Stevie G: Music that took over the world

It’s amazing that hip-hop and dance music are so ubiquitous now. I’m listening in the background to an ad for Just Eat featuring Craig David and thinking about a recent one they did with Snoop Dogg too.

It got me reminiscing about the early days of Craig David, who was singing and rapping in youth clubs as a teenager, before rising to success with Re-Rewind by Artful Dodger, before releasing some really successful solo albums. His modest beginnings and eventual success were dwarfed by that of a much bigger star, Snoop, who was frequently behind bars in his early days. He is now one of the most successful rappers of all time, and as mainstream as they come. It’s more than Just Eat ads that have Snoop possibly the most recognised figure in hip-hop history, and we don’t need him to be legitimised by a TV ad either. When Snoop was first becoming internationally known, the UK tabloids ran a campaign saying he should be expelled from the UK, thanks to a charge he was facing elsewhere. Many of his peers on and off the streets ended up dead, but in 2025 Snoop is almost like a cuddly figure who your grandmother will know.

Hip-hop in 2025 is all over TV ads and over the last 30 or 40 years much of mainstream fashion has also copied what rappers are wearing. We have Kendrick Lamar, a Pulitzer prize-winning MC whose music is studied in universities, and in our own universities in Cork, even local DJs like myself are invited to speak on music and do workshops. Hip-hop’s global reach is bigger than ever, and we even had breakdancing at the Olympics (though sadly, its coverage largely concentrated on only one dancer, who became a meme). I spoke last week of its market share dominance, but culturally we can see hip-hop also heavily influencing the language, the politics and even the corporate world, where many rappers are now big players too. Hip-hop and dance helps soundtrack most sports events, and many movies too, where many MCs have swapped the mic for high profile acting or directing slots.

It was never meant to happen like this. Hip-hop was largely seen as a novelty in its formative years and much of the rap music that crossed into the mainstream was fairly gimmicky and not too far from what Just Eat are doing with their ads now.

Dance music in its very early iterations made chart impact, but it was its very popularity that ended up causing a backlash and bringing it back underground. This is an aged old tale, and after disco became dismissed, it went back underground and re-emerged as house music in the mid-to-late 80s.

Disco truly never died and even enjoyed a huge revival through house sampling and reworkings in the 90s, and the sound still pervades today in these formats too.

A cursory listen to dance music or hip-hop in 2025 will bring an overwhelming sense of deja-vu for people who grew up in previous decades, but music will always sample or borrow from previous eras, and the cycle will always continue. Some people even survive to work in separate eras, though it’s a bit of a challenge. Snoop and Craig David are still here making new music, but it’s their heritage jams that help them sell shows. It’s also probably why they are making ads for Just Eat, though I can’t imagine Snoop really needs the cash. MK, whose sound in the early 90s helped shape house music, is still doing the same in 2025, and still enjoying huge commercial and underground success. Disco era giants like Nile Rodgers help negotiate the various eras by embracing the new found interest in his music through sampling, and by continuing to work with some of the big contemporary players, such as Beyonce, Daft Punk, and Pharrell. Again, these artists owe his influence everything, so the collabs make sense, and generally, the music sounds great too.

Hip-hop and dance music is everywhere but we should remember its deep roots. It comes from backstreets and tiny bedrooms and humble origins and even though it now soundtracks wine receptions and large scale corporate events, it’s music that doesn’t need this validation in 2025.

Next week, I’m going to explore this further, and tell you why with music, it’s sometimes better, that to quote Busta Rhymes, “Everything remains raw”.