What’s really strange to me is that there are barely any similar lists from major publications despite rap’s popularity. Paste’s is one of the first Google hits, and it only goes up to 30 hip-hop albums and also includes SZA and Beyoncé, and I think a list that purposefully excludes mixtapes—a very important frontier in the early-2010s—like Hip Hop Golden Age’s just doesn’t come close to capturing the truth.
For me, this isn’t just another arbitrary list though. In 2010, I stumbled on some of Nodima’s rap reviews and lists, and that was at a time that I wasn’t even into rap music outside of what was fed to me on MTV. No one was more influential on my hip-hop journey, and I might not have even joined RYM at all if it weren’t for him, or reached out to Popmatters where he was writing where I got my first online published review (uncoincidentally, a rap review, of Ka’s The Night’s Gambit). I’ve wanted to make a list like this for a long time in tribute. Jason, if you’re reading this, thanks for all the words.
#100. L’Orange & Jeremiah Jae - The Night Took Us In Like Family
The Madvillainy worship gets wearying—Jeremiah Jae goes “Hand a pistol to Bill / All love in this bitch with no frills / No ills” as if he just internalized “Close but no krills, toast for po’ nils, post no bills” before stepping into the booth; the cartoon samples peppered throughout on L’Orange’s side—especially because L’Orange meticulously crafts a noir world here that is far removed from Madlib’s stoner basement — and the rest of the hip-hop world for that matter. For once, the Miles Davis reference isn’t Bitches Brew or On the Corner but Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. The instrumental tracks are just as important as the ones with bars: “Part Two: God Complex” has an addicting pulse and off-kilter vocal, with the occasional TV detective show horn blast; “Part Three: The Damning” has a piano line that’s twisted and looped around the drum programming in a way to make it feel that much more ominous and urgent. Alas, the rapper murmurs hid way through and doesn’t commit to the noir fiction because he’s not Ghostface Killah circa 2015 let alone circa 1996, and in general, I wish L’Orange collaborated with rappers far more deserving of his talents than Jeremiah Jae, Kool Keith, or Mr. Lif. The opening verse starts with a boast about how his bars are “made of gold” and then goes on to say, “No hope, cope with the lows / Can’t boast when you broke.” As such, Jae gets outclassed by the two features here. Gift of Gab raps more effortlessly and energetically than Jae on “All I Need” while the underrated Homeboy Sandman whips up rhymes that are beyond Jae (“Steps undetected over distances / There aren’t any fingerprints or witnesses / I will not be serving any sentences / There aren’t any photos / I move at night, there’s not even photosynthesis”). Still: a unique kind of nighttime in rap music.
#99. Sélébéyone - Sélébéyone
Too much jazz rap hasn’t lived up to its potential, often merely presenting the two genres side-by-side, and not capitalizing enough on the fact that both the vocals and the beat can improvise with one another. Sélébéyone announces their intentions from the get-go, selecting a name that translates ‘intersection’ in Wolof. It is an intersection of genres, yes, but also of cultures and languages thanks to the the two rappers, HPrizm (formerly High Priest) raps in English, whom you may recognize from his work with Antipop Consortium, while the other voice is Senegalese rapper Gaston Bandimic, who raps in Wolof and who is far less concerned with meter. Bandimic’s rants leap off the page as the most intense element of everyone here. Beside—not behind—these two rappers are two saxophone players, Steve Lehman on alto who is one of the leading creative minds of modern jazz (Ex Machina was my AOTY last year), and Maciek Lasserre on soprano. And when they’re no playing sax, Lehmand Laserre throw in samples and drum programming, most prominently on closer “Bamba.” Helping solidify the crossover are hip-hop engineer Andrew Wright and drummer Damien Reid (who has played with Robert Glasper); check out Reid’s liquid-glitch drumming on “Cognition.” Many of the songs on this album contain one verse apiece from HPrizm and Bandimic, and between them, Lehman and Lasserre play an instrumental bridge that ultimately functions as a new way of imagining the traditional rap posse cut.
#98. Gang Starr - One of the Best Yet
I went into this with a lot of reservations. Gang Starr put out a great run while they were active, but Guru made clear that he had severed ties with DJ Premier, choosing instead to associate with a new partner named Solar. There was a strange mess about Guru’s death in 2010 where Guru allegedly wrote a note stating further disassociating himself from Premier, but an oncologist testified that he couldn’t possibly have written it since he was in a coma. Unreleased Guru verses were surrendered by Solar and given to his old partner, which Premier shaped into One of the Best Yet. Sure, there’s an element of nostalgia here; Premier even starts things off with a rolodex of samples from their catalog together, and first proper song “Lights Out” is as bone-dry boom bap as they come (“Sick bars, bitch, what up? / I spit SARS, you spit nut up,” from Lil Fame, is terrible). But in terms of the best-ever producers, Premier has always ranked in the top thanks to a great ear for sampling and flipping those samples in a way to make them feel sky-blue and modern-steel, and One of the Best Yet proves he hasn’t lost his touch at all. The problem as you might have guessed is Guru, whose verses often feel simplistic—he was always stately—and many of his verses feel like they could have used another once-over, which would have undoubtably been the case have been the case if he were around. The best verse on the album is courtesy of J. Cole who dazzles in a way that Guru used to: “I’m destined to invest in urban sections where depression rules / I hope to heal the destitute before I leave this vestibule.”
#97. Shabazz Palaces - Black Up
Fifteen years after Digable Planets, Ishmael Butler would remake himself into Palaceer Lazaro and link up with multi-instrumentalist Tendai ‘Baba’ Maraire and form a new, abstract, experimental group called Shabazz Palaces. There are remnants of Palaceer Lazaro’s past life as Butterfly from short-lived jazz-rap outlet Digable Planets, namely in the vibraphone bridge of “An echo from the hosts that profess infinitum” and then in the wafty saxophones that peaks in and out of “Endeavors for Never,” the two major highlights—but ultimately, the jazz serves only to highlight how different these beats are from what anyone else is making, part of the early-2010s push in underground hip-hop that seemed to be rebelling against how fangless mainstream rap had become by deconstructing what exactly hip-hop was in the first place. This is Shabazz Palaces’ best/only worthy album because Lazaro is trying (relatively speaking) harder on the microphone and because Maraire’s production sounds more like hip-hop than a lifeless drift: “Recollection of the wraith” has a soul sample that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a RZA production; “Yeah You”’s two-note bass creates a monolithic pummel over the interesting drum onslaught which mixes thick drum programming, guns reloading and what sounds like a cash register opening. You’ll never hear drums sounding that good on a Shabazz Palaces song again.
#96. Pedro LaDroga & $kyhook - SKYDRVG 1.0
Cloud rap making its way across the ocean via Soundcloud and into Spain! Producer $kyhook really absorbed Clams Casino and SpaceGhostPurrp (“Catarata” is the golden mean between the two), and grants rapper Pedro LaDroga a set of beats that are truly ethereal with a lot of reverb-heavy keyboards and synths. What gives the album an extra push for me are the codas: the funky little guitar at the end of “Win2Drug” or the late-night jazz interlude of “Catarata,” and even the ringtone ending of “994 Suicide (2:22 AM),” all little details that didn’t need to be included but I’m very happy $kyhook did. There’s only one English verse on the album, fittingly rapped by someone named A. Tourist whose lines about bitches and drugs is unfortunately emblematic of the rest of these lyrics as a whole: Pedro LaDroga goes on and on about how fucks life without a condom on “A PELO” while Galgo Rock goes “Veo mi futuro en el vómito, es increíble” on “SKYLAB” (“I see my future in the vomit, it’s incredible”). My advice? Approach this the same way you would English cloud rap albums: swim in it and ignore the lyrics.
#95. Freddie Gibbs - Shadow of a Doubt
Freddie Gibbs followed up Piñata with a very good album and no one—except those who were with Gibbs back in his mixtape days (I’d been following him since 2011 because RYM user Nodima kept singing his praises)—cared. Back in 2015, there was a narrative by critical audiences that Shadow of a Doubt was merely a ‘victory lap,’ but then came You Only Live 2wice in 2017 and Freddie in 2018, and that narrative quickly fell apart: how many victory laps do athletes run? Not this many. Freddie Gibbs is one of those rappers born way too late, and the only signifier that he’s of these times is his love for trap rap beats. But in doing so, he carved out his own lane of ‘lyrical trap rap’ even though most people just want him to hop on more Madlib beats, so he obliged with Bandana, a crowd-pleaser that I don’t rank nearly this high. Shadow of a Doubt feels like a refinement of his early mixtapes (“McDuck” is a bigger budget remake of “The Hard”) and debut album ESGN: Evil Seeds Grow Naturally (with E-40 and Black Thought as features instead of weed carriers), and comes with his very best songs in “Fuckin’ Up the Count” and “Extradite.” Yes, the chaff is egregious but easy enough to spot/delete: “Mexico,” “Packages,” and the R&B cut “Basketball Wives” (one notes there was also an R&B cut on Piñata), and that the midsection has all the features in a five-song stretch makes the album strangely sequenced. Gibbs sounds like Black Thought’s “75 Bars” on the Mike Dean-produced “Cold Ass,” and speaking of, the Roots’ rapper shows up on “Extradite” which caps off the incredible opening block, a 5-song run that’s the best of his entire discography.
