#50. BK - Gigantes
Opener “Novo poder” has Brazilian rap powerhouse BK announcing “Nós somo’ o novo poder” (“We are the new power”), referring to the growing Brazilian hip-hop culture and their place on the world stage. Backed by a sample of early, Spartan Daft Punk—refreshing considering the brainless use of Daft Punk by Kanye West and more recently, Drake & 21 Savage—courtesy of producer JXNV$, I’m tempted to believe him. It’s a shame that I constantly need to refer to Google translate to help me understand BK’s lyrics because he’s clearly a conscious rapper that’s put a lot of thought into his words. From translating around, I have figured out that “Exóticos” goes into the fetishization of black bodies and the power dynamics of interracial couples, while the following “Julius” talks of the consequences of growing up with role models tying back to the title track’s lines, “Criança atrás de armas se tornam gigantes / Criança atrás de telas se tornam gigantes” (“Children behind weapons become giants / Children behind screens become giants”). It’s the beats, mostly helmed by JXNV$ and El Lif Beatz (both of whom largely responsible for debut Castelos & ruínas) that put him above other Brazilian rappers like Djongo or FBC who settle for way less (to say nothing that they’re also worse rappers), mixing together samples and live instruments to create the lush tones on “Titãs” or the spunky horns on “Deus do furdunço.”
#49. Future & Zaytoven - Beast Mode
Zaytoven’s strengths are his ability to fold in chamber instruments into trap beats more naturally than just about anybody else. Especially keyboards. His loops are rarely simple, and his keyboard sound is bright without ever taking away from Future’s darkness: “No Basic” and “Where I Came From” are triumphs in either artist’s long careers. The introduction of “Just Like Bruddas” before the 808s come in demonstrate as much: remove Future, and that could have been part of a jazz piano solo that wandered into a trap album. Add the beat, and it becomes pop bliss. Helping seal the deal is that there’s no bullshit. There’s no room for bullshit: it’s only 9 tracks, dispensing of the radio hit early on (“Oooooh”) so that Future can brag about how “fuck on that bitch and we lay up” while Zaytoven’s string arrangement (we all go on and on about his keyboard playing when this might be his best beat) undermines him. But no disrespect to “Oooooh,” which hammers in its catchiness with one held non-word and a generous amount of autotune. Even though Future has a higher batting average with Metro Boomin and Southside, this mixtape glimpsed a stronger rapper-producer synergy that bested MadGibbs or Killer Mike & El-P.
#48. Jay-Z - 4:44
Jay-Z in 2013 was basically a laughing stock, and I have a hard time trying to pinpoint the exact moment he hit rock bottom that year: the twerk outro of “Somewhereinamerica” or the Nirvana interpolation of “Holy Grail” or “Now eat the cake, Anna Mae” on Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love?” (Anyone who submits his cake verse for Drake’s “Pound Cake” is tripping: it was dumb but at least not idiotic.) What’s attractive about this album is that it shows that rappers can, in fact, age gracefully. By way of comparison, Dr. Dre dropped a brick that everyone forgot about a year later while Andre 3000 dropped rap music. No I.D., who had produced some hard-edge physically-bracing work in the years leading up to this, pairs Jay-Z with stripped-down, mid-tempo, soulful beats that allow Jay-Z to wax poetically about his failures (“Look, I apologize, often womanize”) and triumphs (“Took for my child to be born see through a woman’s eyes”). Helping it is that there are no rap features on 4:44 although some familiar names step in to help with additional vocals, prompting comparisons to The Black Album, and that there’s no bullshit: 4:44 clocks in at 36 minutes, about 20 minutes shorter than the next-shortest Jay-Z album. Well, almost no bullshit: I skip the opener (public airing out of dirty laundry) and I groan to the ‘bridge’ of “The Story of O.J.” His best album in 14 years that provided the model for other rappers going forward, except no one—not even him—dared to follow. “We’ve never seen the maturation of hip-hop before,” Jay-Z once said in 2010 (sampled later by Mach-Hommy). With this album, he shows us exactly what the maturation of hip-hop can sound like.
#47. Milo & Kenny Segal - So the Flies Don’t Come
Consider So the Flies Don’t Come the second-best introverted hip hop record of 2015 (the best is yet to come!). “I’m weaker when the light is on”; “I stay indoors…”; “We broke so it’s lawn chairs, long stares” — introverted as hell! It’s a vast improvement over A Toothpaste Suburb thanks to Kenny Segal’s production creating an ambient world out of instruments that’s been detuned and/or mellowed out, including the inspired Otis Redding sample on “Souvenir” where Milo and Hemlock Ernst (the front-man of that one-hit wonder Future Islands) detail the culture war around them (“And pretended we didn’t hear when white fans said ‘n****r’ fast”). (I recommend backtracking to A Toothpaste Suburb to hear a pre-famous Anderson. Paak wondering if Pitchfork will ever care about him.) Milo’s gift and curse is his love for language—he’s “a paradox in a pair of Docs,” a line so cunning yet simple that it’s insane that it took until 2015 for someone to think of it—which is on display right from the start. “They couldn’t predicate upon a precipice,” is how Milo begins “Rabblerouse,” before continuing on an alliterative assault, invoking the less-merciful Perseus and meek Tortoise, describing himself as thirstiest and impervious, and proceeding to save lives thorough poetry — all in 90 seconds.
#46. OG Keemo - Geist
Though he grew up on 50 Cent and idolizes Earl Sweatshirt, you’d have no idea listening to German rapper Karim Joel Martin a.k.a. OG Keemo, whose music resembles Denzel Curry most of all: high-octane, highly-literal, darkly-shaded trap. Geist is his debut album after breaking through the German scene just a few years prior. The son of a Sudanese immigrant, his experiences as a black person growing up in southwest Germany frames his lyrics as he recalls getting into school fights for being called the n-word (“Er nennt mich einen n****, deshalb färbe ich sein Auge”) on opener “Nebel.” As someone who doesn’t speak a lick of German, it’s the beats that are most vital to me courtesy of producer Funkvater. The piano sample on “Nebel” that made me run back to Massive Attack’s “Black Milk” (not the same, but the same effect), or the uneasy hiss of “216” that makes me think of German ambient techno producer GAS are rich textures that frankly you don’t see enough of in Curry’s music. Also of note is that he got to the YNW Melly name-drop a few years before Kendrick Lamar did on “Euphoria,” although rather than using the name like a threat, he rhymes it with Nelly Furtado and Pirelli on “Belly Freestyle.”
#45. Open Mike Eagle + Paul White - Hella Personal Film Festival
2016 belonged to Paul White and no one else for his work for (almost the entirety of) Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition as well as this album. Open Mike Eagle is about as opposite a rapper from Danny Brown as you get; Brown’s the extravert while Eagle’s the introvert, and one gets the sense that Open Mike Eagle fell into rap because that was the fastest way to get all of his thoughts out; Brown name-drops Love and Joy Division while Open Mike Eagle’s attempting Led Zeppelin at karaoke so you don’t have to. Paul White doesn’t do the same ‘dark hallways’ for Open Mike Eagle as he does for Danny Brown because the rapper’s subject matter doesn’t call for ‘em. Instead, the album is friendly, opening with an indelible sample of Quincy Jones’ “Is It Love That We’re Missin’” and the album just gets funnier and more profound from there. “I looked up what Lena Dunham said and I shouldn’t have!”, he bellows on the very next song, and then names a song “Check to Check” that isn’t about living that way but rather a satire about how modern society has to live by constantly checking their phones, then rejects hypocrisy as a language on “Smiling (Quirky Race Doc)” and would rather have everyone speak a little more sincerely on “Insecurity” but quickly realizes that might be too much, so he’ll make do by pretending he’s invincible on “Dang is Invisible.”
#44. Slauson Malone - A Quiet Farwell, 2016–2018 (Crater Speak)
Note: not ‘Farewell,’ but “Farwell,” originally a misspelling that Slauson Malone kept in because there’s the added distance. You’re not saying goodbye anymore; you’re already gone. Like Flying Lotus, Slauson Malone—real name Jasper Marsalis—comes from a rich musical background. Son of renowned jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, Malone became a member of the group Standing on the Corner after graduating from the Cooper Union for painting. Like Standing on the Corner’s music, A Quiet Farewell, 2016-2018 is hard to place from a genre perspective, but there are rap verses which make it more readily hip-hop than Standing on the Corner. Hip-hop by way of experimental sound collage and fractured jazz; live instruments as both texture and narrative, from the dying horns-n-harmony of “11/28/55, Ttrabul” to the jazzy piano of “08/09/14, Smile #1.” The album is paradoxically both meant to be consumed in one sitting, but also presented as a collage; for example, opening with the outro and having the second variation of “Smile” appearing before the first. There are rap verses—including from Malone himself—but they often feel besides the point which is the album’s themes of the apocalypse (“everybody was just kind of waiting to—DIE!”; “The Flying Africans” re-imagines Sun Ra’s “Space is the Place” as space very much not being available to us). Except it’s an apocalypse that feels very much like a quiet, cracked, internal obliteration than a fantastical, futuristic one.
