Almost any fan of rap will tell you that the genre’s Golden Age expired in 1997, in the passenger seat of a black GMC Suburban, with the life of Biggie Smalls. Jay-Z, Eminem, and, recently, Kanye West have all released admirable, popular, and even groundbreaking albums since then, but the subsequent six or seven years of rap have been derided as something of a Gilded Age, or an Ice(d) Age, if you will, of devoting verses and lifestyles to “slangin’ blow, pimpin’ hos, rollin’ vogues, 24s” and other frivolities (that is, “peddling cocaine, operating a bordello, driving an automobile with expensive tires, wheel rims with a 24-inch diameter” –T.I., “24s”). That lyrically masterful, emotive songs about getting gunned down in the gutter should be replaced by, say, an entire canon of posterior-inspired odes is a bad thing, goes the conventional thinking. But what if the two genres are just, as your mom told you when you asked which sibling was her favorite, different? And what if I told you, furthermore, that money-maker-shakers everywhere can no longer ignore the crisis of the past two or three years: the decline of Good Bad Rap?

Good Bad Rap: Pour one out for the genre, because it has been ailing since 2003, the heyday of pioneering practitioners Nelly and Ludacris. As with all great cultural phenomena, the year of the pinnacle of greatness already saw the first seeds of decline sown (“Right Thurr” was a turning point, to be sure). But before I get into all that, I’ll answer your most pressing question, which, I’ve divined, is, “What the hell are you talking about?” I’m glad you’ve asked that, reader. Good Bad Rap’s natural habitats are the club, the Choates (pregame party 2nite, girlz!), and the FCC headquarters, Bleep Bureau (“What’s the consensus on ‘skeet’? Radio-friendly or no?”). OK topics in GBR include boozin’, blazin’, self-aggrandizin’, conspicuous consumption, and hos. Buzzkill topics: Fights (unless between dwarves or women), monogamy, limited polygamy, self-effacement, mortality, hood anomie, The Struggle. All of these criteria, of course, also characterize Bad Bad Rap.

The difference is in the poetry. Critic Edmund Wilson once wrote of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “He has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.” Wilson, though he knew how to get crunkk, was more of a Shostakovich guy, but his criticism is salient here. One of the few recent flashes in the Cristal glass is 2005’s “Grillz,” a Nelly/Paul Wall collaboration that is, in its four minutes and thirty-three seconds, not for a moment anything more significant than a paean to glorified braces. In it, Paul Wall harnesses the power of simile to compare his dental accoutrements to “a disco ball,” “chewin’ on aluminum foil,” and a salad (which he is sporting “more carats than”). “I put my money where my mouth is/and bought a grill” reappropriates the idiom to an even greater extent of literalness than it sprang from (the origin of the phrase was from gamblers who’d talk up horses and then hesitate to bet). “I might cause a cold front if I take a deep breath,” tropes on jewelry-as-ice, ice-as-cold, and cold-as-respired-because-the-jewelry (ice)-is-in-your-mouth. “To the window/To the wall/To the sweat drop down my balls,” this is not.

But a few bright spots like this aside, there have been woefully few others since the heady days of “Big Pimpin’,” “Shake Ya Tailfeather,” “Rollout,” and their ilk. All a rapper needs is a sense of humor, a disdain for killjoy puritans, and a certain joie de vivreezy. Those aside, GBRs could be anything. Paul Wall is white. Foxy Brown is a woman (Irreconcilable? 2001’s “Candy” drops lines like “Let’s role play/You be the pilot/I’ll be the stewardess/Boy, I ain’t new to this.” Objectify that.) Nelly is horribly disfigured—hence, band-aid. Plenty of rappers are clever, plenty smoke endangered rainforests’ worth of green, plenty grab more tail than a Quebecois trapper, and plenty manage to land Top 10 singles—but what happened to those exuberant and thoroughly unapologetic few who managed to do all at once?

If Young Jeezy, Yung Joc (not related, as Wikipedia helpfully notes), Young Buck, Lil’ Romeo, Lil’ Bow Wow, Lil’ Scrappy, and Lil’ Flip are an accurate indication, rap’s new guard has arrived; their pointed epithets leave no mistake that these guys are young, or diminutive. Along with J-Kwon, T-Pain, Juelz Santana, Chamillionaire, and a slew of others, they’ve released the most successful (chyea!) breakthrough singles of the last few years. (Sorry rap elitists: If the song isn’t a formal-playlist staple, it’s the subject of another article.) None of these rappers have added anything particularly cogent to the existing corpus on legit hip-hop hardship since that stuff is totally downer, and 2pac’s turf, to boot; most have garnered hits by sticking to club bangers. Which, if you’ll recall, I said should not prima facie count as a demerit on the ol’ ghetto report card. Quite the contrary. What I fault them for, however, is being disingenuous. One camp (Yung Joc/Jeezy, Juelz, Chamillionaire, 50 Cent, and the rest of the G-Unit diaspora) produces hard-synth, hard-guy singles: girly-man clubber-pleasers masquerading as ghetto grandstanding. The other camp (inhabited by the underage, eunuchs, and most with the “Lil’” appellation) produces kiddie rap masquerading as girly-man clubber-pleasers.