#94. Le1f - Riot Boi
I would have taken the complaints about Macklemore’s “Same Love” seriously if hip-hop listeners actually listened to any queer rappers at the time. No one did. Here’s how I know: Le1f’s debut album in 2015 went completely ignored despite backing from Grizzly Bear’s Christopher Taylor’s label, Terrible, that should have got him an in with the indie crowd. And despite production support from SOPHIE two years before Vince Staples got there on Big Fish Theory, as well as Blood Orange, and Yeezus collaborator Evian Christ. Eschewing the accessibility of his breakthrough single “Wut” on the Hey EP released the year prior, Riot Boi is stranger; better. He claims not to make conscious rap but as a queer, black man living in America, he can’t help it that his music is inherently conscious. He references The Blacker the Berry in the same year that Kendrick Lamar did; an experience of being rejected as a teenager by a crush because his skin was too dark forms the basis of “Taxi” (“Boys pass me like taxis do”); “Tell” reaches out to those hiding in closets, fearing that these people are “passing up on all your dreams.” As a queer rapper, he gets funny bars that no one else can say, “You still out here fucking with them fuckboys? Fuck you n***a, I fuck boys.” It’s also why his collaboration with SOPHIE, “Koi,” works as well as it does: it’s the sounds of two seemingly incompatible musicians/genres working in tandem to create something exhilarating.
#93. Action Bronson - Rare Chandeliers
By 2012, Los Angeles-based producer the Alchemist had been producing beats for more close to 15 years, but it wasn’t until he tapped into mixtape rappers where he began he ascent into rap Valhalla, first Curren$y in 2011 on Covert Coup, and then Action Bronson on Rare Chandeliers, whereupon he became the most psychedelic producer since Madlib. Action Bronson can get written off as a Ghostface Killah clone because of the similarities of their voices, but he crafted a fantasy out of equal parts food, which, sure, GFK was doing before him (“Only green M&M’s placed in my dressing room”) and one-liner absurdity sorta like a toned-down Danny Brown from around the same time (“I make kids, NFL ready / Yours are 23 wearing bibs slurping spaghetti”), and its the latter that distinguished him. 2012 was his peak, releasing Blue Chips, Rare Chandeliers, and the non-album single “Bird on a Wire” that may be the last American cloud rap victory all in the same year, and this was his best work. “The Symbol” is the finest rap-rock song of the decade, but other tracks are loaded with psychedelic details like vinyl crackle filling out the string line on the title track, or the eerie keyboard on “Blood of the Goat” (it’s a shame that Sean Price spends so much time convincing you he’s the absolute best instead of proving it). I equate Bronson to the aforementioned Curren$y: two mixtape rappers that failed to make the leap to major labels. Bronson wouldn’t essay the move until 2015, and Mr. Wonderful simply paled in comparison to the projects he released for free until that point, and he never reached his run of 2011-2013 again.
#92. Rae Sremmurd - SremmLife
The good songs here—all singles—feel like brothers Swae Lee and Slim Jimmi stumbled upon them and were not created by design, and here’s how I know: their albums afterwards are ass. The songs around them are ass. These are all obnoxious party anthems, but what sells them is that the autotune makes their young voices (both brothers barely over 20 at the time) sound even younger than they actually are. That they treat Twitter memes and reference Fast & Furious films with a romantic reverence only adds to that effect. The anxiety comes from the fact that no one this young should be partying this hard, not unless there was something wrong with them—or, something wrong with the world that they’re escaping from. When I praise the rousing perfect iambic pentameter of “Throw Sum Mo” (“I’m bout to emp-ty out the A-T-M!”), or the tantalizing inherent contradiction in the hook of “No Type” (“I ain’t got no type / Bad bitches is the only thing I like”), do I believe for one second that either Lee or Jimmi did them on purpose? Not when there’s a song about Trump simply because they both loved the guy pre-president (“I think Donald Trump is cool […] He’s rich as fuck”). This gets a spot in this list because their version of trap had a swag that they never unlocked again although it gets the close to the last spot because the bad songs here—“YNO” and “Safe Sex Pay Checks”—are among the most obnoxious songs of this entire list.
#91. Jme - Grime MC
This is the best UK rap album of 2019, and I think more people would have realized that if Jme didn’t keep this to a physical-only release for as long as he did. Yeah, it’s a grime record with almost the entire album slamming at 140 bpm, but Jme raps his ass off here, bringing in grime heavyweights Skepta (his big brother), Giggs, and Wiley only to out-rap all of them. “Issmap” has to be one of the most inventive and best rap performances of the decade, cleverly interpolating 1-2-3-4’s and A-B-C-D’s into the verse, “On the mic, I spray like an AK / When I’m on stage with BBK / Sick lyrics like Louis CK / Heavyweight in the game, I’m DK” or “My booking fee was under 1G / When I started spitting in the year 2 G / Feds don’t like me or my 3 G’s / Cause we film them and upload on 4G.” The tone overall is far more serious than breakthrough Introspective> as he gets introspective on opener “96 of My Life” (one long, 96-bar verse) or voices disdain for the music industry and censorship on “Pricks.” There’s still humour—“There ain’t no clean version of Michelangelo's artwork with a penis hidden”—but there’s also pearls of wisdom throughout, such as “The blueprint is to carve your own way / Us man opened doors, but once you get through / You have to solve the maze.” Some of the hooks leave a lot to be desired alas, especially the back-to-back “Move On” and “How Much” that I wish he didn’t bother since so many of these songs don’t have any, and in general, the second half doesn’t even come close to the first half.
#90. Canserbero - Muerte
Crowned the best Spanish rapper by Rolling Stone magazine, Canserbero died young — he was drugged, stabbed, and killed by his manager Natalia Améstica and then thrown out the 10th story window to look like a suicide at the age of 26, having only released two albums. Muerte is his last album, a 65-minute odyssey of complex Spanish rhymes with very few bothering with a hook (i.e. opener “C’est La Mort” is a song running close to 8 minutes and doesn’t have one; second track “Es épico” seems to forget that he does a chorus early on until the end). Had he worked with a better producer than KPU, I have no doubt that this would rank far higher, but unfortunately the beats are dated by even 2012’s standards. “C’est La Mort” feels like horrorcore without the horror, the drums are uniformly lacking power when boom bap could’ve served him well, and the songs don’t develop after establishing the loop, which is a shame when songs run 4 of these songs run over 6 minutes. But when I read along to the lyrics of a language I don’t understand, I still marvel to flow full of alliteration (“tifoidea / Transmitida por mareas que marean a quienes no crean” on “Ser Vero”) and interesting rhymes (“contraria varias” with “cesárea,” “área,” and “patria” on “En el Valle de la Sombras”).
#89. El-P - Cancer 4 Cure
“After laying on my roof one night looking up at the sky, I just had this very strange but absolute realization come over me […] Soon, there will be drones flying over our cities. And this is not science fiction. This is the reality of a good portion of the world right now,” El-P once said on Wired, framing the fourth song of his so-far last solo album. What’s the solution? He’s not a political rapper, but he has some ideas: “So you should pump this shit, like they do in the future,” sampled from his departed friend and fellow rapper Camu Tao as the hook of the lead single. Cancer 4 Cure was released just one week after his fully produced album for Killer Mike, R.A.P. Music, and it’s also better than any of his albums with Mike as Run the Jewels, albums whose stakes are far too low and whose primary focus of hearing Mike and El-P trade bars with one another mean they’re less concerned with atmosphere. His rapping will always irk and impress in equal measure: “Fuck your droid noise, void boys’ ‘noid ploy / Oi oi, I’ll rugby-kick the shit out your groin, boy” is profoundly empty, even if it sounds good (debatable anyway), so the best moments on the album are when El-P lets the beats do the talking (the majority of “Request Denied”) or when he lets someone else take the mic (especially Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire on “Oh Hail No”). It’s his best solo album because it’s his funnest album while still giving his fans the sci-fi apocalypse they come to him for.
