Hip hop has been in the mainstream for nearly 40 years, and has gone through many iterations. In 2018, it is still a genre of success, excess and easy cool, making it bait for the Instagram generation and a name-checking paradise that includes the rich and famous the world over, from the Kardashians to former president Obama. You might gaze longingly at your favourite artist’s Instagram, waiting for the day that you can spray Dom Perignon all over your lazy manager, but here are our quick tips to becoming hip hop cool.
1. Casino Chic
As a hip hop artist, you’ll probably spend most of your time hanging out in clubs or casinos, finding ways to flash your wealth beyond your gold knuckle rings. Looking back on the biggest artists of all the time, the fashion really helps to transcend the genre of hip hop. However, if you want to prove that you truly can be the best, it is probably time to practice. Many sites offer free spins for new customers to allow you to become the expert before you meet your match on the floor. Play on the sofa at home with a glass of cognac in your hands and revel in the fact that you will be an expert in no time. Hip hop and casinos have a long, sometimes controversial, history, but today’s casinos are beginning to revel in this history and are adding more and more hip hop based games every day.
2. Style, Child
Who cares about the music? You can stop dreaming about your hip hop brunch invitation if you haven’t been shopping. You need to make sure you look sharp. Gone are the days when hip hop attire meant baggy trousers and football shirts. Hip Hop is fresh, it is fashion forward, it is a mix of hi-lo. Take one statement piece by a well known fashion house and then add bling. Wear it in the way you want to wear it, you’re bold, the runway is not. Finish the look with your best pal’s new line of trainers. You’ve got to look money in order to make money.
3. Make Friends/Enemies With Like Minded People
Sometimes it is best to keep your friends close and enemies closer. Hip Hop queens Cardi B and Nicki Minaj this: she and fellow rapper Nicki Minaj have been in a ‘feud‘ since Nicki liked a comment criticising Cardi’s music before apparently name dropping her in her track No Flag, in which she claims that Cardi’s success is due to hers. Cardi responded with an expletive ridden speech at the VMAs where she called out an unnamed woman, which many believe to be Minaj. Neither has ever confimed or denied the feud. Creating enemies for yourself gives you a fan base, whether Minaj and Cardi are really at war, we’ll never know, but they’re definitely getting a lot of press for it. Find someone doing something similar, offend them then make up.
At the heart of being a true hip-hop star is the music, and you can act like a hip-hop king or queen but you’re not getting anywhere if you can’t make people move. Hip-hop is about attitude and message, keep up the attitude and stay on message, and nobody will be in your way. This year you’re a nobody and next year you’re rocking a Christian Lacroix gown on the Met Ball red carpet.
