2025 Was the Year Hip-Hop Hit the Reset Button

We don’t always feel cycles; we live through them. Sunsets on this spinning rock we inhabit aren’t the end of days — they’re just signs of another trip around the sun, a reset. Rap is no different; it’s just our revolutions take longer than 24 hours. And 2025 proved that.

Depending on how deeply you’re immersed in hip-hop culture, 2025 may have felt like any other year. Drake’s streaming supremacy continued. Travis Scott made an earth-shattering $250 Million on the road by opening a portal to a rage dystopia. Women MCs soundtracked our summer. Yet, one moment made everyone rethink hip-hop’s cultural importance. A lightbulb moment that was likely unexpected. On the Billboard Hot 100 chart, dated Oct. 25, 2025, rap music’s presence was noticeably absent for the first time in over 30 years.

Danny Brown framed it as hip-hop returning its roots, telling Billboard, “To me that sounds like a reset is happening, sounds like a cleansing.” If you truly were immersed in what was happening in hip-hop this year, you felt that reset — even if a full descent to the underground is a bit of an exaggeration. 

For decades, the album was king. Everyone wanted a hit record. It was the golden ticket. And before any artist could get a check for an Instagram post promoting erectile dysfunction medication, and monetize every opinion imaginable, the album was both a rite of passage and a key revenue generator. Raw and unconventional albums like Redman’s zany 1994 classic Dare Iz a Darkside could land in the top 15 of the Billboard 200 without having a single song chart on the Hot 100. RZA crafted solo albums from Wu-Tang Clan with the intentionality of a Marvel Cinematic Universe. Wyclef Jean allegedly threatened Jesse Washington, founding editor-in-chief of VIBE spinoff Blaze, to prevent him from releasing a bad review of an album the Fugees member produced. One of Jay-Z’s most scathing disses to Nas on “Takeover” was about how he only made one hot album in a decade, an exaggeration of a critique hip-hop fans shared at the time.

There was once a balance between commerce and art. That shifted dramatically when the playing field moved to streaming, ultimately falling into TikTok’s hands by the early 2020s.

“We’ve been getting a lot of music that’s bulls**t,” journalist Rob Markman told Okayplayer. “We were in an era where people were making songs for TikTok. TikTok is 30 seconds. People were literally making songs like, ‘I just need a catchy 30 seconds. F**k whatever else the rest of the song is. Let me just blow up on TikTok.’ That intention didn’t make for the best music.”

When hip-hop climbed past rock as the most popular music genre in 2018, rap transmuted into a numbers game. Next thing you know, fans were inundated with bloated albums engineered to generate as many streaming-equivalent album sales and songs that offered very little value beyond their chorus. Virality can only win the race against longevity for so long — and no music act embodied a return to traditional hip-hop values in 2025 more than Clipse.

Their long-awaited album, Let God Sort Em Out, delivered 13 smartly constructed songs, cohesively produced and stitched together by Pharrell Williams. Virginia’s finest literal bromance confronted grief with unflinching honesty, rejected content creation culture with disdain, and honored elevated traditional hip-hop songs with lyrical reverence. No rap album this year felt more culturally significant than their first in 16 years. 

“People just want something real after a while,” Markman explains. “We’ve gotten bulls**t for so long, people crave something real. The pendulum eventually has to swing. [In ’97], when Puff [Daddy] was on top, everything was shiny and dancing. Then comes DMX with grimy street rap. That resonated because there was a void.”

Beyond the music, Clipse created an imprint. Maybe even musical core memories for some, which is a rare feat in an era when history often moves at the speed of a swipe. Bianca Edwards, Vice President of Marketing at Roc Nation, and product manager for Clipse, notes, “It took an entire dream team to pull off what we pulled off for Clipse.” 

The duo intentionally prioritized insightful, in-depth conversations with GQ, The New York Times, Complex, Rolling Stone, Billboard and Apple Music at a time when rappers alienated traditional journalists in favor of streamers and podcasters. They rapped at The Vatican. Their drug-fueled “F.I.C.O.” video was promoted on the iconic digital display on the Nasdaq MarketSite building in Times Square. They had artful music videos that told stories rather than just fed attention spans. They toured packed venues across the country. And most of that entire rollout was meticulously planned months before we even knew Let God Sort Em Out existed. 