#88. 2 Chainz - Pretty Girls Like Trap Music
Tauheed Epps a.k.a. Titty Boi usurped the crown of Atlanta after T.I. exited the conversation by re-christening himself into the more radio-friendly name 2 Chainz and then appearing on every single project possible. Pretty Girls Like Trap Music is his fourth album on a purely technical standpoint because his collaboration with Lil Wayne was filed under his name only for legal issues; if you consider it his third proper album, then it comes after a 4-year gap after B.O.A.T.S. II: Me Time. No longer interested in the memes that made him famous and irritating (“She got a big booty so I call her Big Booty”), 2 Chainz instead curates a front-to-back listening experience that appeals to older fans of trap as much as it does the newer gen. Here’s trap by way of OutKast to start things off (“Saturday Night”); here’s trap by way of Memphis to follow up (“Riverdale Rd”); here’s the red-eyed Rodeo experience (“4 AM”); here’s a 21 Savage song without him (“Trap Check”); here’s a reggae-fied beat-switch just ‘cause (“OG Kush Diet”). And he’s funnier than ever because he’s not trying as hard to be funny: “Fuck all that humble shit / *mumbles* / Man, fuck all that mumble shit,” he quips on the gorgeously-textured beat of “Realize.” All told, this reminds me of Big Sean’s Dark Sky Paradise, another album by a mainstream rapper that was better than anyone could have possibly predicted.
#87. Drake - Nothing Was the Same
I debated hard about whether this deserved to be on this list — if the most-popular rapper of the last decade actually made a bonafide great album. I give the edge to Nothing Was the Same over Take Care because it’s leaner, because there’s no weird lines about the moon, because Noah “40” Shebib really fashioned his own sound here, a mix of early Kanye West with the coldness of Toronto winters (the sound on “Tuscan Leather,” “Furthest Thing,” and “Pound Cake” is practically liquid), and I think Drake’s decision to work less with 40 after this has made his music less unique. This album actually has some flow as an album: ambitious opener, second song that turns into a rave-up halfway through, big single which then ebbs back down, which then segues into “Own It.” Later on: a banger into a ballad into another hit. And then a soulful closer that turns into a redemption number. DJ Dahi outdoes himself on “Worst Behavior,” pairing up an odd drum sound with brief clips of soul, and Drake’s final verse—leaping off Ma$e’s verse from “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems” as a springboard—is one that actually makes me laugh: “Bar mitzvah money like my last name Mordecaiiiiiiiii / Fuck you bitch, I’m more than high / My momma probably hear that and be mortified.” It’s not perfect because it’s Drake: “Started From the Bottom” surely ranks as his dumbest single before “What’s Next” came along and should’ve been delegated to bonus track the same way “Hotline Bling” was on Views; some of the songs on the second half are hideously empty; Jay-Z doesn’t even pretend to be conscious on “Pound Cake.” The title of this album turned out to be unfortunately prophetic: nothing was the same after this for Drake.
#86. Future - Monster
Whereas about half of Honest had features, Monster only has one, marking the new phase in Future’s discography where he does it all (almost!) by himself. On releases like Monster and DS2, this was clearly a sign of strength: he had gotten to the point where he no longer needed anyone to help besides his beatmakers. On his late-period records, this had turned into an annoyance as he increased the number of songs: you started wishing there was a different voice or two to break up the monotony. In lieu of ‘em, he plays with his voice a lot more, stumbling his way through “I was drugged up on so many drugs” on “Showed Up” before robotically proclaiming “I just downed a whole eighth of codeine.” In that regard, “Throw Away” is a masterpiece, sequenced to appear immediately after the hit “Fuck Up Some Commas”; at the song’s end, he completely breaks down as he lays bare his fuck-ups (“I’m laid up with my sidepiece / The one that text while you was right there laying up beside me”) before revealing that the monster of the title and cover aren’t him, but Ciara (“Tell me you moving on and you don’t love me no more, monster”). (Is he wrong about that? Well, he’s certainly honest.) The beats by everyone are bassier and sharper as a result: “Radical” plays like “Move That Dope” in the sense that it feels like 99% chorus and bass, while “Fetti” and “Wesley Presley” are minor cuts here that would have been the major highlight on any of his prior releases. “Codeine Crazy” is the first of many devastating songs to come.
#85. Little Brother - May The Lord Watch
Like Gang Starr’s One of the Best Yet that appeared earlier this list from the same year, this is not quite the full reunion of a beloved group that we would have wanted, but it’s a miracle that it exists regardless. Little Brother—rappers Phonte and Big Pooh, and producer 9th Wonder—were the south’s (only) response to De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, hence why they chose their name: they were the Little Brother to the Native Tongues’ acts’ ‘big brother.’ After The Minstrel Show—still their best album— producer 9th Wonder left as he was getting more demand as a producer, leaving Phonte and Big Pooh to limp on without him, producing two lackluster albums before disbanding. 9th isn’t here on May the Lord Watch, made clear by the empty space between the rappers on the cover, but he is replaced by Khrysis, Nottz, Black Milk, Phonte himself, among others, and is crucially not missed. Meanwhile, Phonte and Pooh rap as if Getback and LeftBack never happened while also acknowledging their position as outsiders now (“Flexing on a old bike I never forgot how to ride”). Phonte is a rapper that never got his flowers, especially as the rare rapper who also sang before Drake got here. On “The Feel,” anyone could’ve said, “The lost days of my youth,” but Phone gets even more poetic by rapping, “The lost days of my hazy youth”; he does something similar on “Everything,” with the sudden emotion of “I laid in my bed and thought about everything / The light, dark, and the heavy things / The house, the kids, the wedding rings / The inner peace that I’ve never seen.”
#84. The Roots - …And Then You Shoot Your Cousin
The last three Roots albums feel short, and Black Thought doesn’t rap enough on them, passing the microphone too much to his friends Greg P.O.R.N. and Dice Raw; the latter keeps trying to sing despite not being able to hit a single note. Why I give this album the edge over How I Got Over (an indie-friendly album whose ceiling was much lower) and undun (which so desperately wants to be A Prince Among Thieves) is simple: it’s darker. There’s a real feeling of falling into a deep, mental chasm thanks to the combination of Questlove and the piano—not electric keyboard, which was their friend in the early days, but actual piano—on songs like “Never,” “When the People Cheer,” and “The Dark (Trinity).” The only light on the album is saved for the closer. Negatives: “Black Rock” would have been a highlight of Black Milk didn’t use the same sample just a few years earlier, and Black Thought’s sex lines are so deeply stupid on “When the People Cheer” (“legs in the air tonight like Phil Collins” and “First, I feed her vodka shots and then she eat my Johnnie Cockran”) because he’s clearly the rare rapper whose gotten better overtime (“Molly popping, trolley hopping, know somebody prolly watching…”) and shouldn't have stooped to such embarrassing punch-lines. The little experiments that dot the album don’t amount to anything interesting because they never ever have on the Roots albums, and I find it ironic (moronic) that Questlove—who fancies himself a music historian—would sit idly by and watch Jimmy Fallon mock Peter Brötzmann on the Tonight Show when the Roots bothered to add an abrasive, avant-garde take on “Dies Irae” here which is not that many worlds apart.
#83. Kids See Ghosts - Kids See Ghosts
Kids See Ghosts is the Kid Cudi-Kanye West collaboration that was the third album to be released from the Wyoming sessions, and I also rank it third of the five (although the second-best doesn’t appear here). The problem is that there’s filler in its 23 minutes, histrionic “Freeee (Ghost Town Pt. 2),” and “Reborn” being too long by two minutes (even “Feel the Love” overstays its welcome), and though Kanye West doesn’t bottom out the way he did on ye (“All Mine”), there’s simply no song here as good as “Ghost Town” anyway, a rotating door of voices that culminates in 070 Shake’s superb release that Cudi tries to emulate on this album but doesn’t pull off. Like ye, it’s the second half that’s the most compelling: the Christmas-in-summer chords of “Reborn”; the drum programming and hook of the title track, the latter courtesy of Yaasin Bey whose voice always effortlessly commanded attention; the Nirvana flip of “Cudi Montage.” All sonics, no lyrics… I just don’t get much out of Kanye’s lyricism from 2018-onwards. Put another way, statistical analysis yields but one conclusion. Better for Kanye West to have donated “No Mistakes” (“I was too grown in high school / The true soul of Ice Cube”) and “Ghost Town” of course (“Woah, once again I am a child”) to Kids See Ghosts, thus rendering it the classic it was heralded as, and not bother releasing the rest of ye at all. But in the absence of compelling artistic motivation, this just didn’t happen.
