The Hottest Apps in Hip-Hop Music
It’s not just bling and flashy cars that today’s rappers like to name-drop
This article is for subscribers only.
The song begins with a request to turn the speaker volume “way, way, way up.” As a subdued piano plays, Drake hits on some standard rap motifs—money and mansions, to name two. But then, sandwiched about halfway into his track “Energy,” the chart-topping rapper drops a reference to an app that didn’t even exist when Drake’s career first took off in 2009: Uber.
Drake is one of 87 mainstream hip-hop artists who mentioned the ride-booking app in their songs, according to data compiled by Genius. Bloomberg asked the startup formerly known as Rap Genius, which hosts music lyrics and asks people to annotate them, to analyze its Rap Stats database for mentions of popular apps. Because why not?