#43. Mach-Hommy - HBO (Haitian Body Odor)
What separates Mach-Hommy from his contemporaries is that he’s not an American by birth. It says it right there in the title of his breakthrough album for all to see, he was born in Haiti, and his words sometimes divulge into Haiti’s background; the cover of this album is a painting of Haitian first lady Hichèle Bennett (painted by Mach-Hommy himself). The majority of HBO is produced by August Fanon who should have been far more highly sought after for his work here, nostalgic of 90s’ east coast while also absorbing the drumless sound of Roc Marciano (who produces one beat here) and Ka, but for whatever reason, it seems like only billy woods and Elucid as Armand Hammer and very few others have really figured out what Fanon’s capable of. “Ti Geralde” is the grittiest guitar-based rap instrumental we’ve heard since Wu-Tang was good, while “Trezeta Air Max” perks your ears up with a dual sample of Charles Mingus and Notorious B.I.G. only for Fanon to subdue both to let listeners focus on Mach-Hommy; compare these to the celebratory horn line on the title track—wisely placed in the middle of the album when we need an upper—and it’s shocking that this is all made from the same person. Elsewhere, Knxwledge gets in what must surely be one of his best beats of the decade on “Fresh Off the Boat,” and Daringer outdoes himself on “Bloody Penthouse,” effortlessly merging the rock guitar and jazz that we’ve heard previously to make the album feel like an actual song cycle. And you gotta respect someone who wants his listeners to engage with the music and not the image as much as Mach-Hommy, especially when the annotators on Genius are sometimes just way off the mark.
#42. Jpegmafia - All My Heroes Are Cornballs
There’s too many songs, and many of the short songs feel inconsequential (“Life’s Hard, Here’s a Song About Sorrel”) or just there to make a joke (“JPEGMAFIA TYPE BEAT” and “BBW,” which doesn’t stand for big, beautiful women). And some of the humour is—well, I was going to say terminally-online until I read Jpegmafia’s response to Alphonse Pierre saying “too online”—so I’ll just say not for me. At its best, the beauty of this album is how much Jpegmafia is trying to cram into a small, confined space of a song that rarely goes over 3 minutes. Hence, “PRONE!”, a digital punk track that Jpegmafia wrote to prove to rock naysayers against hip-hop, which ends in an autotune drift, or that “Jesus Forgive Me, I Am a Thot” has him going full MC Ride for 8 seconds only to melt down right after (“I put my soul into every bar / Into every verse, into every rhyme”). There’s a line in that song that I think about often: smack dead-middle of the first verse is a blunder of a line that doesn’t even rhyme with the rest of the verse, “Pray that I end up like Charlize Theron,” which he admits was a mistake that he simply didn’t correct and has retroactively assigned new meaning to (“I looked at like Charlize Theron and like what she’s been through and I drew similarities […] But I’m kind of cheating with that bar because I retroactively like assigned purpose to it”). But for me, that random line about wanting to be a beautiful celebrity icon in an album full of lines about being a thot or a slut… it just ends up working. Why Charlize Theron? Why not Charlize Theron? Pray that we all end up like her.
#41. Death Grips - The Money Store
As a music-loving internet dweller, it was impossible to not have these guys shoved in my face, and I wrote them off at the time. I still don’t fuck with them—too limited a worldview—but I confess that their blend of hip-hop by way of hardcore punk, over industrial-electronic beats, was way more potent than their experimental rap contemporaries like Shabazz Palaces, or Deathbomb Arc acts like clipping. or Dos Monos. The singles from their debut album, particularly “Get Got” and “I’ve Seen Footage,” are addicting in their throbbing glitch and growl, respectively; glimpsing just far hip-hop could go during the early stages of the decade, only to be disappointed that no one else went that far besides them. A lot of rap listeners questioned whether they should be filed under hip-hop, but MC Ride makes that clear with lyrics straight out of rap culture: “Never got strapped / With a Glock tongue cocked,” he warns on “Hustle Bones” with its vocal sample arpeggiated to an insane degree, or the Gaga name-drop on “Hacker,” rave music for the end of the world. I love the way MC Ride barks out the choruses of “I’ve Seen Footage”; not just like he’s seen police cams tucked away from the public, but that he’s seen the entire score. So when they cheekily go “Hear a bitch say, ‘Why’s he yelling?’” on “Bitch Please,” the answer is because simply because he’s trying to communicate the end of the world to the rest of us.
#40. Aesop Rock & Tobacco - Malibu Ken
My problem with Aesop Rock is that every new album from him makes me truly believe it might be his best yet — at least until the next one drops. It’s a nice problem to have. In the very short list of rappers that have aged like wine—Black Thought, Pusha T, Q-Tip, Lupe Fiasco—he tops everyone. Skelethon was a reinvention, his first album entirely self-produced album without any help from Blockhead. The Impossible Kid was a refinement, tapping into what it means to be a human being by an abstract rapper. Malibu Ken feels like a detour. Much shorter and stranger than both albums, tapping Tobacco of the Black Moth Super Rainbow psych-electronic group to provide far more colour than Aesop did on Skelethon or The Impossible Kid. “Corn Maze” groans its way into an earworming hook; “Acid King” (about Ricky Lasso who killed his friend while tripping acid) eventually brings in deliciously-dated drums to thicken the stew. Aesop Rock navigates these beats—unlike anything he’s ever rapped before—with total ease; “Tuesday” is an examination of the human condition, pathetic (“The fridge is pretty much a home for mayonnaise alone”) and disgusting (“I’m bunions and contusions, bumps, lumps and bruises / Discoloring, and other things I can't reach with a loofah”) while on “Churro,” he imagines someone who lost their cat only to watch it being eaten by eagles online as they try to take their mind off it.
#39. Isaiah Rashad - The Sun’s Tirade
Everyone underrated this at the time — including me. Rashad signed onto TDE in 2013 (at the same time as SZA, hence why they have natural chemistry together), the first rapper on the label outside of the Black Hippy crew and the first rapper from the south onto that label (he hails from Tennessee). Clivia Demo—an album that’s filed under EP that’s also a mixtape—was good, but it also sounded like many contemporary rappers at the time from Q to Tyler, the Creator, whereas The Sun’s Tirade doesn’t sound like anyone else because no one raps in the same zonked out way that Rashad does, and no one would’ve picked these beats. Case-in-point: J. Cole rejected the beat for “Free Lunch.” There’s jazz in these beats, from the real bassist set against the hooky, jittery guitar line of “Free Lunch,” or the transition in “Rose // rosegold” while “Wat’s Wrong” proves he can go toe-to-toe against Kendrick Lamar (“Twisted with ‘em, this the isms”) with a beat that’s RZA circa 1995. Surprisingly, it’s the big producers that let Rashad down the most: Steve Lacy lays down a really simple beat on “Silkk da Shocka” for Rashad and Syd to do their slow dance (a good hip-hop love song that would’ve been fatally boring had it been even 20 seconds longer); Mike Will Made It collects another paycheque for “A lot” which begins the album’s problematic winding down. But the album’s first 2/3rds is the spiritual successor to ATLiens that OutKast never bothered with. He got the music for the vibers.
#38. Benny the Butcher - Tana Talk 3
New York’s gangsta rap from the mid-90s returning to form by a rapper from Buffalo in the late-2010s. It makes sense: Buffalo is a drive away from the city, but it’s socioeconomic status is among the lowest in America, with a poverty rate higher than that of New York City. Of the Griselda rappers that put Buffalo on the map, Benny the Butcher raps on a technical level that’s beyond Westside Gunn or Conway the Machine; the internal rhymes of “In this game, you take some losses, I was straight, I ate with bosses / On my plate, that yay was flawless…” here reminds me of a young Jay-Z ( a ‘97 Hov, you might say) in his short-lived prime, and his albums are tighter than those of Westside Gunn. That Tana Talk 3 is completely produced by Daringer and the Alchemist is only to its advantage, whereas I think Hit-Boy lets Benny down on Burden of Proof because Daringer and the Alchemist can match Benny’s grit whereas that word isn’t in Hit-Boy’s vocabulary, great as he once was. Daringer ensures his beats are varied throughout: a triumphant horn and woodwind loop on “Intro: Babs” to the anxious flutter of “Fast Eddie” to making Havoc proud on the first half of “‘97 Hov.” Meanwhile, the Alchemist submerges “Broken Bottles” in darkness, the blare of a faraway alarm far off in the distance. The best Griselda album of the decade. I want to add that 2022 was a banner year for the Griselda rappers, with Westside Gunn’s 10th instalment of the ‘Hitler’ series and Conway the Machine’s God Don’t Make Mistakes, and Benny once again outshone both with his follow-up to this album.
#37. Rich Gang - Tha Tour: Pt. 1
This mixtape’s dirty secret is that the choruses are often the best parts of the songs, which is usually way less important to a rap song than its beats and bars. Exhibit A: Young Thug on “Flava,” which is basically an entire verse and whose “I’ma spread that pussy like an acre” ranks among his funniest one-liners. Exhibit B: Young Thug going “Hey, I came out of Hades with rabies and scabies on my baby” in the dead-middle of the chorus of “Throw Your Hood Up” like he was testing out the rhyme but couldn’t work it out into a verse so just threw all of them out at once like that. Exhibit C: Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan playing merry-go-round with their voices on “Pull Up,” the brightest star of the mixtape’s less-noteworthy final stretch. I have big respect to anyone who says this is Young Thug’s best work—his verse on “Givenchy” certainly might be—but ultimately, I just can’t get behind it: 20 songs running 84 minutes with no breathers to break up the slammin’ is a tough pill to swallow, and it doesn’t help that Young Thug shares microphone time with the far less alluring Rich Homie Quan.