The first group are tough. They are crunk. They have yawps like broken lawnmowers (“Whhhhatttt?”). They hail from unnecessarily-acronymic places like ATL and MIA. Some sell crack. Some are crack (c.f. Juelz Santana, “I Am Crack”). They rap about fighting people. They rap about being sort-of poor. They rap about objectifying women. Except that they’re fighting people in the club (“Meet me in the club/It’s goin’ down” – Yung Joc). They’re fighting people in the mall (“Meet me in the mall/It’s goin’ down” – Ibid.). There’s nothing desperate here, no “My destiny’s to die, keep my finger on the trigger/No mercy in my eyes,” as 2pac rapped in “Death Around the Corner.” They’re similarly objectifying women in da club—barely (watch out, ladies! 50’s into having sex, not making love!). The Great Ones did it all: Biggie’s “Juicy” is The Great Gatsby in five minutes, minus the ending, a celebration of the self-made man. His seminal album is entitled Ready to Die. His “Nasty Girl” opens with an anecdote about shitting on a girl. Today’s crunk artists are, bottom-line, half-assed: not convincing as ‘hood upstarts, mean-street soldiers, or “true fuckin’ playaz” (-Biggie, “Juicy”). To seize on current VIP room darling “It’s Goin’ Down”’s refrain: If you’re a guy, the mall stopped being a hip hangout during that pre-tenth-grade period of social balkanization, when if you were cool, you met people at the alcohol-parties of Tom Connors, who had awesome deadbeat parents, or, if you weren’t, on the East Coast US II Server of Diablo II, with me. Yung Joc must have been truant, prowling the mean streets of College Park, during that day’s Post-Pubescence 101 class.

Group II is even easier to slam. They are Britney, pre-“Slave 4 U,” or Marilyn Manson, pre-becoming himself. These guys—most of them our age or thereabouts—don’t even earn that validation of coolness, the Parental Advisory sticker in the corner of the album cover. They too pretend to be Good Bad Rap, and, tragically, have made it onto playlists right alongside legitimate contenders like T.I. Case in point: J-Kwon’s miserable act of self-fellatio “Tipsy,” a song that glorifies getting slightly drunk. Tipsy is what happens to Mom and Dad at Dakota’s Steakhouse on their anniversary. Tipsy is what Dick’s House propaganda posters encourage you to do with your Friday nights. And T-Pain love letter “I’m in Luv (with a Stripper)”? That is, indeed, the complete antithesis of everything Good Bad Rap stands for—come on, who wants to be reminded that a talisman of unadulterated sexuality can actually be the recipient of one’s unrequited luv? Since when was good music about feelings?

Few artists can sustain careers solely by celebrating jewelry (watchmakers ever the exception) or mammaries. So, to be fair, the current crop of would-be GBRs can only be judged by their singles that fit my painless criteria for the genre. Fortunately for my human craving for deleterious blanket generalization, most of these singles have been pretty insipid; ergo, the genre is dead. OK, perhaps not yet—we’ll always have “Chain Hang Low”—but the outlook is not so good. Akon, Dem Franchise Boyz, Gucci Mane, 50 Cent, Ying-Yang Twins, Mike Jones, and David Banner have all put out contenders, but most are standard fare: minimalist bass beats fueling trite ho-hum verses, and chugging choruses repeating rhymes of no more than five words. The chorus of Dem Franchise Boyz’ “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It” is, “Lean wit it,” followed by, “Rock wit it” eight times. Technically, this is called a “hook,” but that only counts if your song has a chorus in the first place and does not feature rhymes like, “Ay, go’n and rock wit it, go’n and lean wit it/Rock so damn hard, you break your spleen wit it.” Though hot rappers like T.I. and Paul Wall deliver regularly, no rapper seems poised to take up the mantle of Ludacris and Nelly, who have bravely sacrificed careers in being taken seriously by using words like “tailfeather.” Still the most boast-worthy in this braggadocio genre right now is Luda, weighing in on the hot-button “money-maker” issue (finally!) with “Money Maker” (sample: “Let me give you some swimming lessons on the penis/Backstroke, breaststroke, stroke of a genius.” Indeed).

Poetry has been ribald ever since ever. A majority of the first popular poetry, lyric or otherwise, was not lofty; it was about drinking, ladiez, and bling. In his hit “Beowulf,” Anonymous rapped about hanging out at Heorot and slaying Grendel’s mom, and that was over a millennium ago. A hundred and fifty years ago, grown-ups thought Verlaine and Rimbaud were trash, and in our own hyper-relativist, text-obsessed time, surely we can understand that dismissing mainstream rap out of hand is reductive and ridiculous. And at last check, hedonism still seemed to be as popular as it was three years ago. Is there no one left with an eye for booty, a nose for yayo, and ear for alliteration?