“This isn’t about nostalgia because when you look at the concerts, in any city, you’ll see people in their late 40s, and you’ll see kids,” Edwards said. “At the Hot 97 block party the Clipse did, there were 12-year-old kids rapping the lyrics. It wasn’t just nostalgia. It was great music coupled with the perfect execution.”

Even with hip-hop’s global footprint ensuring a moment like Clipse’s resonates far beyond its core audience, their commitment to the genre’s foundation, without the boost of major Billboard success, made their impact feel deeply embedded and largely celebrated within the culture itself. That’s the same feeling I got when Joey Bada$$ lit the match on the modern-day East Coast versus West Coast battle (really just Joey against the West) in the Red Bull Spiral Freestyle cypher. After Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s lyrical war was co-opted by everyone from the Oscars and the Emmys, to the United States men's national basketball team at the 2024 Summer Olympics, it was refreshing to see mostly hip-hop fans turning each diss song into a main event.

The same goes for Nas and Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It series, which featured the release of seven albums hip-hop fans had been dreaming of for years: Slick Rick’s return after 26 years, a new Big L opus more than two decades in the making, Mobb Deep’s first album since Prodigy’s death, De La Soul’s first in nearly a 10 years, Ghostface’s sequel to his 2000 landmark Supreme Clientele, Raekwon’s first album in 8 years, and the long-rumored Nas and DJ Premier collaboration that seems like it took an entire generation to materialize.

Outside of Mobb Deep’s Infinite and potentially Nas and DJ Premier’s Light-Years, most of these albums didn’t touch the Billboard 200 or produce conventional hits. Yet pressing play reveals the beauty of an era when hip-hop thrived without commercial expectation or ambiguous markers for success. Faith Newman, one of the first five employees at Def Jam back in 1987, remembers that time before hip-hop was a mainstay on the Top 40, when some of the best hip-hop music was only consumed by those who truly loved the culture enough to find it.

“What they were doing at Black radio at the time was very entrenched,” Newman shares. “The only time they allowed hip-hop to be played was on Mr. Magic and DJ Red Alert’s shows. That was the only time you could hear it on the radio. So, of course, you’d tape everything off of the mixshows. I remember Russell [Simmons] always having arguments with people at WBLS and KISS [FM] about why they weren’t playing their records.”

Obviously, the days of hip-hop being a secret whispered loudly among those in the know are long gone. But, 2025 captured that essence of cultural authenticity, even if the mainstream didn’t always acknowledge it, see its value, or impact. Newman, now the Executive Vice President of A&R and Catalog Development at Reservoir Media — an independent music rights company — saw firsthand how a strong appetite for legacy hip-hop remains, even if it didn’t make the headlines. 

“I did a deal for a piece of Marley Marl’s catalog,” Newman says. “‘Mama Said Knock You Out’ alone sync activity is off the charts. He recouped his deal quickly off of syncs that we got for that. That was this year.”

This is why culture can’t be quantified, especially using metrics that constantly shift over time. Hip-Hop not having a song in the Billboard Top 40 wasn’t a sign of the genre’s waning popularity; it was a sign of Billboard adjusting to a changing consumption pattern. That same week, Billboard introduced new rules for recurrent songs, removing tracks that had stagnated on the charts beyond a certain timeframe or position. 

Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” which sat at No. 38 a week prior, was removed due to this new rule, not audience disinterest. That technicality alone explains hip-hop’s brief absence from the Top 40.

If 2025, and specifically the overreaction to the Billboard charts, did anything, it reminded us that hip-hop is more than something you can buy. During a recent conversation on the platform PLLRS at SoHo Works in Dumbo, Brooklyn, Styles P summed it up perfectly.

“It hit a reset button for rap, not hip-hop,” Styles said. “Rap is worrying about what’s on the charts, worrying who sold what, who’s doing this and who’s doing what. We often confuse hip-hop with rap. We confuse corporate with culture. Rap is done. Hip-hop is lived.”

And the world keeps spinning.