#36. J.I.D - DiCaprio 2
First things first: Zach Fox’s skit at the end of “Workin Out” about J. Cole (“Look like he ‘bout to borrow somebody charger or something”) gets my vote for funniest skit on this entire list. The way some people talk about J.I.D is that Destin Route was late to the game when the opposite is true: the game was late to him. Having started releasing tapes when he was twenty years old, he didn’t build up traction until he was close to 25 years old after the DiCaprio EP got him enough attention to sign onto J. Cole’s Dreamville label. This was my introduction to the Atlanta rapper, and I was floored by his eagerness to impress; many of his verses are just a barrage of syllables as a method to force his way into the conversation of great modern rappers. “Activation, activation / Maturation process, rap game too saturated / Grab your lady, masturbation on her face / An acne patient acting patient…”; “Son of a god, son of a bitch / Son of woman and man, son of a son, in a sunken abyss / Summon a plan…” High profile features—A$AP Ferg (dumb as a brick but Trap Lord had bangers and I considered it briefly for inclusion here), J. Cole himself (supposedly not dumb but barely has any bangers), and Method Man—are often here only to prove how much faster J.I.D is than them. It’s not all flash and no substance: “Off Da Zoinkys” is an anti-drug song (“Ronald Reagan, I can’t thank him enough / Nah, I’m playing, n***a racist as fuck”) while the following “Workin Out” has J.I.D slowing down and reflecting over a beautiful piano line by producers 2Thirty5 & Unxque. His nom de guerre was allegedly chosen for his grandmother describing him as “jittery,” and that’s the way he flows: like he has a million words in his mouth and wants to get them all out before the chorus hits.
#35. niLL - Regina
I encourage everyone to stop what they are doing and proceed to the fourth song of Brazilian rapper niLL’s album, Regina. Not just for its inspired David Bowie sample—though that too—but for the guitar solo that niLL adds (operating under the producer name O Atodato) that locks in so tightly with the funk-rock of “Ashes to Ashes” such that it feels like it was part of the original song. niLL self-produces the majority of the album, cooking up a diverse selection of beats including the mournful trap of “Nego Drama, Pt. II.” The album, recorded and released after his mother’s death, has an overarching theme of family, including using voice-mails from his sister as interludes throughout, and often talking to his mother in the lyrics (“Mãe, essa não é só pela grana, é pelo balanço do mar” —> “Mom, this isn’t just about the money, it’s about the swing of the sea”). So with that context in mind “Stay High” is a skip, a mindless banger that bothers with an English chorus for crossover appeal that the other songs already had by being…good. Don’t miss out on “Wifi,” one of the few songs here not produced by himself with that slippery-funk and hooky guitar. Alas, his follow-up album is not nearly as good, hopping on more synth-wave-inspired pop and less Brazilian trap.
#34. billy woods & Kenny Segal - Hiding Places
Four years before billy woods & Kenny Segal teamed up to make the 2023 AOTY contender Maps, they made the best rap album of 2019 on Hiding Places, an album I suspect to be even better, but the world hadn’t caught up to woods yet. Kenny Segal—who crafted an introverted, introspected version of Digable Planets for Milo earlier on this list—creates the bleakest set of beats of any rap album of the decade, which is why I give this the edge over billy woods’ other albums this decade. An animal squeals in the place of a kick-drum on “Checkpoints”; an electric guitar roars as it lurches down the dark alleyway of “Spider Hole”; a woodwind 7L’s of “Houthi” sounds like the one that was everywhere in 2017 but without the luxury because woods doesn’t know luxury. “You have 10 dollars, 22 cents remaining in your account,” an automatic voice informs woods at the end of “Spongebob.” In fact, he seethes and rails against it; “I don’t wanna go see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall,” he says, and then uses that line as the chorus of “Spider Hole.” Armand Hammer’s Paraffin imagined a dystopian, futuristic version of New York City; by contrast, Hiding Places is gritty because it’s real — and that makes it more powerful.
#33. A$AP Rocky - LiveLoveA$AP
Lil B’s 6 Kiss introduced cloud rap as a concept, its beautiful haze providing a smokescreen for its not-so-technical rappers to inhabit. A$AP Rocky’s debut mixtape perfected the sound: no beat that comes close to “B.O.R.” or “I’m God,” but sixteen tracks that come close enough. A$AP Rocky bores me on the microphone—“She gon’ really think I’m hot if I told her my degrees […] Graduate school of hard-knocks, I can show you my degrees” is pathetically dumb—and it isn’t until closer “Out of This World”— a banger, no cloud—that he impresses. But the sound of early cloud rap, before it got absorbed into emo rap and its original advocates (including Rocky) moved away from its sound, felt like Cocteau Twins circa 1986 by way of Memphis rap, and it’s as intoxicating now as it was in 2011. Everyone knows the Clams Casino productions, and it was wise to shove so many of them at the start, but I don’t even think Casino has the best beats here compared to A$AP Ty Beats’ purple brushstrokes on “Peso,” or Beautiful Lou’s guitar sample on “Trilla,” or the best beat I’ve heard from SpaceGhostPurrp on “Purple Swag: Chapter 2,” proving that cloud rap and jazz rap could dance together. By the time A$AP Rocky released his studio debut in 2013, he was already moving away from the sound that made him famous in the first and Long.Live.A$AP should be fondly remembered for its posse cuts and/or Hit-Boy bangers and literally nothing else. Then his next two albums tried desperately hard to prove he was some sort of great rap auteur even though he left his one good idea behind. Similarly, Clams Casino’s 32 Levels was a debut album so forgettable that it tried very hard to erase his name from the production greats, and then he promptly returned to releasing instrumental beat tapes.
#32. Chance the Rapper - Acid Rap
Hard to remember a similar meteoric rise and faster plummet than Chance the Rapper, but I’m a big proponent that an artist’s legacy doesn’t get tarnished by their bad releases, no matter how bad. Acid Rap is a mixtape, but it plays like an album: 13 tracks running a tight 53 minutes with high-profile heavy-hitters like Ab-Soul, Action Bronson and Childish Gambino. Vic Mensa, Saba and Noname—now household names—got their big breaks here, and so this plays like a Chicago house party. And for someone who looks up to Kanye West so much, he grabs Twista to help pull off the convincing climax of posse cut “Cocoa Butter Kisses” as Kanye once did on “Slow Jamz.” (Compare the features to Coloring Book and The Big Day to see what started going wrong.) Tracks 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13… so many summer days that year. At this point, Chance the Rapper was just bubbling with enthusiasm without being too preachey about it, and with plenty of love for language such that he’s able throw together words and phrases that shouldn’t go together: “Flip the candy, yum, that’s the fucking bombast / Lean all on the square, that’s a fucking rhombus.” Tracks 2.5, 5 and 11… so many summer nights that year. He tugs on emotions, sneaking in the line “I ain’t really been myself since Rod passed” on the lightweight “Juice” (one of the weaker songs and yet it was selected as a single), while he says “Down here, it’s easier to find a gun than it is to find a fucking parking spot” on “Paranoia.” “Lost”—which uses the same sample of “Brother’s Gonna Work It Out” as Dr. Dre’s “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat”—is the rare rap ballad that’s not fucking embarrassing to listen to, and I miss the days when Noname spent more time rapping, and less time scrolling on X: “Practice backflips, tragic actress / On a movie with no screen / When the only time he loves me is naked in my dreams.” Is Chance corny? Yes, but in his first few years of being active, no more so than so many of his contemporaries, except he dared to rap about positivity and love in a decade of cheap cynicism.
#31. Lil Ugly Mane - Mista Thug Isolation
I s’pose Memphis is close enough to Richmond, Virginia so it’s no inconceivable that someone out there would be making a Memphis rap classic in 2012, but it’s stranger to me that it’s from a former noise musician turned rapper-producer. Yeah, classic, even though no one fucks with LUM outside the internet it seems — certainly not rappers, who rarely bring Travis Miller in as a feature. “Serious Shit” mixes jazz with memphis rap by breaking down UK saxophonist Don Rendell’s “Blue Mosque” into pieces and reassembling it into a banger; “Bitch I’m Lugubrious” has the most ridiculous hook I’ve ever heard by rhyming off that word with “uzi spit” and “gooey shit”; “Cup Fulla Beeltejuice” almost would have been a DJ Paul beat if not for the cheekily ridiculous vocals. Produced under the alias Shawn Kemp, Lil Ugly Mane produces the entire record himself, and if it weren’t for two features, it’d be an entirely one-person affair. The SpaceGhostPurrp connection secures him a feature of a young Denzel Curry on “Twistin’” whose verse here reminds me of Koopsta Knicca at his very best (high praise), and part of me wishes that Curry stayed in this lane rather than the music that he would get far more famous for (I considered Curry for this list, but ultimately, I think “That’s me at my Lois, no Peter Griffin” is too unforgivable). The second half lets up a little: “No Slack in My Mack” has no business being that long even if the guitar-based beat is good (hinting at his metal past), and “Lookin 4 Tha Suckin” is generic for an album where Lil Ugly Mane is breathing new life into Memphis rap.
