What Makes A Great Rap Show? Depends On Your Age

My only Rolling Loud attendance was in New York City in 2021. I remember the weekend for a constant overcast, introductions to TiaCorine and CEO Trayle, and being disappointed by one of rap’s biggest emerging superstars.  

During night two, I walked past Playboi Carti’s set on the way to the concession stand. Up to that point, I liked some of his singles when I heard them, but didn’t consider myself a huge fan. And what I saw from his performance didn’t do much to win me over. 

Dodging rain puddles and empty food containers in the Citi Field parking lot, I don’t know what was making me cringe more: how messy my Oreo 4s were getting, or what I perceived as a lack of stage presence during Carti’s set. He was shrieking over synth blips and seemingly deciding which phrases he wanted to recite over his backing vocals at random. 

Maybe he was really high, I thought. Perhaps he’s so enamored with how he sounded on the record that he decided to be his own hypeman. Whatever the case, he didn’t offer much in the way of a vocal performance. But the crowd was having the time of their life. I didn’t hear any booing or echoes of “what the hell is going on?”

Standing in front of a flickering black-and-white screen, it looked like he could’ve been flying through a lightning storm as he swayed with his arms outstretched like the overlord of sweaty, overcaffeinated teenagers. “They don’t know any better,” I thought, with a condescension I didn’t recognize at the time. To me, his “performance” was little more than a karaoke set. But the kids who were too busy moshing to watch him rap didn’t mind. At the time I didn’t ask myself, “why not?” I see rap purists lambasting rage rap shows all the time, but the conversation never includes the core fans. So I decided to change that.

Recently, I spoke with a couple of Gen Z rap fans about their expectations of a live rap performance. I also talked to the Wu-Tang Clan’s Inspectah Deck, who told me about his tenets of a good live show. To him, a solid live rap set comes down to a combination of diction and physical charisma. 

“If you stand onstage and you got a wack stage presence, and you're not delivering your lyrics with authority and things like that, man, you'll get booed,” the rap legend tells me during a Google Meet interview we’re conducting as he cruises through New York to promote his upcoming album, Dragon’s Breath. But it doesn’t seem like lyrical delivery is even in the top 10 of priorities for rage rappers or their fans. As for stage presence … it just depends on how you define “presence.” 

For his part, Antonio Johri, a 23-year-old journalist, says he doesn’t hold a rage rapper to the same standard as Kendrick Lamar or Drake, and generally has fun at their shows. He rejected my premise of a generational dip in performance craft. 

“It goes into a bigger meta of how people perform,” he contends. “A lot of people [are] like ‘This looks low effort.’ There's a difference between low effort and intentional minimalism when it comes to performing. If a ton of kids are coming here to mosh, I'm not expecting Ken Carson to go bar for bar with his backing track or [have] no backing track at all. I'm just expecting him to bring the energy to the show.” For Johri, a live show is strictly as good as the energy an artist radiates from the stage. He credits Travis Scott and Carti as some of his favorite live shows ever. 

Sixteen-year-old Leo Shachtman has been to “10 to 12” shows, from Kendrick Lamar to the recent 2Slimey concert at New York’s Gramercy Theatre. For him, an artist’s stage presence comes second to him having a good time with friends. “I think the underground's beats are so otherworldly and phenomenal [that] the vocals don't need to be doing the heavy lifting,” he says. “I prefer it when you're singing along. But it’s almost as good when the whole crowd is singing to the backing track [with the] 808 blasting.”

When Shachtman speaks of “the underground,” he’s specifically referring to a rage rap scene where all roads lead back to Carti. Carti forged a path for a scene of rockstar-ideating rappers screaming their way to cult fandom over rambunctious synth compositions and intentionally distorted 808s. This scene has taken the mantle from snap rap and “mumble rap” as hip-hop purists’ main source of derision. And that consternation has now extended into their live show.

Both Johri and Shachtman say that their ideal live show experience is a smaller, intimate room where the frenzied energy more easily surges the room. But they’re not in complete lockstep. Both saw Playboi Carti’s 2025 Antagonist tour stop at Barclays. Shachtman says that he couldn’t get all the way into it because he was in the stands, while Johri had a pleasant experience because of Carti’s presence. Shachtman doesn’t have many requirements for a fun show experience beyond loud music and room to mosh with his friends, while Johri derives his enjoyment from mirroring the artist’s energy. He thumbs-downed a show from a well-known Future offshoot who stood stationary onstage while his songs blared over the speaker. “I was like, damn, like there's really nothing happening,” he recalls. 

Backing vocals are generally viewed as a lazy no-no, but Johri says he sees them as “a north star” for rage rappers trying to orient themselves throughout the show. A Nas or Kendrick Lamar show consists of them dropping into almost every song after 4 bars, then rapping verse-hook sequences that the whole crowd knows by heart. But lyrics aren’t the draw at a rage show. “They’re literally screaming,” Johri says. “There's a lot going on. That's the only thing keeping them cohesive for the whole show.” 

At this juncture, I feel like I can read the minds of some people perusing this piece: “That’s a lame excuse,” or the dreaded “that’s not hip-hop.” Shachtman doesn’t disagree. 

“You can't even compare it to old hip-hop,” Shachtman says. “I'd argue that this super distorted rage sound shouldn't even be considered a subgenre. It should be its own thing.” He says that the rage scene feels like a “logical continuation” of the punk shows his father told him about attending in the ‘80s and ‘90s, where attendance was a contact sport. At the recent 2Slimey show he went punch-for-punch with another moshing fan, and they “hugged it out” in the bathroom afterward. “It was a top three concert experience,” he raves.. 

That’s the kind of experience he says he can only expect from a rage show. “I went to a Wu-Tang show. They had good crowd presence and everything, but in a completely different way than a Nettspend,” Shachtman says. 

Inspectah Deck agrees that a lot of modern rap necessitates a different skillset than what he was reared on. But he doesn’t look down on it. “When I see the young generation perform, I see a lot of jumping up and down, kind of the same move. I don't knock it because it's still energy. It's still their step,” he says. “I can't expect them to do what I did.”

Deck is a beacon of a rap generation that made their bones before virality and a digital ecosystem that allows rappers to sustain careers outside of a label. Deck says that he was initially shy onstage, but his Wu comrades Method Man and Capadonna helped him develop his live craft. They told him to develop some go-to steps onstage and practice rapping in the mirror to master them. Back then, success was all about getting signed, and a good live show drew label A&Rs to you. But now, artists are getting signed off virality. I spoke with an artist in 2021 who was already signed to a major label and told me he had never even performed. Artists are starting their career with no stage craft, and too few of them are developing it as they go. 

But even when they develop their stage craft, there’s no guarantee it will resemble Inspectah Deck’s. And there’s no mandate for it to do so. If you’re a rapper who's focused on lyricism, there’s no reason the crowd should be rapping harder than you. But if you’re a rage rapper, the audience just wants to go harder than you; however you make that happen is on you. These are two different rubrics, but they just represent how hip-hop has cascaded out into a wide variety of subgenres demanding different things from a live show. Variance isn’t good or bad; it just is. 

Speaking to Johri and Shachtman, I realized that those kids at that Rolling Loud set were probably having just as much fun screaming and moshing as I was rapping every word of Eminem and JAY-Z doing “Renegade” at JAY’s recent Yankee Stadium show. In both cases, they’re proof of a job well done. 

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