“At the end of the day, nothing more powerful than rap music,” Kendrick Lamar said onstage at the 2025 Grammys. “We are the culture.”
The Los Angeles rapper was accepting song of the year for “Not Like Us,” which won five awards that night, including record of the year. Lamar would return the following year to pick up another five Grammys for his GNX album and its smash SZA collaboration “Luther,” which made him the first solo male artist to win record of the year in consecutive years. And GNX was nominated for album of the year in 2026 alongside Tyler, The Creator’s Chromakopia and Clipse’s Let God Sort Em Out — only the second time three rap albums were up for that prize in the same year.
Of late, hip-hop has had a starring role on Music’s Biggest Night — but 2027 could be different. As it has for much of the streaming era, hip-hop reigned supreme in 2026 as the most consumed form of popular music, leading all genres in streams. Look a little closer, however, and its chart dominance has been slipping for years.
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In October 2025, the Billboard Hot 100 had no rap songs in the top 40 for the first time since 1990. As of this September, no rapper has reached the chart’s top 10 as a lead artist this year outside of Drake, who notched nine songs in the region in the debut week of his much-anticipated ICEMAN album. Even in terms of sheer streams, the Luminate midyear report showed the R&B/hip-hop genre falling 1.6% year over year, while “experienc[ing] the sharpest decline in equivalent market share since 2023,” as its Billboard 200 market share fell from 40% to 30%.
Meanwhile, this year, with no major eligible releases from Lamar — or Clipse or Tyler — it’s unclear who, if anyone, will carry the hip-hop torch at the 2027 Grammys. Similarly, after Doechii vied for best new artist and won best rap album in 2025 and followed it up with song and record of the year nominations in 2026, there’s not another rising star waiting in the wings.
“This was a pretty weak year for standout [hip-hop] releases with storylines, with narratives,” observes academy member and record executive Riggs Morales. “Forget that it didn’t even sell. It just wasn’t even talked about [the same way].”
Academy member Chris Anokute, who has worked as a senior vp at Universal Music Group and Epic Records, calls the doomier headlines about hip-hop’s downward overall commercial trajectory “fake news” and more about changes in the streaming landscape than anything else. But he does acknowledge that the relative lack of new genre stars on par with ascendant ones like Drake, Young Thug and Future from the 2010s is more than just an aberration.
“I don’t know if you’re ever going to get that level of star [again] in today’s marketplace, when everything is crowded by the attention economy,” Anokute says. “The streamers are the new rappers. If you ask any kid under the age of 18, they’re more excited about iShowSpeed than they are about Loe Shimmy … They all want to be streamers. They don’t want to be rappers.”
So without brand-new stars at the highest Grammy level, and in the absence of some of the most reliable favorites of recent years — including Drake, who sources tell Billboard did not submit his three 2026 albums or any of their songs for Grammy consideration — who could represent for hip-hop in the biggest categories at the 2027 awards?
One potential contender is A$AP Rocky. A long-respected hip-hop veteran (and widely recognized celebrity, partly due to his relationship with Rihanna), he returned with his first new album in nearly eight years this January with the Billboard 200-topping Don’t Be Dumb.
“A$AP Rocky, to me, made the album of the year,” says Anokute, adding that the album’s genre-blending sonics — it integrates punk, psychedelic and jazz influences into its trappy base — and its wide array of collaborators could make it a general field Grammy contender. “A lot of the people who vote [on those categories] are engineers, musicians, right? They nerd out on that stuff. So I think you’re going to get those votes.”
Don Toliver, the ascendant trap&B hitmaker, could also make an impact — based on his career-best-performing OCTANE, released in January, and breakout hit “E85,” which spent 25 weeks in the Hot 100’s top 40 this year. “That was one of the biggest songs of the year,” Anokute says of the track, adding that its genre-blending nature is a boon to its overall chances.
Morales acknowledges that both Rocky and Toliver may get recognized in 2027 but cautions that for rising hip-hop artists like Toliver, getting on the radar of the Grammys’ general field voters doesn’t happen all at once. “It does take a second for folks to be front and center and make it to where they are now household names [to those members] — that is a four- to five-year, maybe even six-year process,” he explains. “I think [Toliver’s] a project or two away from [that kind of awareness]. But I think this might be his entry point.”
Plenty of other rappers have outside chances to end up as general field nominees, including veteran stars like Cardi B and J. Cole, who released projects that were well-received but lacked the cultural impact of past releases, as well as Vince Staples and Rapsody, with albums that drew critical raves but little mainstream notice. Still, the usual ilk of Grammy front-runners, who match major commercial and critical relevance with a history of general field recognition, are absent from the hip-hop landscape this year.
Even with the lack of sure things, Anokute observes that the number of plausible pathways to the awards’ general categories means that if hip-hop totally gets shut out, “then we have a big problem … then there’s definitely an issue with the complexity of who’s voting — because it’s not indicative of what the reality is, socially and culturally.”
But while Morales agrees that hip-hop remains atop the cultural heap when it comes to popular music, he’s less worried about the implications of a potential shutout in the general categories, seeing this as more of a “transitional” period for the genre.
“It happens every few years … the world is waiting for some new fresh blood to make this interesting again,” he says. “I don’t know that we have that yet, [but] I’m monitoring the development of someone like a Rod Wave, same way I’m looking at Don Toliver. There’s a young crop of folks coming up that are probably a year or two away in the development process of breaking through and being able to take over and get a nod in the general categories.”
This story appears in the Oct. 3, 2026, issue of Billboard.