#30. Black Milk - No Poison No Paradise
This man still never gets his flowers, and in the discussions of the greatest rapper-producers, he should be top 10 for his run from 2008-2014, even if his rapping leaves a lot to be desired. (2018’s Fever was a gorgeously textured and aggressively okay album for him, and rhyming “relationship” with “relation-shit” is Big Sean-brain.) Hailing from Detroit, he received some comparisons to Dilla on breakthrough Tronic for his blend organic soulful approach to rap, but he quickly shrugged those comparisons off with Album of the Year where the drum hits on cuts like “365” and “Deadly Medley” knocked loudly as if it were a rock album, and then completely freed himself on this album which effortlessly moves from synthy bangers (“Interpret Sabotage”) to jazz instrmentals (“Sonny Jr. (Dreams)”). No Poison No Paradise is better than his previous albums in part because his rapping has improved dramatically, taking on a 6/8 beat on the very opener where most wouldn’t bother or would fail, or keeping up the rhyme scheme on “Sunday’s Best” for as long as he does from the perspective of a kid that doesn’t want to go to church that ends up being one of rap’s greatest good morning songs. But it’s his first album where all the songs feel connected thanks to not just because of the loose concept that it seems no critic picked up on, but because of the undercurrent of darkness that will continue into his next album: the brightest song on the album is the only one that Black Milk doesn’t produce himself (“Deion’s House”). “Codes and Cab Fare” is black-as-night, and its the production that draws me into the song, not the high profile feature (who isn’t up to standards but impresses far more than Black Milk); the intense drum programming of “Black Sabbath” chews up the scenery and spits it out over the electronic bass-line.
#29. Babyfather - BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow
You can accurately gauge how much you like this album based on how much you like the opening song, which loops the phrase “This makes me proud to be British” as a harp goes on in the background for 5 minutes. And if you didn’t get enough the first time, there are a few more instalments later on in the album. On the first playthrough, I hated it; on the second, I didn’t mind its ridiculousness, and by the third-onwards, I was proud to be British as a Canadian-born Chinese and realized “Stealth” was exactly as described later on: “It’s like therapy, innit? It’s soothing.” This is a satirical album of rap mixtapes (i.e. the misspelt and stylized song titles like “HELLS ANGLES”) and rap culture (“Shawty fell in love with a hustler”); in fact, the entire phrase about being proud to be British is very likely satirical. Consider this: the phrase deliberately not looped ad infinitum on the last “Stealth” track. My favorite song—although this is obviously meant not to be taken from a track-by-track level (too disjointed for that, even though it’s all tied together by some sonic motifs)—is “Platinum Cookies,” because it sums up the album’s themes in one minute. Some nonsense bars over a fast-paced beat (“Who’s back, who’s back / See a little cat / Run around the flat like ‘What?’” is how it begins and things don’t improve) before finally conceding (“Yeah, obviously it’s a little bit basic and that, but I’m a DJ first, innit? … Remember Wiley? Remember Wiley who used to be a shit MC, yeah? And then he got sick, like that’s gonna be me, you know?”). Ultimately, I guess this is one of those cases where the concept is more the draw than the execution: have you ever gotten excited about three Arca features only to blink and miss them? But I can honestly say this is one of the most unique albums on this list.
#28. Alpha Wann - Une main lave l’autre
The best non-English rap album of the decade that I can think of. Parisian rapper Alpha Wann had been slowly building hype over the decade after his work with the 1995 group with a series of singles and EPs before finally dropping his debut album, Une main lave l’autre (one hand washes the other), an hour-long demonstration of his microphone prowess with not a single moment wasted for chart or crossover considerations. Opener “Le piège” demonstrates as much right out the gate, a song that runs 3:36 that’s just one single, unbroken verse — not an ad-lib in sight, let alone a hook. And Wann just flexes throughout, with internal rhymes (“L’homme veut impressionner avec des logos et des sapes / Les seuls qui s’en foutent sont les clodos et les sages”) and alliteration (“Tout est dans l’paraître, parce que l’homme juge à l’apparence / Faut être paré, surtout à Paris, ouais, j’dis ça mais j'suis pareil”) while producers VM The Don & Hologram Lo’—the latter a member of the aforementioned 1995—give him a beat that’s pure slippery drums that inspires one of the best flows I’ve heard all decade. Knowing French, or at least, reading along to translated lyrics, is a boon here because otherwise, you can’t glean the hard-hitting lyrics about society (“Y’a pas d’taf, que des stages pour être apprenti / On a fini dans les filières poubelles”) and depression (“Cette vie est clairement stressante, j’y ai vu plus d'enterrements que d'naissances”), although you can still marvel at the flow.
#27. Danny Brown - Old
Wherein Danny Brown splits his interests, literally. Old is divided into ‘Side A’ (denoted by ‘Old’) and ‘Side B’ (denoted by, um, ‘Dope Song’), something that Danny Brown took the care to do even though the album wasn’t available on vinyl until a year after its release. The first side is more traditional bars-n-beats, spearheaded by producers Paul White and Oh No (Madlib’s younger brother), while the second side—predicted by XXX’s one-off “I Will”—hops on EDM beats, establishing Danny Brown as modern hip-hop’s great eclectic (though he’s wrong when he said this was his Kid A to XXX’s OK Computer; it’s his Hail to the Thief). After this, we’d see him signing onto Warp, and hopping on records like Rustie’s Attak or the Avalanches’ Wildflower. It is not a perfect record but it is his most underrated. There’s a lot of the fratty verses and repeated hooks are in full party mode without the thinly-veiled cry for help of XXX, and the guest spots from ScHoolboy Q and A$AP Rocky are absolute blunders (Choose your fighter among these lines from Q: “Now come here chick and let me feed you nuts”'; “Cum on her ass and have a lioness”; “Take the wood like a termite”). But it’s a joy to hear Danny Brown navigate beats that were not designed to have a rapper over them, like “Handstand” or “Way Up Here,” both on the album’s potent final stretch, finishing off with the trap-tornado “Kush Coma” and then an usually reserved Charli XCX feature. Oh No gets pretty on “Lonely,” while Paul White goes Madlib on “Wonderbread,” pulling a sample out of progressive rock act Gong for its carnival. But the best song here is Purity Ring’s “25 Rings,” proof that there was a home for witch house in hip-hop that no one besides Brown capitalized on.
#26. Earl Sweatshirt - I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside
Doris was the transition, which Earl acknowledged as much when he considers this his first ‘real’ album; regardless of Earl’s prodigious ability to string together unique rhymes and make them cohere across entire verses, I agree with the majority that his lethargic manner of rapping doesn’t sustain interest overtime, which is why generally his albums have gotten better as they’ve gotten shorter. This is ten songs in less than half an hour, which is big Wild Honey energy. It also plays like the title in how the first three songs unravel: baseball game organ beat on “Huey” (appropriately, the happiest beat on the album is for the shortest song), and then it’s already midnight with the red-eyed highway chase of “Mantra” (“Drop this when the sunlight gone / Better run right home when the sky turn black”), and by the third song, he resigns to the false comfort in the confines of his bedroom, the constant hum of the ceiling fan and the familiar drip of the leaky faucet in the next room. The beats are more willing to go out on a limb than before, like the glitchy drum percussion of “Grief” or the electric guitar flickering in and out on “AM // Radio.” Furthermore, at this point, he no longer feels beholden to his Odd Future crew, a group of outsiders which he always felt like an outsider of: Doris had assists from Tyler and Domo Genesis where I Don’t Like Shit features no one from OF, instead, tapping like-minded rappers from the East Cost like Da$h and Wiki. Vince Staples is the only guest that reminds us of the old Earl, and “Wool” returns to the violence of “Mantra” with what I have long suspected is Vince Staples’ best verse, leveraging his eternally-young sounding voice cracked by experience to stunning effect (“Bullet hit his forehead, it exit out his underarm”) and even then, he’s still outclassed by Earl (“Switch to a different fucking whip to let them piggies speed past ‘em”).
#25. Open Mike Eagle - Brick Body Kids Still Daydream
What impresses me most about Open Mike Eagle’s best album is that the sound is more cohesive than the previous year’s Hella Personal Film Festival despite the fact that Brick Body Kids Still Daydream has the ‘disadvantage’ of ten different producers for its 12 songs, including two produced by Exile, who I keep wishing would give his beats to better rappers than Blu. A concept album about the Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing project in Chicago that was demolished in 2007, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is a touching exploration of present-day America through the lens of a smart, nostalgic, and sad rapper, trying to keep it together (“I got to keep a facade, I got a play it cool / Like when you with a girl and she go away to school”) in the face of leaders he doesn’t respect (“When the king is a garbage person / I might wanna lay down and die”), eventually breaking down on the closer “My Auntie’s Building” as he watches the projects get torn down and replaced with nothing (“Blew up my auntie’s building / Put out her great grandchildren / That building cost 10 million / Now an empty lot not filled in”). And hidden in this record is a contender for one of the best verses of the decade, courtesy of Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo a.k.a. Sammus drops a verse contender of the decade, keeping up the same double rhyme throughout as she references Star Wars (“I’d rather be hiding alone like some Ewoks up in treetops), rap culture (“But don’t wait like Dre did with Detox), indie folk music (“Tryna pen classics like Reebox, or Greek thoughts or Fleet Fox) while squeezing in the occasional gutwrencher (“Take a nap, lie awake in-between sobs / Then I rap and I pray and the grief stops”) over a beat that sounds like Tim Hecker’s Virgins’ glitch-noise.