#82. Westside Gunn - Flygod
The Griselda rappers put Buffalo on the rap map through a seemingly never-ending flow of projects—including being the rare rappers to leverage the EP format—and while I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve heard from them, I also doubt any of them have a classic album in them because I always have a nagging suspicion whenever I listen to them that I’ve heard it before — just without the “doot-doot-doot-doot”’s and “The Butcher coming.”’s Westside Gunn has a voice that sounds like Action Bronson, and so they capitalize on that by actually teaming up on “Dudley Boyz” here (I’m proud to say I can spot the Alchemist’s handiwork from a mile away), but aesthetically, Westside Gunn crafts a far grimier world where luxury is within his grasp, but just one more act of violence away (“Shot his ass in front of Tony Roma’s / His brains landed on the top of Barclay’s, he gave me too much soda”). Griselda’s in-house producer Daringer produces more than half of these beats, helping Westside achieve that vision: his beats can be opulent, soulful, and even pretty, but they’re far more often rugged. For example, “Shower Shoe Lords” kicks out its opening soul sample for a piano rumble. My favourite beat is “Bodies on Fairfax,” not just because Danny Brown is here with a XXX-style verse (“Liquor got my kidney like, ‘What's going on?’ / Smoke so much, brain cell count low”) but because Daringer’s beat is pure vibraphone bliss with only the occasional drum smack.
#81. Jean Grae & Quelle Chris - Everything’s Fine
One of the best rap collaborations of the decade arrived to quiet acclaim in early 2018 and was promptly forgotten about, despite the accolades garnered by both rappers before Everything’s Fine. Anyone who knows Jean Grae will tell you that the Cape Town-born rapper is one of the best female emcees to ever grace a microphone, while Quelle Chris has been gaining traction for his work not just as a rapper but as a producer too (including some beats on Danny Brown’s XXX. The appeal here is how different they are as rappers, with Grae being the more technically precise of the two while Chris’ flow is looser but his words sometimes sharper, and how they approach the record’s concept of everything not being fine despite what we constantly tell ourselves. “"It was our first year of Trump […] The news all day is bad news, you know,” Chris said to NPR regarding the album. The first proper song here is a scathing satire on rap culture the likes we haven’t seen since De La Soul circa 1996, calling out image, Instagram, YouTube critics, and rappers who are only in it for money. Helping them make this black comedy-satirical album are comedians, including Hannibal Buress (who drops a really lame verse on “OhSh”), John Hodgman, Michael Che, and Nick Offerman. But it’s not all fun and games: “Saw somebody else got shot up, this time by some cops in Texas or Virginia / Can’t remember, can’t keep count,” Chris raps on “Breakfast of Champions.”
#80. Chief Keef - Finally Rich
Keith Farrelle Cozart had been churning out videos of a new sound, Chicago drill, while under house arrest at his grandmother’s house. He got the attention of Kanye West, and then labels fought for his attention for his long-awaited major-label debut. Finally Rich—on Interscope—sounds like a mixtape, except with (1) bigger bangers, and (2) bigger features, although the appearances of Wiz Khalifa, French Montana, Young Jeezy, and Rick Ross place this so firmly in 2012. You can probably tell from those features that there’s little to dissect about this album; its appeal the two-pronged approach of Young Chop’s drum programming and Chief Keef’s ridiculous hooks, tight-roping the thin line between brain-numbingly repetitive and The Greatest Thing Ever. (Naturally, he stumbles here or there; “Laughin’ to the Bank” is annoying.) I heard this album once and the melodic sound-byte “These bitches love Sosa” rattled in my head forevermore, never annoyingly, as well as “Damn, I hate bein’ sober” just a few songs down the road. (I should point out that both these two hooks sound like one another—and they rhyme!—and yet I love them both. They alone are worth more than the entirety of his mixtape that same year.) The verses often feel like afterthoughts: neither 50 nor Wiz Khalifa leave nearly as much of an impression as the chorus of “Hate Bein’ Sober”; “3Hunna” gets remixed here to add Rick Ross begins about his dog’s death in a plastic bag and then gets as generic as he always is.
#79. Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 2
All four Run the Jewels albums are good, and they’re also all the same — it’s mostly the guests, very often not repeated from album to album, that provides any marginal differentiation. The second one’s the best because “Oh My Darling Don’t Cry” and “Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck)” are El-P’s most potent and also maddeningly catchy productions; they’re avant-garde pop experiments unlike anything he’s ever essayed before. (The Pitchfork review considers this akin to “Sonic Youth in 1987 or Animal Collective in 2004, the point where a celebrated noise terrorist starts to embrace and challenge their audience rather than simply testing their patience,” and while I agree, I think El-P was slowly making his way there since 2012.) For another thing, “Early” (about police brutality) and “Crown” (an outpouring from Killer Mike about his drug-selling days) differentiate this from Run the Jewels (the first one), which was a deeply impersonal album from two rappers who kept going on and on about how they are the best. Whereas the first RTJ album peaks early, this album spreads out its quality more evenly throughout, and whereas the first RTJ album had cuts that flat-out didn’t work (looking at that Prince Paul feature mostly), there are none here — not even the unfairly-maligned “Love Again.” But similarly, Run the Jewels 2 leaves no room for filler running a tight 39 minutes across its 11 songs, and the same can’t be said about Run the Jewels 3 where they spread out too much.
#78. Big K.R.I.T. - Live From the Underground
Big K.R.I.T. fans, which he carefully cultivated off the strengths of three entirely self-produced mixtapes released in the years of 2010-2012, frown at his major label debut which doesn’t make sense to me on two fronts: (1) it’s better than exactly two of those mixtapes, and (2) it’s stronger from a production standpoint given that he had to use more live instruments instead of samples: the title track is his most rigorously organized song ever with multiple voices stacked on top of each other as if he were Kanye West on Common’s “Be (Intro)”; the horns on “Cool 2 Be Southern” make for his funkiest song. Not to say that the general criticisms are unfounded: the mainstream pandering throughout his first album to feature a price tag instead of a download button range from decent (“Money on the Floor”) to downright embarrassing (Ludacris’ misogynistic feature on “What U Mean”; lead single “Yeah Dats Me”), and so the skit at the end of the title track about finding himself in the mainstream is cute wishful thinking that never came to pass. But the three-song stretch of “If I Fall,” “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” and “Praying Man” remains the greatest run in his discography because K.R.I.T. shines when he’s not pretending to be hard and here we get 10 minutes of uninterrupted soul food. The problem with K.R.I.T. is that he arrived fully-formed as the hungry, smart, and soulful child of early OutKast, Goodie Mob, and UGK at a time when there was still nostalgia for that sound because no one else was delivering it, and then he never feigned to be interested in anything else while his core audience slowly moved on.
#77. Jay-Z & Kanye West - Watch the Throne
Let down by lofty expectations of these two rappers finally working together over the course of a full length—to say nothing that it’s coming off the heels after My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy—this was underrated on impact. Yes, the rappers phone it in from time-to-time—Jay-Z barely registers on “Lift Off”—and the album should’ve started and ended with Frank Ocean collaborations instead of closing with “Why I Love You.” Yes, the album is frontloaded. Yes, the two rappers don’t share the same lethality as Andre 3000-Big Boi or Ghostface Killah-Raekwon (Jay-Z never ranked as high as those four rappers, not even when he briefly donned an umlaut), and don’t play off each other as much as they should (“Otis” being a key exception). But the beats carry the album through: the bass-line of “No Church in the Wild”; the swirling backing vocals during the choruses of “Lift Off”; the Blades of Glory sample popping up halfway through “N****s in Paris” that makes the ridiculous Hit-Boy banger that much more ridiculous. Most of these beats are heavily processed, but two of them flash the old Kanye (the “Chop up the soul Kanye”). “Otis” presents the immortal singer’s voice in all its glory, then proceeds to cut it up and turn it into the driving mechanism. Meanwhile, “New Day” samples one of Nina Simone’s most famous songs, only Kanye West has pitch-shifted her voice into an alien warble. It’s the one song where both rappers stop with the braggadocio and remind us they’re human by rapping about their future children. “I mean I might even make him be Republican / So everybody know he love white people” is a reminder Kanye was funny about politics, once upon a time.
#76. Yugen Blakrok - Anima Mysterium
South African rapper Yugen Blakrok broke through with her show-stopping feature on the Black Panther album (an album for a movie that’s hard to imagine anyone caring about literally two days afterwards), and she wasted no time at all getting her second album out there. Opener “Gorgon Madonna” is just one long verse, showing off her vocabulary and flow by rhyming “Vulture goddess” with “Multiple sunsets” in the opening few lines, and then using images that you would’ve seen from the Dex Jux label at the turn of the millennium (“A throwback, in the age of clones and phone taps / Metallic drones and all that, command an army of skeleton bone stacks”). The abstractness culminates in her highest profile guest to-date, Kool Keith, one of the originators of this style of rapping (she references Blue Flowers in her verse in turn). Keith sounds right at home over Kanif the JhatMaster’s boom bap beats, but he pales in comparison to Blakrok whose flow is a lot more nimble, and whose vocabulary eclipses his own, though he lends Anima Mysterium legitimacy the way elder rappers do when they grace new projects. Kanif the JhatMaster’s beats provides Blakrok a template akin to Portishead’s Dummy: the doomy midnight stroke of “Hibiscus” offsetting the loungy, understated piano line while one can imagine Geoff Barrow responsible for the scratching of “Morbid Abakus.” This was the rare instance of a non-North American rapper that made waves without pandering to anyone with an in-vogue beat or R&B chorus.
