Will the sun set in the West? How the Internet’s usurping of the music industry is collapsing regionalism and threatening the West Coast’s race to recapture hip hop’s crown

Unrestricted At the dawn of the Aughts, hip hop was doing a bustling business. It had done what its progenitors had only dared to dream. Not only had it become a legitimate way of making a living from creatively expressing oneself, but it also had become mainstream, “pop music.” Yet just as the exorbitant wealth of the 1980s gave way to the recycled grunge of the 1990s, the days of throwing money off speedboats and letting a record label clean up the mess in hip hop gave way to making beats on personal computers and marketing oneself on the Internet.; Curren$y, Pacific Division, TiRon Jeffries, and Wiz Khalifa are all members of the latter generation. In various stages of their careers, they all are artists navigating a brand new landscape—a landscape that once was divided by regional characteristics as well as the stamp of a “deal or no deal.” But the seismic shift that the Internet has caused in hip-hop has collapsed all the old barriers. Suddenly, the most successful method is whatever an artist pieces together. Though the West Coast seemed poised to recapture its first glory, hip hop is again as it began—future unknown, anybody’s game.