#24. Danny Brown - Atrocity Exhibition
The Joy Division reference sealed this album’s fate as being his most overrated album because it helped give this album more crossover appeal; nightmares of message boards asking for more ‘post-punk-inspired rap music’ even though there’s not an iota of post-punk here. (Vince Staples also made a blatant JD reference the previous year to not nearly the same effect.) I love the sonics, don’t get me wrong: the humid sample of forgotten krautrock band Guru Guru that immediately begins the album; the over-the-top horns of “Ain’t It Funny”; the best use of Kelela’s voice ever as a texture on “From the Ground.” Black Milk produces posse cut “Really Doe,” and gives it a water-dripping-off-icicles texture, whereupon Earl Sweatshirt lays waste to everyone preceding him (“I’m at your house like, ‘Why you got your couch on my Chucks?’”), while the short “Dance in the Water” is more danceable than anything from Old. All tremendous, truly! Nary a weak song to be seen. The beats on Atrocity Exhibition are more ‘technically proficient’ than the often skeletal beats of XXX, and they’re often fleshed out into proper songs instead of get-in get-out tracks a la Madvillainy, which means the songcraft is more notable too. And yet, I don’t get nearly as much out of this album as I want to, or his more mature albums to come, because slick professionalism doesn’t fit Brown as much as punk insanity.
#23. clipping. - There Existed An Addiction to Blood
Mixing 90s’ horrorcore with horror movies—the title comes from the cult vampire film Ganja & Hess—clipping.’s album does what so much horrorcore couldn’t do: it’s actually horrifying. Partly because Daveed Diggs never raps in the first person; he’s just describing details as an observer, not a (fake) participant, and the focus on horror gives his verses more purpose than they did previously. But more importantly, behind the rapper are producers William Hutson, who has a doctorate in theater and performance studies, and Jonathan Snipes, who has done a lot of work for film and television scores. What results are songs perfect for your Hallowe’en playlist—the album was released in mid-October, but it’s scarier than Without Warning, which was actually released the day of—like “Nothing is Safe” with its John Carpenter keyboard lines, and the incredibly sparse “Run for Your Life” with clips of cars zooming past and catching what they’re bumping in one of the most unique beats I've ever heard. Elsewhere, “The Show” takes a lurching industrial beat and turns it into something dancey were it not for the lyrics describing torture in detail. Benny the Butcher is as big a surprise here as Gangsta Boo was on CLPPNG, and I wish the Griselda rapper would take more chances like hoping on “La Mala Ordina” in his own discography, a song that eventually gets swallowed up entirely by noise, predicting the 18-minute piano burning performance piece that closes the album.
#22. Tyler, the Creator - Flower Boy
Everyone had an opinion on Goblin in 2011—personally, it was a pieceashit!—but it had been so long where a mainstream artist was trying to shock audiences that it was impossible to not be sucked into the vortex of Tyler, the Creator and Odd Future at large. A personal and even sometimes delicate sensibility started coming through on Wolf—”Life’s a bitch, bruh, but from the third floor, man, she’s gorgeous”—that he dove headfirst into on Flower Boy, an album that shocked audiences for its provocative queerness but shocked me personally for its sound. As a producer before that point, Tyler wanted to be a basement version of the Neptunes mixed with Kanye West, but on Flower Boy—entirely self-produced—the sound is organic, lush, and gorgeous, all words I had never previously associated with Tyler. Take the introduction of lead single “Who Dat Boy”—which is actually one of the weaker cuts and doesn’t really fit the context of the album; it should be of no surprise to learn that it was originally created for ScHoolboy Q to use—it’s just an ominous synthesized string tone, and the shortening intervals between each blast suggest a swarm on the way, and it already feels more threatening than Tyler’s early work. (Alas, A$AP Rocky’s verse is rapped fast but means nothing.) It helps that Tyler takes a backseat and creates a playground of other voices leading to the touching choruses of “See You Again” (“Can I get a kiss?” “Can I?” “And can you make it last forever?” “Can you?”) or the revolving door of features, credited and uncredited, on “911 / Mr. Lonely” that feels like a refinement of “Partyisntover / Campfire / Bimmer,” capping off with a vulnerable verse. Krautrock samples and multiple Frank Ocean sightings sweeten the deal for the first mature work from what used to be a stubbornly immature artist.
#21. Playboi Carti - Die Lit
Playboi Carti will be both fondly remembered and viscerally hated for taking the language of the most language-centric music genre there ever was… and reducing it to indecipherable sounds. It’s Young Thug taken to the next logical extreme. Criticisms of the repetitive nature of Carti’s lyrics—Whole Lotta Red highlight “JumpOutTheHouse” repeats the phrase “Jump out the house” and “Jump out that bitch” a whopping 48 times in 93 seconds which must be a record of some sort—are missing the point, which is that Carti’s music is American minimalism by way of punk by way of rap. Ditto criticisms of his lyrics which gives me the mental image of someone actually reading along on Genius because he’s not trying to sell you lyricism, he’s selling an idea, a groove, and later, a rage; all-in-all, a sound. His debut album on Interscope compared to his already-good mixtape means more voices, more high-profile features like Travis Scott (glorious autotune) and Nicki Minaj (who puts on a mumble for some of her lines, and whose FaceTime punchline is actually funny for Ms. “Punchline on duct tape”); means more songs, means more music. Carti’s synergy with producer Pi’erre Bourne is going to be one for the history books when the dust settles (who shows up to drop the brag, “Did it all off computers” on “Right Now”), though—like Playboi Carti before this—the best beat isn’t from him at all. “Shoota,” which is a masterclass of tension-building sky-blue synth for a drum beat that doesn’t appear until Lil Uzi Vert hands the torch over to Carti.
#20. Curren$y - Pilot Talk
Curren$y never chased the spotlight. Instead, he figured out what he wanted to rap about early on—smoking weed and enjoying an upper middle class lifestyle—and released an overwhelming stream of mixtapes to a devoted fanbase. More than Future or Young Thug or Gucci Mane, Curren$y defined a harder-working ethos that he’s kept up with to this day. Pilot Talk was a breakthrough of sorts thanks to a partnership with Roc-A-Fella co-founder Damon Dash, who not only partnered Curren$y with Ski Beatz (Reasonable Doubt and Camp Lo) on production, but hooked the rapper up with features that his other 2009 XXL Freshman Classmates would have killed for: Snoop Dogg and Mos Def, fellow New Orleans man Jay Electronica, and fellow Southern veteran Devin the Dude and fellow rookie Big K.R.I.T. Everyone mentions the jazz that Ski Beatz brings to the table, mixing up live instruments and samples—a Rhodes keyboards blends into Zulema’s “I’ve Got News for You” on “Chilled Coughphee”—but he also beefs up Curren$y too: the synth rain of “King Kong” is appropriately massive, as is the triumphant horn hook on “The Day.” I think his flow and words can be too low-stakes, but he had an ear for sympathetic producers—Ski here, Harry Fraud, and the Alchemist—and an exciting run of mixtapes, including Pilot Talk II (“Airborne Aquarium”) and Weekend at Burnie’s (“She Don’t Want A Man”). He attempted to deviate from his formula in an awkward bid as his Warner Bros. debut in The Stoned Immaculate (“Chasin’ Paper”), and promptly returned back to the refines of jazzy beats afterwards to diminishing returns (eventually returning back to form when he made full projects with the Alchemist).
#19. Earl Sweatshirt - Some Rap Songs
Were I a parent, I’d like to think I’d be more concerned if my child were listening to Earl Sweatshirt’s mature records than his juvenile ones, because EARL plays like a less threatening, less funny Eminem whereas albums like this one are explorations of depression as told by the closest we’ve gotten to a 2010s’ MF DOOM. I know that Earl challenged listeners not to compare Some Rap Songs to Madvillainy, but both albums represent a complete abandonment of traditional song structures by artists formerly beholden to them — why not compare them? Except this isn’t two supervillains against the world, it’s just a human being with all of its human problems: breakups (“Of course my old lover was scorned, we grow from it”), anxiety (“Clouds grey on the move / On the way like the truth”), and depression (“Yeah, I think I spent most of my life depressed / Only thing on my mind was death”). I don’t think it’s as good an album but here’s the thing: I connect with this way more as a result. Earl Sweatshirt’s beats, once stuck in the basement, are now on the level that his words deserve: crate-digging to find “Trust in Me Baby” by Soul Superiors for “Ontheway!,” or the touching Hugh Masekela sample—a friend of his father’s—to close the album. And unlike Madvillainy, this flows: don’t take it as 15 short songs, take it as one long one like Solace or Mavi’s Let the Sun Talk.
#18. Young Thug - JEFFREY
Modern hip-hop’s bizarro alien strikes gold with his leanest and best project: nine tracks, bearing resemblance to Future’s Beast Mode mixtape earlier on this list, with his collaboration single with Travis Scott, “Pick Up the Phone,” as a bonus track due to the umpteenth who-cares rap controversy. Not to slander “Pick Up the Phone,” because it’s a highlight both here and on Scott’s Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight (where it makes more sense in context); it’s one of Young Thug’s best verses, and the beat is everyone in the room starring at the synth’s purple molecule bouncing in slow motion but they can’t be sure it’s actually there with them because they’re too high. So many rappers seem unable or unwilling to move their voices around as an instrument and not just a vehicle for words, which is why I think Young Thug’s tribute to Rihanna, “RiRi,” is his best song, squeezing and twisting his voice about her like a crazed seal. Likewise, his rapping on “Harambe” is absolutely deranged, taking it a step further than Kanye West around this time, while he ad-libs “womp womp” and “wet wet” over the bass and some backing vocals from Wyclef Jean as a tiny little chamber orchestra on “Kanye West”; even the summer buzz at the start of that song is intoxicating. Meanwhile, the song “Wyclef Jean” itself—with its hilariously stitched-together music video—is as natural a merging of trap and reggae that we’ve ever gotten, looking ahead to his country rap songs of Beautiful Thugger Girls that came out the following year (“Family Don’t Matter” is the “Old Town Road” that should have been). As you can see from the titles of the tracks, they’re all tributes to people or memes that Thug finds special, including one in the style of old rival right before he began collaborating with him.