#75. Roc Marciano - Behold a Dark Horse
Rahkeim Calief Meyer is, of course, the dark horse referred to in the title. Still not yet a household name by this point—despite laying the foundation of NY noir ahead of Ka and the Griselda crew—Marciano has been in the game since the late-90s when he first joined Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad crew (Roc went to school with Busta Rhymes’ younger brother), and didn’t embark on his own solo career until much later. Behold a Dark Horse is the second of three albums that Marciano released in 2018, and it’s also the best (Behold > Kaos > RR2: The Bitter Dose). Assists from the Alchemist and Q-Tip make it feel like a career retrospective when they first, looking back to Reloaded when they first backed him and seeing how far he’s come since; the rare Black Thought feature sweetens the deal. Having quieted the drums (“drumless,” a new contender for dumbest genre name has entered the chat) to create a paradoxically more threatening ambience early on, the use of percussion on the second song or the drum solo that wraps up “Diamond Cutters” are titanic in this context, the latter of which has a beat straight out of Ghostface Killah’s Fishscale. The Alchemist’s beat on “Fabio” takes a soul sample and cuts it off into a yip, looping it so it feels like a constant cry for help against the song’s dark bass-line, and worried that it might get annoying over the course of a 5-minute song, he cooks up a completely different beat for the second half.
#74. Czarface - Czarface
Nostalgic and nerdy, it’s a fine line to walk, and Czarface tight-rope it all the way through, stumbling occasionally but ultimately sticking the landing. Why I rank this over Ghostface Killah’s Twelve Reasons to Die from that same year is simple: I like Ghostface Killah more as a rapper than Inspectah Deck, but I prefer 7L’s beats more than Adrian Younge’s. 7L’s beats are boom bap with little details underneath the surface head-nodding—the bubbling keyboard or guitar that sputters into happy existence as the song’s primary sonic hook on “Cement 3’s”; the delightful high note at the end of each loop on “Rock Beast”—that keep me coming back for more. Czarface are a supergroup—trio, really—but they load their albums with features (including two full collaborations with MF DOOM), and while most of the features here waste time (Oh No should stick behind the boards; Mr. Muthafuckin’ Exquire thinks that Superman side character is some deep, obscure reference; Ghostface Killah’s verse ain’t up to his standards), it only adds to the supergroup-ness. Especially that DJ Premier—whose influence looms large over 7L’s production—gifts them one beat in “Let It Off.” So it’s largely Inspectah Deck and Esoteric’s show, and they largely impress, describing a zombie apocalypse on “Dead Beat” over an anxious-squeak of a beat and Esoteric ending the song by extending the zombie metaphor to the rap game.
#73. MIKE - May God Bless Your Hustle
The album’s title is a phrase his mother posted on Michael Jordan Bonema’s Instagram, and his love for her casts a dark shadow over his breakthrough project. “Try harming me, bro, when my mama had gone / It left a part of me ghost” arrives early on, and then the second song goes deeper into it, “My mother’s face seem new to me every time / I hit the photos for a better time.” It’s lines like these that remind me of Earl Sweatshirt. For one thing, both rappers are younger than they sound (MIKE was only 18 years old when this album dropped) thanks to their deep register, but both occasionally toss in a nuclear line about family and depression (compare these lines to Earl’s “I spent the day drinking and missing my grandmother”). But it’s the beats—many self-produced—that help frame his mindset. Avant-garde collective Standing on the Corner—who will soon work with the aforementioned Earl—performs a strange, supine interlude and will work with MIKE to produce a full project the year afterwards. Elsewhere, soul samples that have been carefully crate-dug (including of fellow NYC forgotten singer Billy Hambric on the second track), and then subsequently warped and rusted. A well-traveled sample that we’ve already heard in a rap song over a decade ago shows up as the coda of “STANDOUT” and it’s treated in a practically-vaporwave manor here.
#72. Young Thug - Beautiful Thugger Girls
This was advertised as Young Thug’s “singing album,” executively produced by Mr. Singing Rapper himself, Drake. The cover sees Thug with an acoustic guitar, and early reports suggested a mix of country, R&B, and trap. Weird, which is just a normal Tuesday for Thug. I think framing the album this way ultimately did it a disserve: only three of this album’s 14 tracks prominently feature an acoustic guitar, and the opener has you anticipating a far stranger album that never arrives. Beautiful Thugger Girls’ dirty little secret is that the best songs are all saved for last where Thug’s predilection for strange beats comes out to play: wobbly synth of “Oh Yeah” peaking in and out; peppy horns of “For Y’all” that looks ahead to Thug’s collaboration with Camila Cabello that would be the first time he hit #1 on the charts; synth-wave line of “Take Care” (not to be confused with “Take Kare”). Opener “Family Don’t Matter” is the country-pop-rap hybrid that we were promised, and since Thug knows that acoustic guitar doesn’t automatically make the song country, he adopts an exaggerated country drawl for some of the verses (also shouting “YEE-HAW” on the first verse). Elsewhere, Young Thug puts his feud with Future to rest on mid-album highlight “Relationships,” wherein Future goes from “I’m in a relationship with all my bitches, yeah / I put my dick inside her mouth before she left” to “I’m in a relationship with all my bitches, yeah / I need to cut some of ‘em off, I need help” by song’s end. This was supposed to be Thug’s debut album but was changed later to be a “commercial mixtape”; his actual-official debut album didn’t arrive for another three years, and it was an album that was shockingly normal for Thug.
#71. Blu & Exile - Give Me My Flowers While I Can Smell Them
Nobody goes to bat for this album, even though Blu & Exile’s Below the Heavens was championed as an underground classic of the 2000s. Make it make sense. My opinion? Take Below the Heavens down a notch, an album where so many of its beats rely on same-y plucked 8th notes, and raise this one up a bit. It’s true that the rapper did not make it easy for his listeners, leaked online without a care and with mixing issues such that Blu—already one who doesn’t really move his voice around much—sounds like he’s mumbling through some of the songs. Hence, peep the 2012 version released via Fat Beats that drops the 5-minute EDM instrumental “John McCain” that doesn’t even sound produced by Exile, and smooths out the mixing too. But even on the original version, some of these rank among Exile’s greatest productions: the dots of soulful vocals of “More Out of Life” (some incredible rhyming on the first verse here from Blu) to the roving bass-line of “I Am Jean” which would have been west coast’s best jazz rap song that year if not for Kendrick Lamar’s “Ab-Soul’s Outro” to the bright and smoky piano sample of “She Said It’s OK.” Even a minor cut like “Money”—one of the songs suffering the most from the nonexistent mixing—has Exile laying down the funk with some additional horn and woodwind textures. I’m a big fan of NoYork! too, released in the same year, which is also an album where Blu’s voice matters less than the production, but it’s become outclassed by rappers that came after that took its glitchy Los Angeles production to new heights.
#70. Bladee - Gluee
At first blush, this album might seem overloaded with post-808s & Heartbreak autotune and rap cliches (“Gucci lenses on my eyes” in one song; “Gucci on my belt” in another), but it was the profile on the Swedish rapper on AQNB that revealed more about Bladee: “I don’t know why I care about brands.” My guess: it’s because he’s been told to. The Swedish rap scene breaking through around this time—“Bitches come and go, brah”—really feels like these young, European rappers were figuring out rap music on their terms specifically because they are so detached from American rap tradition. That, and the fact that these rappers often are ESL—and, in the case of fellow Drain Gang member Thaiboy Digital, ETL—which means less focus on bars and more focus on beats, here leaning hard on cloud rap and then later drawing a throughline from there to trap. There are spellbinding sonics on this tiny mixtape—just shy of half an hour—the un-rap drum programming of “Ebay” or the shimmer during the chorus of “Everlasting Flames” and plenty more as Bladee evolved, but nothing I’ve heard from him—that is, until his newest album this year, and if you told me in 2014, 2016, or 2018 that Bladee would drop in AOTY contender in 2024 I would’ve laughed—will ever top hearing “Deletee (Intro),” a song whose autotuned vocals feel like looking out the window and discovering that the sky is within reach but being too strung out to care. The vaporwave outro is just icing on the cake.
