1. I have stayed fairly close to the structure of Nielson’s original article. I have, in places, taken some of his arguments and even his language in an effort to demonstrate that even though a decade has passed since his article appeared, very little has changed. Some could argue that this is plagiarism: I would call it sampling and remixing.
2. It’s worth considering the impact that the rise in music streaming has had on record sales figures. Amy Wang observed that music consumption rose from 2017 to 2018, but that music sales continue to drop: album sales dropped 18.2% and song sales dropped 28.8%. Rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s album Hoodie Szn earned the number one spot on the Billboard sales chart ending 10 January with sales of 823 digital copies (no hard copies of the album were produced) and 83 million streams. See Amy X. Wang, “Album Sales Dying as Fast As Streaming Services Rising,” Rolling Stone 3 January 2019. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/album-sales-dying-as-fast-as-streaming-services-rising-774563/.
3. The inductions were met with some hostility, notably from Gene Simmons of KISS, who said on Twitter that he would only acknowledge N.W.A.’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on “the day Led Zep[pelin] gets into [the] Rap hall of fame.”
4. Erik Nielson, “’My President’s Black, My Lambo’s Blue’: The Obamafication of Rap?” Journal of Popular Music Studies 21/3 (2009): 344−63; Travis L. Gosa and Eric Nielson, The Hip Hop and Obama Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
5. Allison McCann, “Hip Hop is Turning on Donald Trump,” FiveThirtyEight, 14 July 2016. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/clinton-trump-hip-hop-lyrics/