#17. Azealia Banks - Broke With Expensive Taste
The concept of ‘flow’ was introduced, conceptualized, and popularized by a series of well-meaning emcees; changed, killed, and resurrected by others, and in 2011, one woman perfected it when she strung together words into sentences no male rapper would have dreamed of, “Caught the warm goo in your du-rag too son?” Azealia Banks’ debut album wouldn’t drop for another three years—much longer in hip-hop time—where “212” towered over everything else. Which is a point against it, sure, but not nearly enough for the heads to mostly glaze over the album, which is stacked all the way until the end where we get a surprisingly filler Machinedrum beat in “Luxury,” an Ariel Pink cover that’s nice but still filler, and then two Lone beats from the Echolocations EP (“Miss Amor” and “Miss Camaraderie” are “Coreshine Voodoo” and “Rapid Racer”) that were originally intended as b-sides to the album’s first single and now tacked on here when that didn’t pan out. “Idle Delilah” (groovy), “Gimme a Chance” (funky), and “Desperado” (wintry) all come very close to “212” for me. Elsewhere, she does the swallowers-followers rhyme before Kanye West got there with far more edge than West (“He ever got licked, but he never got swallowed […] He was on her Twitter, but he never got followed”). “It’s the sound, the hip and hip and now...” If only it were! Hip house like this record and Vic Mensa’s one-off “Down on My Luck” (his best song) should have been much, much bigger than it was. In a way, the cover of “212”—just black and white lightning—couldn't have been more apt for Azealia Banks’ ultimately sad trajectory: the song was the definitive ‘lightning in a bottle’ release. What were we going to do when she appeared? No, the better question is what was she going to do when she appeared? Disappear up her own ass, it turns out.
#16. Future - DS2
Robert Christgau and Tiny Mix Tapes’ Jude Noel have already summarized DS2 in blurb reviews so perfectly and so succinctly that it feels folly to even try. I will say that “Thought It Was a Drought” remains one of the best rap songs of that year (I say this while looking directly at my digital copy of To Pimp a Butterfly) and the perfect summation of what made Future a dangerous and interesting persona. I will say that “Put the girl on a train, strapped a bird on her back, now she came back with change, ay” is delivered with the simplicity and finesse of Pusha T. I will say that “I Serve the Base” is filthy, filthy, filthy and quite possibly the grimiest, dirtiest (t)rap beat ever. I will say that “Where Ya At”’s beat is weirdly hypnotic in its shimmering opulence, and that while I know a lot of people feel that Drake always sucks the air of the room, I love his verse here because he had only just become larger than life so the boasts here feel like he’s being honest: “I’ll buy the neighbor’s house if they complain about the noise” is a line that was stupid and yet, I get the feeling that he means it, and the flow switches before that are just what the song needed. I will say that “Groupies” has that really fascinating squeal-hook at the 0:45 mark that ranks among the coolest sonic elements to ever happen on a Future album. I will say that I love how Future grunts “Pussy good enough to make me love you” the second time because the pussy that good, y’see. I will say that these first four songs make you anticipate a far more interesting second half that never comes. The Zaytoven beat feels like it wandered in as a leftover from Beast Mode; that “Rotation” has a beat that matches the album’s cover of a digitially-synthesized colourful cloud but always feels slight; that “Slave Master” might have the best rapping on the record but it also has the worst choruses. The bonus tracks “The Percocet & Stripper Joint” and “Kno the Meaning” shouldn’t be missed.
#15. Freddie Gibbs & Madlib - Piñata
Madlib is one of my favourite hip-hop producers of all time; Freddie Gibbs is not one of my favourite rappers. It happens. Someone can be doing all the right things and be technically proficient and even dazzling at their craft, and it might not check all your boxes. Even on this record where he varies the subject matter a little more than he typically does (“Deeper” --> “High” being the most fascinating 180s in rap music: he gets high because of he got cut deep), I still think he gets boring over a long album, and his albums tend to be long. The beats aren’t as out there as the ones on Madvillainy because the rapper isn’t a freak-rhyming alien that deserves them. Actually, some of them are shockingly normal for Madlib, which is just proof that Madlib could also knock ‘normal’ out the park if he wanted to: the thin string line on “Deeper” as Gibbs gets just that and comes up with some of the best lines of his career (“Back on the bus, I used to fingerfuck her singing Usher”); that pitch-shifted little marvel of a funk guitar on “Harolds,” where, as on Aretha Franklin’s Spirit in the Dark, one of the best songs is about food; the title track that’s the most conventional banger here, all great. But these are all beats you might’ve found in the 90s, and in the case of “Piñata,” a beat that we actually did hear in 1999 on the posthumous Notorious B.I.G. album. So when “Bomb” comes along with that bracing sonic grenade of a sample from Italian prog rock/film score band Goblin, it sticks out as an indicator of what could have been and what ultimately wasn't, and also why this album isn’t as special as Madvillainy even if the rapper thinks he can outrap DOOM.
#14. Black Milk - If There’s a Hell Below
This is Black Milk’s best album because it’s his most ambitious. Almost every song here ends with an entirely new beat for a coda, and a fair number of songs in the second half are comprised of three beats, and there’s a jazz-Detroit techno hybrid as the album’s centerpiece for good measure. The potent synth-line being birthed out of the bass-line on “Everyday Was”; the bass-line of “Quarter Water” that practically flings its entire weight against the drums and Black Milk's words; the drums in the first part of “All Mighty” that gives it its title; the dark pulse from the combination of the drums and the murmuring of voices in the first part of “Scum.” These are glorious sounds that make me very sympathetic to this awkward rapper. A lesser artist would have taken the beer bottle blowing of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” as a hook but Black Milk only uses it as a subtle shade for the choruses of “Quarter Water.” My favourite song here is “Gold Piece,” where Black Milk depict a young man trying to threaten no one other than Bun B, who plays it cool: “N****s say he want beef, let's have a barbeque / And Imma give him a two piece and a biscuit / Then we put the ox to his tail and cut his ass to the brisket, bitch.” But the real joy is the skittering flute that Black Milk as one of the most inventive sounds on the album. Let me be absolutely clear on two things: all of these beats have impressive sounds to begin with, but moreover, when Black Milk juggles multiple parts he isn’t simply shoving them together; the flute motif was already introduced in the song’s intro, and though the (third) beat switch at the 3:40 mark sounds like the start of a new song, the thunderous drum-rolls tie the song's theme of violence together. All told, when I get a short intro or outro that seems sonically like a completely different song but completely fitting when you ‘zoom out,’ it makes me think of none other than Paul McCartney.
#13. Pusha T - Daytona
The first and best of the five Wyoming sessions albums, 7-track albums produced by Kanye West in an increasingly-rare burst of productivity. Unlike Kanye West’s ye or the Kid Cudi collaboration Kids See Ghosts where the short album format left me wanting more, or the Nas album that had me wanting less, seven songs is the perfect amount for Pusha T, a rapper whose only had one thing to say and inevitably gets boring on albums longer than 8 songs. Daytona succeeds because it’s My Name is My Name without the pop blunders, so it’s up to Kanye to come up with a few memorable soundbytes-as-hooks, and he does just that: the bluesy guitar line of “The Games We Play” (later bolstered by horns) like a “Nosetalgia” sequel; the George Jackson sample on “Come Back Baby.” Meanwhile, Pusha T raps his ass off, and he’s on the shortlist of the greatest voices in hip-hop because it’s pure, icy menace. He just keeps throwing out quick jabs before the uppercut: targeting Drake with a few lines in a single, unbroken verse over Kanye’s shuffling drum beat on closer “Infrared” that led to a response from Drake, and then the best, vilest diss track in 17 years on “The Story of Adidon” (surpassed by Kendrick Lamar this year). But Pusha T’s also funnier than he was on King Push - Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude, in an immensely quotable way: “You all get a bird, this nigga Oprah” (“If You Know You Know”), “If you ain’t energized like the bunny for drug money” (“The Games We Play”), “Wrist for wrist—let’s have a glow-off / Fuck it, brick for brick—let’s have a blow-off” (“Come Back Baby”), “Never trust a bitch who finds love in a camera / She will fuck you, then turn around and fuck a janitor” (“Hard Piano”). What more is there to say about this one? A rare instance of an artist coming up with a classic a decade after what seemed like the peak of his career (Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury). Yuugh.