#69. Mavi - Let the Sun Talk
Near the end of Earl Sweatshirt-produced “Sense”—a one-minute song selected to be a single, mind you—Mavi drops this line which turned my head, “What kinds of songs you make? / I make the kind you gotta read, baby.” Yes, he does. Not even 20-years old at the time Let the Sun Talk dropped, Mavi, real name Omavi Ammu Minder, is a neuroscience student at Howard University that moonlights as a rapper — or is it the other way around? A student of the body, but a rapper of the mind, Mavi’s music exists on the same peninsula with Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE: albums made up of very short songs a la Madvillainy and packed full of rhymes. “Was taught to barge in / Learned it off the margins / Flirting with the hard shit / Urchin in the government eyes / Perfect in mom’s,” he goes on “Ghost (in the Shell)” which is essentially a 1-minute verse, before dumbing it down eventually, “I would wait, but I got a few more bars left to say / So in good faith: fuck the army, and the law, and the banks.” Like Some Rap Songs, this is meant to be taken as one sitting. In fact, it was originally released as a one-track, 32-minute download in one of the last major SoundCloud releases of the decade that I can think of.
#68. De La Soul - …and the Anonymous Nobody
By 2016, De La Soul probably did feel like ‘anonymous nobodies,’ funding their comeback album through Kickstarter, but they must have felt like odd ones out as early as 1993 when hip-hop started leaving their friendly version of rap behind. This is their comeback album, their best album in 23 years (released in the same year as the comeback album of fellow Native Tongues act Tribe Called Quest), but woefully ignored in the grand scheme of things because it’s a low-key Gorillaz album and barely a hip-hop album. “Drawn”—featuring Little Dragon, possibly introduced to the group via Gorillaz when both featured on Plastic Beach—doesn’t feature rapping until the last minute; instead, it’s just a plucky little darling instrumental while Yukimi Nagano’s voice floats on by. Instruments are introduced, poking their head in the recording room and leaving: in-and out drumming, an electric guitar showing up with a single note… and that’s it. The instrumental prowess on display reminds me of “I Am I Be,” a masterpiece song that hip-hop has barely essayed since then. The failures of this album aren’t like the lame hardcore posturing of their clueless 2000-2004 era because they’re still interesting: “Snoopies” brings in David Byrne but the choruses feel grafted in; the Damon Albarn assist sounds like an alt-rap version of Coldplay. (Surprisingly, these collaborations fail while the 2 Chainz one ends up…being a highlight?) The album isn’t solid, which implies some sort of cushy consistency. Stakes is High or Grind Date are solid. This is interesting — and underrated as a result. Their fourth-best album.
#67. SpaceGhostPurrp - Mysterious Phonk: The Chronicles of SpvcxGhxztPvrrp
I know his diehard fans probably prefer his earlier mixtapes, but I think a little bit money cleaning up his sound did a lot for him. This being released on hallowed indie label 4AD (Pixies, Cocteau Twins) makes less sense than Shabazz Palaces’ Black Up on Sub-Pop no matter how you slice it, and indie listeners/Pitchfork readers who might even have been interested in hip-hop didn’t know what to do with a repetitive Memphis rap tribute. The second song, “Bringing thv Phxnk” (all the song titles are stylized similarly) begins with SGP declaring “I’mma keep bringing the phonk / N****, I’mma keep bringing the phonk / And you n****s can’t stop me” and he proceeds to repeat that nine more times in full such that the chorus takes over a full minute, each instance with the same drunken backing vocal (“Phonnnnnk”) trailing behind him. For me, the song peaks during that chorus—I don’t even need his short verse, which is just a bunch of cliched phrases—specifically when the bassy synth chord gets thrown into the mix (at the 0:40 mark exactly), swallowing up the strange, alluring, high-pitched beep-beat, and then after that instance of “Bringing the phonk,” he has a woman cum to the intensity. It’s an album that lives and dies on that repetition, and I’ve come to give in fully to its insanity to get to hear sound-bytes like the bird-squawk harmony of “Grind On Me” and the 90s’ east coast piano of “Don’t Give a Damn” over and over again. This followed 4AD releasing Joker’s debut album of purple sound, rare instances of the label trying to branch out before returning to releasing the billionth St. Vincent or National album.
#66. Killer Mike - R.A.P. Music
Not so secretly the best Run the Jewels album: El-P doesn’t ham up the microphone, and this is back when Killer Mike had more political fire instead of bragging non-stop (he's a landlord now). Killer Mike has always been a rapper in search of good beats prior to this; his early albums have been plagued by poorly-aged hip-hop sentimentality and beats such that you wouldn’t have known you were in the presence of the agility Big Boi mixed with the force of Ice Cube if you only heard the painfully generic PL3DGE released just the year before. El-P tailors his bombed-out basement beats so they sometimes have a southern funk to them (“Untitled” and “Southern Fried”) while others demonstrating a rare sense of space for El-P (“Reagan”) such that beats sound like they’re trying to appeal to both Killer Mike’s original fanbase and the fans that El-P brought with him. It’s not perfect: “Butane (Champion’s Anthem)” brings the frat boys out the woodworks with an annoying ‘yeah-yeah-yeah’ hook that I wish El-P were above by this point while the title track gets mad corny as Killer Mike does a whole verse of name-dropping (y’see, all black music is ‘Rebellious African People Music!’). Don’t discount “Go,” the rare rap interlude that goes harder than most of the actual songs. Opener “Big Beast” declares how different this new era of Killer Mike is (painfully short-lived) while re-affirming his southern roots despite working with a non-southern producer by bringing in Trouble for hook duty, and UGK’s Bun B and T.I., the latter of which raps breathlessly while rhyming six lines—internal rhymes and all—with “Tel Aviv.” Kenny was right about this one: Killer Mike should have been platinum — for this album and this one only.
#65. Nas - Life is Good
Jay-Z once admonished Nas for having “one hot album every 10 year average,” and sure enough, Life is Good is Nas’ only good album for the entire decade; his album backed by Kanye West for the Wyoming sessions was the worst of the batch. “Summer on Smash” is the pool bar banger that no one asked for, a truly vile piece of early-2010s club songs that you should swap out for pre-album single “Nasty” that’s available as a bonus track (“Nasty” has a mindless banger beat, but Nas tears the songs to shreds), and “She says ‘third leg from a legend is sheer heaven’” is the dumbest brag about dick size I have ever heard. But overall, the prodigious flow he demonstrated early on in his career that slowly evaporated over the years is back even if it’s a little clangy and stiff in places, but such is to be expected by a rapper 20 years out of his element. Even “Daughters,” wherein Nas raps about the Very Embarrassing story about his daughter showing off a jewelry box full of condoms is handled with finesse. Salaam Remi does a beat switch in the climax of “A Queens Story” by using—and more rappers should sample classical music—Frederic Chopin’s “Étude Op. 10, No. 12”; “World’s an Addiction” flashes his old storytelling prowess in the third verse, unexpectedly weaving in a story about a doctor who ends up murdering his ex while depicting a waiting room full of patients (“Filling out an application cause they all need medication / But the doctor need love or a quick vacation…”) as Remi’s strings appropriately supply the drama. Though the second half lets up, No I.D.—on his re-ascent back into rap Valhalla—supplies the indelible “Stay” that not even J. Cole could’ve have bundled up when he hopped on that beat the very next year.
#64. ScHoolboy Q - Habits & Contradictions
The first major album to be released in 2012 arrived on January 14, hot on the heels of the success of Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80, an album too uneven to be considered among Lamar’s best. The main issue here—in parallel with fellow Black Hippy mates Ab-Soul’s Control System and Jay Rock’s Follow Me Home—is that Habits & Contradictions is 17 songs totaling near 70 minutes, and Q’s subject matter is more limited than Lamar or Ab-Soul. He does drugs, he fucks bitches, and sometimes, he enjoys both simultaneously; only “Blessed” really aims for anything different, which features one of the greatest guest performances from a young Kendrick Lamar. (More reasons why Spotify sucks: you can’t hear the best song on the album!) The party song comes early (“Hands on the Wheel”), using Lissie’s live cover of Kid Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness,” and then the vibe afterwards is a haunted playground thanks to disorienting beats, including deploying eerie samples of Portishead (“Raymond 1969”) and Genesis (“Gangsta in Designer”). The quality isn’t even throughout—Ab-Soul is on J. Cole’s shit shtick on “Druggy Wit Hoes Again (“thought I had a laxative, now ain’t that some shit?”) which might explain why the two would collaborate later on—but songs near the front (“There He Go”) and end (“Blessed”) make clear how high Q’s ceiling was. For the record, Oxymoron is better than I think a lot of people give it credit for, but it has big major record label energy in the singles that firmly place it in 2014 whereas this album feels less era-specific.
