Making new songs from a favourite rapper’s offcuts has delighted fans and angered artists. But is it so very far from hip-hop’s roots?
When a new song by the Atlanta rapper Playboi Carti emerges, the response from fans is frenzied: last year, a tune called Minute Maid appeared on
YouTube and quickly racked up several million views, many fans hailing it as an instant classic. However, Playboi Carti had almost nothing to do with the song. While his voice was on it, he wasn’t involved with its production. In fact, at the moment of release he didn’t even know it existed.
Minute Maid is an example of a bizarre and engrossing new phenomenon in hip-hop: a work made not by the artist, but by one of their fans, and indistinguishable from the genuine article. Elements of tracks will leak from a studio session, usually via engineers or hangers-on, and these “snippets” of unfinished material make their way to listeners.