Hip-Hop revolves around a couple of centrifugal themes: rebellion, sex, money, materialism/consumption, hoes and hustling. Another theme was added in the past 15 years, this would be addiction (junkie) rap.
A million beats are currently in existence that cover all of the aforementioned topics, WITH all types of flows. So originality gets shot in the face of this, I mean, can you really be original in beats or flows nowadays? Whatever flow you come up with or beat someone's done it before, often times better than you.
Naturally, the way to stand out is to contextualize (rap about rebellion, sex, money, materialism, hoes, hustling or addiction) the bars in your music so that it can be original. After all being a hustler today is different from being one back then. But from what I see kiddos ain't trynna do all that.
Most of them lean towards addiction rap (which is hard to contextualize since drugs pretty much do the same as before, unless you wanna rap about fentanyl).
And yet...so many could be rapping about 2025 scamming, 2025 car theft with new technology, 2025 OF pimping, etc... but choose not to, or maybe these rappers exist but they're off of my radar idk.
New nikkas could rap about Trump, or politics to lean towards the original theme/reason for hip-hop as dictated by public enemy (criticizing government), but I don't hear no YN's rapping about that either.
Could rap about mental health or gender identity...actually, I did hear a nice little bop about that, that asian dude kanthrast has a track called
neurodivergent which is pretty fresh and a perfect example of what I mean by originality in 2025.
Bottom line, there's still a lot to rap about, but it requires actually coming up with bars.