#63. Ab-Soul - Control System
It’s hard to imagine now but in 2012, Ab-Soul could have been the heart and brains of the Black Hippy crew; certainly not the gangster Jay Rock (good for features and boring for albums) or party animal ScHoolboy Q (bad for features and good for albums); his wordplay at this time was better than Kendrick Lamar who ended up running laps ‘round all of them, but Soul was running laps ‘round Jay-Z. Heart: “The Book of Soul,” which goes through his challenges with Stevens-Johnson syndrome and the suicide of his girlfriend Alori Joh. It’s the most touching rap song of the decade. Brains: the way he swishes around the same word over and over and then switches its meaning as a punch-line: “Babylon, Babylon, out my window, all I see is Babylon / On the news, all I see is Babylon / And all n****s do is just babble on”; “This is a shift in paradigm / I remember when I couldn’t spare a dime / Now I step in with a pair of dimes.” His vocabulary should be admired, even if he awkwardly mispronounces plateau as pla-too to force a rhyme: he rhymes “tattooed” to “few plaques too” to “attitude” to “Timbuktu” to “ten bucks too”; elsewhere, he rhymes “battle” with “chattel,” a word I had never heard of before Ab-Soul introduced me to it. My theory is he smoked a spliff so laced with shit that he never came down, and with less commercial appeal than his crew-mates, he was stuck on TDE while his friends all took on major record deals and progressed artistically while he made Do What Thou Wilt.
#62. Big K.R.I.T. - Return of 4eva
Big K.R.I.T. first garnered acclaim for K.R.I.T. Wuz Here, an entirely self-produced mixtape containing a generous 69 minutes that announced his intention to bring back the glory days of southern rap music (1994-1996), which was unfortunately more front-loaded than any U2 album I know. Released less than a year later, his second mixtape Return of 4eva—also entirely self-produced—should have established him as a household name. 73 minutes this time, but the highs aren’t just higher than they were previously, but also more evenly spread out. “Intro” and “Another Naive Individual Glorifying Greed and Encouraging Racism” trace his lineage to jazz while “Dreamin’” goes back even further: it feels like an autobiographical blues song in the form of a rap song. His penchant for choruses made out of repeating simple hooks gets tiring (“My sub, my sub, my sub, I put that on my sub…”), but the beats are so darn colourful: “King’s Blues” recalling the high-pitched twinkle of OutKast’s “Unhappy”; the saxophone line of “Another Naive…” Holding him back is that his flow is always too thought-out, and his feature ending A$AP Rocky’s posse cut “1 Train” (unequivocally the best verse there) and on “Control”-response “Mt. Olympus” are ultimately exceptions in his discography, but his words are always thoughtful that I wish more rappers took note of.
#61. Armand Hammer - Paraffin
What’s insane to me is that billy woods—who has released a steady stream of albums ever since breaking through in underground circles in 2012, including two albums a year in 2019 and 2022 and consistently making AOTY contenders—has time for a side project with Elucid as Armand Hammer, which feels as important to his legacy as his core albums instead of some for-fun side project. Furthermore, Armand Hammer’s albums all feel distinct from woods’ solo albums, not just because he shares the microphone with Elucid, but because the beats they choose (sometimes produced in-house by Elucid) have a gritty aesthetic that feels like post-war New York. Of the two, woods impresses more; he raps like a tank rolling through an occupied city, something that was made clear when I caught them on their We Buy Diabetic Test Strips tour where woods towered over the audience with one arm outspread while Elucid mostly stuck to the shadows. But Elucid gets in many of the album’s best lines: “We call a system / Algorithm that applies pressure to achieve desired results,” he says on opener “Sweet Micky” which is an Elucid solo spot setting the political tone of the album that follows, while “Your favorite rapper’s a corporate shill / Who dresses like a banker in they spare time” (“Rehearse with Ornette”) glimpses humour that woods is usually far less interested in. The beats—with assists from Messiah Musik and Kenny Segal—are sounds on the verge of disintegrating into drum hiss and fallout drone, including a Havoc-like piano on closer “Root Farm” and the most surprising of samples for its chorus. “Everything I wrote is in the wind / We didn’t win, and I can't see doing it all over,” woods says, resigned, in the album’s final lines. What really happened is that they kept fighting, and their albums in the new decade have been even better than this.
#60. Quelle Chris - Guns
Wherein Quelle Chris’ off-kilter beats get as sharp as his wit and tongue as he explores guns — guns as a weapon, yes, but also guns as a culture, and how we’ve gotten to this point. This album floored me because I didn’t expect Chris to put out a solo record that ends up that much better than his collaboration with Jean Grae earlier this list, but the beats here—the problem on Everything’s Fine—are some of the best Chris has ever produced. The deep bass-line of “Spray and Pray” as Chris adopts a deep register and fake accent to talk about his relationship with gun-obsessed rap culture (“Been packing since a yute”); the fuzzy drum sound of “It’s the Law”; the use of a children’s choir on “PSA Drugfest 2003 (Sleeveless Minks”). And “Obamacare” gets my vote for the best beat of that year, turning Danny Brown’s “Really Doe” into something jazzier while still being ice-cold, which he follows up with a love song to his partner (who alas, doesn’t get a proper verse). Don’t discount the two skits, the first of which is a Quelle Chris take on a De La Soul-esque skit from 3 Feet High & Rising, and the other is a solo verse from Bilal Salaam, completely without any of Chris’ fussy drums, to list out recent tragedies made possible because of guns.
#59. Lupe Fiasco - Tetsuo & Youth
Lupe Fiasco has opined in multiple interviews that rappers don’t fall off. “[O]ur craft isn’t based on anything physical. It’s not like we need knees to rap, need ACLs to rap. The things that come under pressure and get damaged in the career of a basketball player—we don’t have those. Our muscle is our cognition. Neuroplasticity lasts throughout your entire life. Even if you get to be 90 years old, your brain is still creating new pathways,” he elaborated on The Ringer. And he proves his point time and time again. With multiple songs breaching 8 minutes in length and interludes influenced by the four seasons, Tetsuo & Youth feels like a magnum opus, or, at the very least, the album that Lupe Fiasco has wanted to make but has always been hamstrung by Atlantic (who allegedly didn’t want to release this either). “Mural” leads things off, a 9-minute song that doesn’t even bother with a hook, just bars on bars on bars to demonstrate Fiasco’s way of rapping as if he were a painter (he does paint; see the cover for an example), over a soul sample that feels like something RZA might have done in 1995. Elsewhere, “Prisoners 1 & 2” takes a look at the prison industry complex, not just through the eyes of a prisoner—which would be too easy for Fiasco—but also in the eyes of a guard, who he positions a prisoner in their own right (“Either working at the prison, or it’s no lights”). I do wish there was more colour to these beats—DJ Dahi does what he can in the final stretch—and “Chopper” forgets that good posse cuts like “1 Train,” “Piñata,” or “Really Doe” enlist people we care about in the first place.
#58. Young Thug - Barter 6
I wasted the summer of 2015 deliberating if “If the cops pull up, I put that crack in my crack / Or (pause) I put that brack in my brack” or “I’ma ride in that pussy like a stroller” (from Jamie xx’s “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)”) was funnier, and to be honest, I still don’t know. What I do know is that those lines—as well as the threat to get to prison for the sole purposes of fucking your father on “Numbers” (as a chorus!), plus the ridiculous “SHEESH” ad-lib that comes early on “Dome”—place Young Thug as the funniest performer on this list, even if others like early Danny Brown might have better punchlines. He’s not just funny either: I think the key line on this album is the one mumbled so that no one can understand him, “Geeked out my mind, man, I'm tripping out / I don't know none of these people.” Production-wise, Young Thug’s secret weapon here is London on da Track, a Zaytoven to his Gucci Mane. London on da Track handles four of these songs, of which “Check “And “Numbers” are the album’s best songs. It’s a shame that a good chunk of the album (“retail mixtape”) is devoted to features that are infinitely less interesting than Young Thug himself. Birdman’s “Smoke some stunna blunts, now my eyes Chinese” on “Constantly Hatin’” is cheap humour while T.I. continues with his casual misogyny that somehow got him involved in one of the decade’s biggest hits, “She let me put it everywhere but the butt / I always tell the bitch don’t talk so much.”
#57. Pusha T - King Push: Darkest Before Dawn - The Prelude
What’s most-noteworthy about this album is how it plays like a streamlined, modernized take of the late-90s Jay-Z albums with the multiple Timbaland and Puff Daddy productions. Like My Name is My Name, there’s a lack of direction here, evidenced by the thirty different producers who have hands in only ten songs, even if the vision is slightly clearer that Pusha won’t resolve until Daytona. Notably, the two The-Dream features demonstrate an inability to complete let go of pop music and embracing the darkness promised in the title, and while I’m quibbling, “M.P.A.”—one of two songs that Kanye West has a hand in—takes up way too much scenery here and it might be the album’s worst song. In some ways, it feels like Push is re-hashing the previous album’s successes: “Untouchable” does the “Numbers on the Boards” thing of sampling a classic rap song; “Got Em Covered” is yet another hypnotically-rhythmic Ab-Liva feature akin to “Suicide.” But there’s lots to be admired in the sound design: the best rap song named “Intro” since Common a decade ago; the beat switch on “Untouchable” as Push goes “Mu told me to switch styles”; the cavernous drum programming of “Keep Dealing” and the water-drip beat of “Retribution.” Two massive highlights are saved for last, a Q-Tip production that sounds nothing like anything the Tribeman has ever done, and then a song where Push does switch styles by going political and knocking out the park.
