2018 Pulitzer Prize winner Kendrick Lamar is the face of the hip-hop lane. Lyricism can be displayed in different ways, such as complex rhyme schemes, clever punchlines and, my personal favorite, storytelling. To everyone on this side of the culture, no matter how good the sound is, it isn’t accepted if the lyrics aren’t good. Since the 1980s, rap has been centered around lyricism. All of these things have led to Drake being Spotify’s most-streamed artist of the 2010s. A lot of his lyrics could be tweets, Instagram captions or even TikTok dances. Almost every song he releases will get radio play. At the head of this lane is none other than Billboard “Artist of the Decade” Drake. Pop is radio music, dance music and feel-good music. Popular music, better known as pop, has been integrated into rap to become its own subgenre. The three lanes are defined as pop, hip-hop and hip-pop. “I felt like it might be time to redefine how we classify the music of our culture.”Įach of the three rappers represents one of the lanes. “With hip-hop and R&B surpassing rock as the most popular genre of music in the United States, rap is now technically pop, or popular music,” Murs said in the Breakdown. When rap surpassed rock as the most popular genre in the world in 2017, rapper and journalist Murs presented the “3 Lane Theory” during a HipHopDX Breakdown. However, the three rappers have established their own respective styles, which have all achieved greatness in their own ways. Each has had a tremendous amount of commercial success, and their names are often mentioned with one another. In the last decade, rap has been dominated by the big three: J.