#12. Elzhi - Lead Poison
Former Slum Village rapper Elzhi got plenty of acclaim when he dropped The Preface, and he continued his streak with the Elmatic mixtape, essentially a “Illmatic cover album” that was destined to live under the shadow of Illmatic. (I considered Elmatic for this list but “She was the shit like when you sit and let it fall in the stall” might be the worst line from a good rapper that entire decade.) By the time Lead Poison finally dropped as the official album follow-up to The Preface, it was almost eight years later, and the only people who seemed to care were those already invested in Elzhi in the first place. So I submit this for the most under-discussed rap album of the decade. An extremely talented rapper, most of these songs are deeply conceptual: a song about his own personal experience of being charged for marijuana possession (“Weedipedia”); a song in tribute to his mentor J Dilla (“February”), a song about a vampire (“She Sucks”). Best of all is “Two 16’s,” a song requested by fans for him to rap for sixteen bars twice which he takes a step further by rapping about two tragic stories around the number. It reminds me of J. Cole’s career highlight “Rise Above,” but better executed. “February” starts with a terrible rhyme (“the opposite of cashmere”) but corrects itself immediately with the touching passing of time by mapping out the months (“Because yesterday it fell from the January sky / Now it’s February and the world feels a lot colder […] She said she wanted to get married back in October / Probably why in the month of May is when you got sober”). It helps that most of these songs are just bars ‘n’ beats; crisp, beautiful beats filled with piano and organ courtesy of Bombay (who’s produced a full album for Blu), Karriem Riggins of Common fame, and Oh No, and in the case of “She Sucks,” a live jazz band for its outro.
#11. Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment - Surf
Surf is the only album released thus far by Nico Segal (then known as Donnie Trumpet before Donald Trump became president; “What began as a joke, a silly play on words, is not funny anymore”) and his band the Social Experiment, which was released for free exclusively on Itunes. It does not play like a free album. It plays like a various artist compilation featuring the entire Chicago rap scene (Chance the Rapper, Noname, and Saba), as well as big names like B.o.B., Busta Rhymes, J. Cole and Big Sean. Donnie Trumpet pairs them off such that superstars are featured with up-and-comers on the same track to further the album’s message: B.o.B. and BJ the Chicago Kid; Busta Rhymes and Janelle Monae; J. Cole and Noname; Big Sean and Kyle. But it’s the production that ties it altogether, and the album goes from richly textured hip-hop to jazz and then slowly makes it way back at its own leisurely pace. Beautiful plucked strings make one of the corniest rappers of that decade worth listening to; what sounds like a Beach Boys sample opens up “Wanna Be Cool” for Big Sean to drop a surprisingly good verse (though he gets outclassed by Kyle); Saba gets the space to let it rip on “SmthnthtIwnt,” something that he rarely gets the chance to do in his solo career; “Sunday Candy” is the best thing Chance has ever done. This album strikes a mood that’s incredibly rare in hip-hop: warm and upbeat, but an undertone of sadness. It reflects reality! A kiss from the sun, if the sun could like, tone down the heat a bit enough such that such a thing wouldn’t kill you. This is the early Kanye West that Kanye West left behind! This is Chance the Rapper, but only the good parts!
#10. A Tribe Called Quest - We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service
The fourth song here interpolates Elton John’s best song so that Q-Tip and Elton John start having a conversation that turns into a mantra: “What you gonna hear?” “Solid walls of sound.” And then we do: the whole album is a solid wall of sound. That song also feels like a modern take of what Tribe did on “Can I Kick It?”, which takes a very recognizable sample from a classic rock song, and builds a new classic out of it. There are sound-bytes here that are among the best thing Tribe have ever recorded, like the heavy bass riff of “We the People…” (effectively a “Georgie Porgie” apology as well as an anti-Trump song at once) or the surprising Can sample on “Lost Somebody.” And to make it clear they’re jazz rap masters, they throw a sample of fusion-era Andrew Hill on the first song for good measure. What’s not mentioned nearly enough is that Q-Tip’s rhyming has drastically improved compared to his awkward phrasing and basic rhyming on debut People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, established on the very first verse of the album where he flows breathlessly — he’s on the shortlist of rappers who have improved with age. And the album forces its way into consideration of one of hip-hop’s few great doubles by being a single, 60-minute album separated into two discs. But Tribe have never once delivered a perfect album, and this album with its awful stylized title is no exception. “Kids…” should have been an easy highlight with the André 3000 feature but ends up being one of that rapper’s worst features in quite some time; the beat sucks anyway; the “rhyming/ramen noodle” punch-line of “We the People…” makes me wince, especially because they can’t help themselves but cut the beat out for it; ditto the sex verse on “Enough!!”; the Jack White ‘motif’ should have been cut altogether — I’m not sure why he’s on this album at all when he could have been in the studio working on another boring solo record. A comeback album for the ages regardless because it might still be their best album with all that being said.
#9. Kate Tempest - Let Them Eat Chaos
Of all the rappers to appear on this list, it’s Kae Tempest who loves language the most, and it doesn’t surprise me at all to have learned that rapping is just another lane for them: they’re also a playwright, poet, and novelist too who loves William Blake as much as they do Wu-Tang Clan. There’s a loose narrative on the album of different people being awake at 4:18 AM (again), and Tempest takes the care to make each and every one of them feel real, each with different real-world problems that are keeping them up at night. For example, Zoe is moving out because her landlord fixed up the mold and the shower but also tripled the rent; Esther’s a carer forced to work double graveyard shifts. Tempest raps with a fury that makes their nom-de-guerre appropriate, but they’re also depressed, and it’s the mix of the two that’s lethal, whereas other conscious rappers are one or the other (if we’re lucky). “Riots are tiny though, systems are huge”; “I can’t see an ending at all / Only the end”; “The kids are alright, but the kids will get older.” I find these lines absolutely devastating. Were I to name the best rap song of the entire decade, there’s a good chance it’s “Europe is Lost,” wherein Tempest raps unbrokenly for six minutes about the state of things, each new social critique more scathing than the last. The single-syllable barrage of “Friday night at last lads, my treat! / All went fine till that kid got glassed in the last bar / Place went nuts, you can ask our Lou” is just a marvel, as is the alliteration in “Cross the beige days off on your beach babe calendar,” booking those buh-sounds with the hard c’s on either side, and the song ends with one of the most powerfully delivered f-bombs I can think of that entire decade.
#8. Vince Staples - Summertime ‘06
Ultimately, Staples’ inability—or complete disinterest—to write a song has hindered my appreciation of him as an artist: there’s far more to the ever-mercurial concept of ‘songwriting’ than merely writing good raps and selecting good beats, and I’m not sure that Staples knows that. One way to frame Staples’ songs is economic: his songs average around 2 minutes in length and his albums have increasingly gotten shorter. FM! and Vince Staples both feel lazy more than anything; even Big Fish Theory has “Rain Come Down” where he just repeats a verse in full because he knows the song deserved to be longer but didn’t know how to fill the space. But on Summertime ‘06, the method of songs that get in get out works to his advantage precisely because there’s more songs than ever before or ever again (conversely, the method works fine on his EPs where there’s less songs). Staples’ strength as a rapper is a clear voice that can spin a memorable line effortlessly—“Bitch, you thirsty, please grab a Sprite”; “Nothing wrong in the world with another mother”—coupled with a voice that sounds eternally youthful yet also worn down by weltschmerz. Maybe we should be concerned about America if it’s creating products like Vince Staples who can rap a line like “Homie where your clout at / You ain’t never pushed nobody scalp back,” from highlight “3230” so convincingly. The majority of the album is handled by three producers: Clams Casino discovering a new kind of haze within hypnotic rhythms, No I.D. on his resurgence after the alarm blaring beat of forever-overrated “Control” (the best part of that song), and the more club-minded DJ Dahi, and to their credit, the whole album feels of one vision; one sound. An interesting case of an artist where their best releases are either short EPs or long double albums.
#7. Kanye West - The Life of Pablo
The common argument on this album that I keep hearing is that it sounds unfinished, and I'm still waiting for someone to actually articulate what exactly they mean without sounding like an idiot. You wanted a beat on “I Love Kanye?” Sure, it didn’t help that Kanye himself announced that the original release wasn’t the final product and kept tinkering away at it, but to me, its original version won me over immediately such that I never bothered to check out the ‘finished product’ with “Saint Pablo” until many years later. In my humblest opinion, instead of laughing at him for wanting to edit as he went, we should have been open to the idea of an album like a video game in which the developer listens to feedback and fixes bugs later. It’s finished, it’s just frustrating and imperfect by-design. Yes, the lyrics are even worse than last time: did we have to hear the unfollow-unswallow rhyme three times, especially when he just heard that rhyme used on Yeezus (followers-swallowers); the “Do anybody feel bad for Bill Cosby? / Did he forget the names just like Steve Harvey?” bit makes me not want to hear “Facts” at all. But I can’t see how anyone could be dissatisfied with the introduction of “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1,” my vote for the greatest opening 30 seconds of any song on this list, or Caroline Shaw’s eerie vocal work on “Wolves,” or the mere prospect of Kanye West and Madlib collaborating together on a song that brings in Kendrick Lamar to inspire the best rapping from Kanye that we’ve heard all decade, while “Fade” glimpses an alternate reality where he moved on to house music and made his own Renaissance. Gotta be honest with you guys, “Ultralight Beam” is among the lesser tracks here.