#56. Milo - Who Told You to Think??!!?!?!?!
No longer beholden to traditional song structures, Who Told You to Think??!!?!?!?! feels like a collection of poetry than the short stories of his previous two albums which suits this Madvillainy-loving poet-warrior Milo just fine. Milo—real name Rory Allen Philip Ferreira—is rap music’s biggest nerd, evidenced early on this album with a deep Elder Scrolls reference, “Hold hisself like J'zargo in Winterhold,” and his nerd-dom lets him get away with constructing lines that no other rapper would have thought of like “How gracefully he fidgets with the ephemeral” or “While we tenured in this deplorable reality,” or rhyming “Salazar Slytherin” with “Salad bar, giggling.” But more than his language, Who Told You to Think??!!?!?!?! impresses with its aesthetic. Mostly self-produced under the name Scallops Hotel, the sound goes further into ambient jazz than Kenny Segal did on So the Flies Don’t Come; the title references the Roots’ Do You Want More?!!!??! so imagine that without Questlove’s forearms and prettier keyboards. “Note to Mrs” feels like an instrumental interlude that only happens to feature words with its chime-like keyboard and gently brushing percussion as the best part while both parts of “Pablum // CELESKINGIII” are jazz rap of the highest order that feel like the results of Madlib-levels of crate-digging. “magician (suture)” eventually hits a drum-locked groove but the percussionless introduction is something I can swim in, and something I find myself revisiting far more than the ‘actual rap part.’ Elucid sums up the album’s thesis pretty succinctly: “I love quiet things quietly.”
#55. Pusha T - My Name is My Name
I rate this ever-so-slightly higher than King Push - Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude for two simple reasons: (1) “Numbers on the Boards,” and (2) “Nosetalgia.” I submit that King Push, his follow-up to this album, is tighter, and more consistent, but crucially, there’s not a single song on that album that comes close to the two best songs here. Pusha T’s early solo releases sounded like an artist trying to adjust to their new environment post-Clipse, and it wasn’t until this album where Kanye West brought with him the hyper-realized dark minimalism of Yeezus to Pusha T where the rapper felt more natural. It makes sense: where Clipse was Pharrell’s outlet for weirder beats, so could Pusha T be Kanye West’s outlet. Thus, we get the cutting off of all the various elements of “Numbers of the Boards” before they’re allowed to decay, a “Grindin’” re-imagined for the post-Yeezus world, or the bluesy guitar turned into a concussive grenade on “Nosetalgia” where Pusha T maintains his footing against Kendrick Lamar (“Then crack the window in the kitchen, let it ventilate / ‘Cause I let it sizzle on the stove like a minute steak”). Yes, it’s inconsistent. Pusha T declares “I don’t sing hooks” on “King Push” with a beat using the same sample as Kanye West’s “New Slaves,” and then comes a parade of R&B fodder singing the hooks for him, some fine (Pharrell on “S.N.I.T.C.H.”) and others not (Chris Brown on “Sweet Serenade”). Don’t discount “Let Me Love You,” not just because Rowland’s hook is actually memorable for once from the former Destiny’s Child singer, but because Pusha T does a Ma$e impression that’s his funniest verse.
#54. Rapsody - Laila’s Wisdom
After show-stopping features on high-profile albums like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Anderson .Paak’s Malibu, Rapsody steamrolled enough hype so that Laila’s Wisdom wasn’t just a break through, it broke down walls; even if it lost to Lamar’s DAMN., this would be the first album nominated for a Grammy for Best Rap Album by a woman in twenty years. She calls in those favours, as well as the rare Black Thought feature as the centerpiece, but the best songs are the bookends that don’t bother with such star-power. The title track’s production is courtesy of the underrated Nottz who opens the album by cutting up Aretha Franklin’s “Young, Gifted and Black” and reassembles the pieces into a soulful banger. On the flip side, rap steward 9th Wonder (who handles the majority of this album) produces “Jesus Coming,” a stunning exercise of minimalism, just dots of electric piano and a voice going “Time to go - home” that surely ranks as one of the greatest rap closers of the entire decade. Alas, “Pay Up”’s hook sucks and in general sounds misplaced in the greater context of the album, and “Ridin” brings in some nobody who goes “Take a shuttle to space / Space is never enough for me”; Rapsody herself can be occasionally corny (“They say we 3/5ths human, well the rest of me’s an autobot / I’m really hot”), all minor blights in the grand scheme of things. She followed this up with another strong album in Eve (no Lamar or Thought is a point against it but she gets the rare feature out of D’Angelo) that reminds me of Jamila Woods’ Legacy! Legacy!, both albums by black women released in the same year whose song titles tribute black excellence.
#53. The Uncluded - Hokey Fright
The Uncluded are the unlikely two-piece act from abstract rapper Aesop Rock and anti-folk artist Kimya Dawson, and their one album together, Hokey Fright, was basically written off completely — even by most Aesop Rock devotees. A shame: I heard one of the most charming albums of the decade. If you want to sample this record and see if it’s for you, I recommend the second song, “Delicate Cycle.” Aesop Rock sounds as natural over Kimya Dawson’s folk instrumental as he does over a hip-hop beat. A problem I have with Aesop Rock is that he doesn’t let his words breathe, so Dawson acts as a great foil because her words are given the weight they deserve. Her first verse about her childhood experience at the laundromat is delivered with a wide-eyed innocence, such that when Aesop Rock joins in to say “HI!” together, it’s a very cute moment, and then we’re brought to the choruses where they harmonize with each other in the delightful repetition of ,”My whole life is a delicate cycle, delicate cycle,” and (1) have you even ever thought about using laundry terms to describe your life and (2) has anything else ever been more appropriate? Though that’s the best song here, most of the other tracks are similar, with their own delightfully harmonized and chanted choruses (“I couldn’t fight my way out of a wet paper bag / Even if I had Edward Scissorhands hands”) or profundities (Dawson: “His mother died the other day / He’s only three years old”; Aesop Rock: “The stasis of a spirit taken from its only home”).
#52. YG - Still Brazy
Severing his ties with DJ Mustard who handled of his debut album, YG instead hands production to mostly local talents for Still Brazy. The result is the best g-funk album since g-funk. It bumps with the same glorious decadence as Too $hort and DJ Quik, get occasionally surprisingly deep and packs tons of weed carriers like a Dr. Dre album, and has a lame women-hating song in the middle as if we learned nothing since Ice Cube. Californian producer Swish gets to flex their range on the first two songs, a throwback beat warning others to stay out of their territory (which might have held more weight if Drake didn’t show up eight tracks later) and then a dark, paranoid beat as YG ponders who tried to take his life (that drum programming, sheesh!). On the other side of the album, “FDT” begins the album’s starkly political final stretch (as opposed to cooling down, YG invites us to turn up louder for these themes), fighting Trump’s MAGA slogan by creating one for the ages that’s more memorable, before turning his attentions to black-on-black crime, and then police-on-black brutality. I truly thought this album was going to make YG a household name, especially when “FDT” continued to gain new life with Trump’s exit, but he just sort of evaporated as quickly as he materialized.
#51. Kendrick Lamar - DAMN.
Like Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, that this album won the Pulitzer—the only time the prize was awarded outside of classical and jazz—felt like an institution shaking things up just for attention. Kendrick Lamar should have won for a different album if they wanted to give legitimacy to hip-hop (but why stop there?) — or not at all. For the record, I like DAMN. plenty; I think it’s as good of a ‘normal’ album as Kendrick Lamar could have given us after exhausting himself creatively on To Pimp a Butterfly. But whereas he was pulling influences from time-tested genres as far reaching as neo-soul, g-funk and avant-garde jazz on his last album, DAMN. is ultra-modern, tapping Adele collaborator Greg Kurstin, Mike Will Made It, and trap beats, such that the weaker songs including his first #1 hit “HUMBLE.” and “GOD.” feel like artifacts from 2017 in a way that To Pimp a Butterfly doesn’t feel stuck in 2015. He’s still (overly) ambitious as ever—“XXX.” starts off like 1988-era Public Enemy while Lamar justifies murder in a way that’ll make a pacifist agree but tapers off to Trump-era fatigue, linking the two with a chorus from Bono—but the album feels strangely impersonal for modern rap’s best auteur, with only glimpses of who Kendrick Lamar really is (which are secretly the album’s best songs, particularly “YAH.” and “LOVE.”). By contrast, he’ll go the opposite route and get too personal on the next one. In terms of Pulitzer winners, I’d rather listen to this than Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto or Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone, but it’s significantly weaker than Caroline Shaw’s Partita in 8 Voices or John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean.