2021 Day N Vegas set, which was his first performance in years, right when the rumors of a post-DAMN project were at a fever pitch. Everyone was hoping for a new song, but the set was incredible regardless. Anyway, watch this space for my Jay-Z review.

If you’re looking for some new artists to check out, Alchemist just put hundreds of them in one place on Twitter.

Mark Zuckerberg recently rolled out paid subscription plans for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Capitalists will find any kind of way to keep nibbling at consumers’ pockets. The worst part about it is that there will be people who’ll say, “what, you don’t have $4?” missing the entire point.

There’s no smooth transition into this, but unfortunately, it seems like another Black person, 16-year-old Juliana Nzita, may have been lynched this week in Charlotte. What infuriates me the most, besides this actually still occurring, is how rarely these stories make the mainstream news cycle. RIP to her.