#6. ScHoolboy Q - Blank Face LP
There generally aren’t themes in ScHoolboy Q’s albums because my gist of the dude is that he’s a father first and rapper second, but Blank Face LP has him merging the decadence of west coast rap from the 90s with the darkness of where the coast was two decades later. You can see this in the feature choices: veterans E-40 and Tha Dogg Pound as well as Vince Staples over production from Black Hippy beatmakers Sounwave and Tae Beast, and Tyler, the Creator; even Kendrick Lamar blesses one of the songs with a hook. What results are 17 tracks where almost all of them can be a contender for the best west coast banger of that decade. I would wholeheartedly recommending scotching “Overtime” (Q had some back and forth about whether this song was label interference but it plays that way no matter what), digitally removing Candice Pillay’s outro from “WHateva U Want” (the rest of the song is great), and also moving “Blank Face” to an Anderson .Paak project where it belongs even if it is the title track and was referenced by the overture (Q barely registers on that song, but it’s a good one thanks to the roving bass-line). The sound design is immense regardless if it’s monolithic drum programming in the climax of “THat Part,” one of those Kanye West red-eyed trap songs a la “U Mad” that ends up not being produced at all by him, or the mixing of Candice Pillay’s billowy voice as a texture on “WHateva U Want.” “Groovy Tony / Eddie Kane” is 6 minutes that never lets up its intensity for a moment, while “Ride Out” is the filthiest banger that the typically jazz-minded Sounwave has ever cooked up. That Q went from this to CrasH Talk is perhaps the second-biggest blunder in rap memory after Chance the Rapper.
#5. Danny Brown - XXX
Atrocity Exhibition has better production, but it doesn’t even come close to XXX, which remains singular in its bracing narrative. Everyone wants to pretend that they all loved Danny Brown on impact now, but as someone who was there in 2011, his exaggerated yip of a voice was very divisive, as was his image — he loves skinny jeans so much, he was dropped from G-Unit. In the same way that he switches between that yelp and his normal voice, he can switch how we as listeners engage and react. In the song that glorifies dead celebrities, we move from worrying about him to wondering if we should join him, and as we go deeper into the album and encounter songs like “DNA” and “30,” it’s clear the former thought prevails: we should be worried. He was also absurd at this time, something he dropped when Atrocity Exhibition rolled around. Packed full of one-liners like “Sent ya bitch a dick pic and now she needs glasses” or “Rhymes that make the Pope wanna get his dick sucked / Had Virgin Mary doing lines in the pick-up / Make Sarah Palin deepthroat ‘til she hiccup” which is used as the one of the best rapped choruses. He also loves language, and not talked about nearly enough is that he was a real rapper’s rapper when he first started, evoking “Squidward and his clarinet” so that he can rhyme it with “bayonet,” or rhyming “gesundheit” with “bonsai” with “Muay Thai,” each line its strange little galaxy that are somehow linked in his world universe. And while most of the beats here are skeletal (read: punk), some are extremely detailed like the mourning elephant horns in the outro of “Nosebleeds” (so gorgeous that DJ House Shoes cuts it short because that word doesn’t belong on an album like this), while the beat of “30” might be the greatest of its year: a disorienting mix of jagged blues guitar and a small chamber band whose strict conductor stepped out so they can finally cut loose.
#4. Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly
A certified classic upon arrival, and he mixes Andre 3000 (“Hood Politics”), Ghostface Killah (“u”), 2Pac (“Alright”) and DJ Quik (“King Kunta”) and forges a unique identity by mining the jazz undertones of Section.80 and making them overtones. That saxophone on “Alright” is my favourite part about it, a song that you can easily tell which producer is doing what between Pharrell and Sounwave; Kendrick Lamar assumes the role of a free jazz instrument with his flow on “For Free?,” an interlude that’s also one of the five best songs on this album. But I’m sick of pretending this album is perfect when it’s clearly not — and I’m not even thinking about the little poem he repeats throughout that he eventually shares with his biggest influence in a moment that I’m sure was very profound for him and him alone. The biggest offender is also the best song: “These Walls” lays claim for the greatest neo-soul song of the decade thanks to Terrace Martin’s production, and Bilal’s voice has that natural shimmer to achieve the gold that he sings about. But Kendrick Lamar overextends as he doubles the metaphor of the walls from pussy to prison, and then feels the need to address the killer from a song from an album ago when he should have just embraced the sound. Likewise, both verses of “Wesley’s Theory” are individually great, and yet, they’re also completely disconnected from one another, which might have been fine if the Dr. Dre interlude actually linked them rather than just showing up on an already-fussy song. The hook of “Hood Politics” tries its hardest to mar the verses which otherwise contain some of my favourite flows on the album. Etc., etc. Minor blights in the grand scheme of a tremendous album regardless, just something I wanted to get off my chess as I rank Yeezus over this.
#3. Kanye West - Yeezus
From a purely rapping perspective, this should rank far, far lower as Kanye West’s lyricism begins its nosedive from here on out (the inaccuracy of “I keep it 300, like the Romans” is the least of our concerns), but its potency is in the sonics, which mixes Death Grip’s industrialism with Kanye West’s pop sensibilities to stunning effect thanks to a lengthy list of collaborators including Travis Scott (most interesting when he doesn’t open his mouth), tapping French house duo Daft Punk to go back to one-off “Rollin’ & Scratchin’,” and Arca before anyone cared about their brand of grotesque body music. Ditching the underdog-style humour, Kanye is more juvenile here than before, but he’s also hilarious. “And I know she like chocolate men She got more n****s off than Cochran, hah!”; “what would Jeromy-romy-rome think?” The opening song—which starts with the ugliest noise Kanye and his collaborators could possibly create—brings in a very on-the-nose gospel sample that has no sonic relationship with anything around it, which was then essayed by others who couldn’t quite get that same effect because you have to give zero fucks when you make music like this, and no one else had that audacity. The switch from Justin Vernon’s “I can hold my liquor” to Chief Keef’s “I can’t hold my liquor” glimpses Kanye’s bipolarism, something that no one else besides Lou Reed really picked up on. Every time Kanye West samples Nina Simone is an album highlight, and “Blood on the Leaves” is no different, while the layering of Charlie Wilson mixed as if he’s belting on a mountain top at the end of “Bound 2” is stunning, as is the hand-off from Kanye to Frank Ocean on “New Slaves,” a song that builds to its release without a single drum beat. Not beautiful, just a dark twisted fantasy.
#2. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
For those keeping track, there are only two albums from 2010 on this list, and that’s mostly because either the acclaimed rap albums from that year have aged poorly or artists like Big K.R.I.T. and Black Milk went on to do better things. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy still sounds epic in 2024 as it did in 2010 because the beats are just that good; whereas Graduation and (influential as it is) 808s & Heartbreak were a step-down, production-wise, from his first two albums, this is a step-up. It’s also a great uniter: the young Kanye West who sampled the Doors for Jay-Z gets more ambitious by mining King Crimson for “Power,” and then later on he grabs Aphex Twin’s Erik Satie ballad “Avril 14th” for “Blame Game.” The album also helped introduce Nicki Minaj as a force to be reckoned with in her playful verse at the end of posse cut “Monster” that outdoes both Kanye’s and Hov’s (Jay-Z sucks there but the part where he starts listing different monsters makes me laugh) — alas, she turned out to be nothing special at all. The emotion explored on 808s & Heartbreak gets distilled into a single moment on “Runaway,” “I don’t know how I’ma manage / If one day you just up and leave” that’s the most heartbreaking moment in his discography, something that I can’t help but have been stronger if Pusha T didn’t take us on a detour. And “All of the Lights” is a tremendous piling-on of voices and instruments mixed in such a way that you’re always aware of the new voice without being elbowed in the rib that Elton John or Fergie or Alicia Keys just showed up: it’s a Super Bowl half-time show in a 5-minute song. As good as everyone knew at the time back then.
#1. Kendrick Lamar - good kid, m.A.A.d. city
I concede that this album’s ‘short film’ concept and its beats are less complex than the best of To Pimp a Butterfly but the album is less of a sprawl: 12 songs in the model of the good ol’ rock album format, even though it somehow ends up running 10 minutes longer than Section.80. In general, concept albums are impossible to follow without a wikipedia summary handy, which Prince Paul circumvented by using his signature skits on A Prince Among Thieves. The skits on gkmc are mostly used for humour—“Did somebody say dominoes”—and if you removed them, you’d be able to follow the story pretty easily, which points to Lamar’s strength as a storyteller on the microphone. Thus, some days I wonder if “The Art of Peer Pressure” might remain his best song on that front, functioning as a one-shot take story within a broader story in the album’s context. He’s also the rare rapper to experiment using his voice as an instrument, like putting on a younger facade on “Backseat Freestyle” or the in-head conversation of “Swimming Pools” in the second verse. Or, I think about his voice cracking on “m.A.A.d. city”: “Now, this is not a tape recorder saying that he did it / But ever since that day, I was lookin' at him different.” Matching his prowess is the producers which give him twelve distinct beats; even the weaker offerings like “Poetic Justice” (which mines the best part of Janet Jackson’s 7-minute “Any Time, Any Place” so you don’t have to hear the whole song) and “Compton” (with that odd soul sound that Just Blaze cooks up) have memorable sonics (everyone’s favourite spanking child, “Real,” is far more integral to the album than these two songs). “Backseat Freestyle” further established Hit-Boy as one of the craziest banger-makers of the decade. Meanwhile, DJ Dahi finds hypnosis in a Beach House sample on “Money Trees” so that Jay Rock can drop one of the greatest features of the decade, and Tabu’s warm vinyl pops in the introduction of “The Art of Peer Pressure” go a long way. The two bipartite songs—“m.A.A.d. city” and “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”—remain two of the best songs Lamar has ever crafted. “Ya bish.” Not, “Ya bitch.” I spent the entire summers with that intoxicatingly softer -sh sound in my head, along with every other casual mantra that appears throughout this album.