Although some non-American rappers may still relate with young black Americans, hip hop now transcends its original culture, and is appealing because it is “custom-made to combat the anomie that preys on adolescents wherever nobody knows their name.” Hip hop is attractive in its ability to give a voice to disenfranchised youth in any country, and as music with a message it is a form available to all societies worldwide.

Even in the face of growing global popularity, or perhaps because of it, hip hop has come under fire for being too commercial, too commodified. Artist Nas said it himself in his 2006 album Hip Hop is Dead. While this of course stirs up controversy, a documentary called The Commodification of Hip Hop directed by Brooke Daniel interviews students at Satellite Academy in New York City. One girl talks about the epidemic of crime that she sees in urban black and Latino communities, relating it directly to the hip hop industry saying “When they can’t afford these kind of things, these things that celebrities have like jewelry and clothes and all that, they’ll go and sell drugs, some people will steal it…” Many students see this as a negative side effect of the hip hop industry, and indeed, hip hop has been criticized all over the world for spreading crime, violence, and American ideals of consumerism although much of the hip-hop dancing community still chooses to refer back to more "oldschool" types of hip-hop music that does not preach violence and drugs.

In an article for Village Voice, Greg Tateargues that the commercialization of hip hop is a negative and pervasive phenomenon, writing that "what we call hiphop is now inseparable from what we call the hiphop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer". Ironically, this commercialization coincides with a decline in rap sales and pressure from critics of the genre. However, in his book In Search Of Africa, Manthia Diawara explains that hip hop is really a voice of people who are down and out in modern society. He argues that the "worldwide spread of hip-hop as a market revolution" is actually global "expression of poor people’s desire for the good life," and that this struggle aligns with "the nationalist struggle for citizenship and belonging, but also reveals the need to go beyond such struggles and celebrate the redemption of the black individual through tradition."

This connection to "tradition" however, is something that may be lacking according to one Satellite Academy staff member who says that in all of the focus on materialism, the hip hop community is “not leaving anything for the next generation, we’re not building.”