Vocal and sometimes controversial South African media personality and former MTVBase VJ Sizwe Dhlomo has expressed his dissatisfaction with the state of the hip hop genre in South Africa amidst the rise of the Amapiano wave.
The hip hop genre in SA has seen a steady decline in the past few years, with some rappers even branching out into other genres like Amapiano and Gqom and some even giving up rapping totally to focus on the more commercial genres.
Rappers like Cassper Nyovest, Blxckie, and Reason are very prominent in the Amapiano space, so much so that Blxckie played in the Amapiano team against the hip hop team during the celebrity charity match that was played in honour of Riky Rick.
Reason has taken a new moniker to accommodate his new career as an Amapiano artist, he is now known as Sizwe Alakine.
Hip Hop used to be the most commercial and biggest genre in the country from the emergence of the AKA and Cassper era 2011-14 to the era of Nasty C and A-Reece (2016). After the pandemic, the genre has lost its attraction to Amapiano and Gqom and other dance-based genres.
https://twitter.com/SizweDhlomo/status/1553698193476567040
Following a tweet by Dhlomo, fans posited that the beef era helped propel both Nyovest and Forbes to great heights but it was not sustainable to keep the whole genre up for long and that Amapiano is so big because the artists collaborate heavily amongst each other, while said hip hop fell because the rappers are not authentically South African and are trying to copy American rappers.
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