FUSE TV - Hip-Hop at Ultra: Is There a Future For Rappers in EDM?

Ultra is the American summer festival in reverse. At Coachella or Lollapalooza, EDM gets its own stage, which is tucked into a corner of the grounds and encountered by the average fan only in passing—a festival within the festival. At Ultra 2014, that dynamic was true for rap and rock music, with artists as successful as MGMT and M.I.A. scheduled to play a small amphitheater in the shadow of the festival's major stages.

A number of the artists on that stage were rappers: Pusha T, Chance the Rapper, Waka Flocka Flame, Riff Raff, and others. As rap's share of the pop marketplace has dwindled, EDM's has risen, and many rappers (including some playing Ultra) have made overtures to dance music fans as a means of growing—if not just sustaining—a fan base. But no mainstream rapper has yet fully crossed over to the lucrative world of EDM, and Ultra 2014 suggested that the road ahead might be a long one.

Rap and dance music have, of course, always been siblings (think Afrika Bambaatta sampling Kraftwerk, or rap's early culture of house parties), so it's not out of the question to think that modern rappers might be able to establish a fan base among America's newest wave of danceheads. And as EDM has grown over the last few years, popular tracks—from "Harlem Shake" to Skrillex and A$AP Rocky's "Wild For the Night" to DJ Snake's current smash "Turn Down For What"—have pulled from the sound, slang and moves of rap music.

But rap was a curio at Ultra 2014, with artists playing to crowds of a few hundred people at most, a tiny slice of the hundreds of thousands that attended the festival over the weekend. The first rapper of the weekend was Waka Flocka Flame, performing under the shortened moniker "Waka Flocka." Flocka was early to recognize the potential power of crossing over to the dance world—his 2012 album featured dance-oriented tracks like "Get Low" and "Fist Pump"—but is still only making inroads there.