어느 새부터 힙합은 안 멋져

Origin

"Somewhere along the way hip hop stopped being cool" is a lyric from the semi-final stage of the rap competition show SHOW ME THE MONEY 10. The contestant Mudd the student performed the track "Dissonance" with Lee Chan-hyuk of AKMU as a featured guest, and Lee opened the song with that line.

The credits run as follows. "Dissonance (Feat. AKMU) (Prod. GRAY)" appears on the album Show Me The Money 10 Semi Final, released on November 27th, 2021. It was written by Mudd the student and Lee Chan-hyuk and produced by GRAY. The performance lost its round to Kunta's "Barae" — but what people talked about was not the result, it was that one line.

The weight of the sentence sits on "somewhere along the way." It does not say hip hop was never good; it says it used to be, and no longer is. The target of the criticism is therefore the current scene rather than the genre. That it was delivered on the stage of a hip hop competition, by a musician from outside the hip hop scene, made it land harder.

Spread

Right after broadcast the line spread as a catchphrase aimed at Korean hip hop, functioning simultaneously as a meme and as a live dispute within the scene. Commentators often note the irony that a song titled "Dissonance" produced exactly that.

The argument outlasted the show. Nearly two years later, a July 1st, 2023 Mediaus column by Yoon Gwang-eun titled "Why did Korean hip hop stop being cool?" took the lyric as its starting point, citing the decline of Show Me The Money's popularity after around season 7 as trot competitions and K-pop took its place, the loss of credibility in flex-and-materialism posturing as the scene itself shrank, and the reputational damage from cases involving taxes, drugs and hate speech. The line, in other words, ended up serving as the title of a discourse rather than just a catchphrase.

Variations

In everyday use it hardened into a swap-in template: "Somewhere along the way OO stopped being cool," applied to a hobby, trend or platform one used to love and has since cooled on. YouTube accumulated videos and hashtags using the phrase verbatim as a title, and it has been reused several times as the name of curated playlists on Korean streaming services.

How it is used

As a one-line verdict when a field one once admired seems to have degraded
As a template, swapping the subject into "Somewhere along the way OO stopped being cool"
As shorthand in arguments about Korean hip hop, compressing the whole complaint
Self-deprecatingly, about the field one works in oneself