The Best Rapper Alive, Every Year Since 1979 PART 6

[Stephan Bobb]

The Best Rapper Alive, Every Year Since 1979

The rapper who stole each year, from the first year of recorded hip-hop until now.

BY INSANUL AHMED,DAVID DRAKE,NOAH CALLAHAN-BEVER,CHRISTINE WERTHMAN,ERNEST BAKER,ROB KENNER,FRAZIER THARPE,DAMIEN SCOTT,BRENDAN KLINKENBERG,ROSS SCARANO

2015: DRAKE

 

CREDENTIALS: Two No. 1 debuts (If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, What a Time to Be Alivewith Future), first-ever Grammy-nominated diss track in “Back to Back,” “Hotline Bling”highest-charting solo single (tied with “Best I Ever Had”), launched OVO Sound Radio on Beats 1, guest verses on “Blessings,” “Where Ya At,” “R.I.C.O.,” “100”

“I need acknowledgment. If I got it, then tell me I got it, then.” Well, Drake, as far as 2015 is concerned, you had it. Those bars come from a song on What a Time to Be Alive, the second surprise “mixtape” he dropped this year via Apple, with whom he closed a deal that netted him a reported $19 million haul and a bi-weekly radio show streamed to dozens of countries. It’s been a blockbuster year for the Boy for sure. And that’s without mentioning the rap beef that completely dominated the culture for a week and a half last summer and served as the centerpiece for quite possibly the biggest year of his career.

Months prior to Meek Mill’s attack on his credibility, Drake would release If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, a mix-album that overall contains a marked increase in aggressive content. In retrospect, “Worst Behavior” was the backdoor pilot to this sneering 6ix God among men. What’s irking him? We may never know, but listening to songs like “No Tellin” post Meek beef, his attitude is eerily prophetic. “I gotta keep watching for oppos, ’cause anything’s possible/There’s no code of ethics out here, anyone will take shots at you.” It’s like he knew a guy he’d just graced with a big feature verse for the second time would do a complete 180 and call him out for violating the one thing that matters in hip-hop: his authenticity. The accusation was shocking but more so was the imminent validity. The ghostwriter in question does exist; he is credited all over IYRTITL. 

Instead of copping pleas, Drake more or less copped to the accusations, dropped a laser-sharp diss track, and absorbed the whole incident as validating energy. If Drake was phased, we never saw it. The biggest rap star in the world shrugged a potentially damaging scandal off and added a new layer of invincibility to his armor. “You all looked in my face and hoped you could be the replacement.” Well, not so fast. “Back to Back” is the diss track that many weren’t sure he was capable of, biting in its “Takeover”-esque factual derisions yet crafted so precisely to be an undeniable club banger. And then quite casually, in the midst of an alpha male chest-thumping and questions of his viability, Drake dropped "Hotline Bling," a song that was so undeniably Drake, and took it all the way to No. 2 on the charts.

But let’s get back to the bars. We may never know the specifics of Drake’s writing process, but if one thing out of the summer’s controversy was crystal clear, it was confirmation that Drake’s final touch is intangible. He’s become the arbiter of his era—a new Drake release brings with it an onslaught of new lexicon, inescapable across social media and even in regular conversation. Squads turned to woes. Cellphones don’t ring, they bling. His feature verses dominate even when others match his technical skill (see “Blessings”). And he’s approaching Jay Z levels of being able to ride any sonic wave and make it his own, word to the mutually beneficial aforementionedWATTBA, which was almost a 100 percent case of Drake adopting Future’s aesthetic. Future had a stellar year—but Drake gave him a plaque, on cruise control, no less. It’s quite clear who the Big Homie is. As artists push hip-hop to new soundscapes, Drizzy is displaying an efficiency at adapting, co-opting, and refining them for maximum appeal, all while he continues to push his own.

Maybe that explains why, much like Kanye once said of Shawn, with Drake, you only saw the wins this year more than any other. “Back to Back” muted the ghostwriter talk all the way to the Grammys. Old foes bowed to him. Potential new ones are thinking twice. And he still hasn’t even dropped the project he’s comfortable with officially designating an album yet. Drake didn’t just hit an undeniable if not surprising peak in 2015—he became borderline infallible. The 6ix God ascended to Mount Olympus. How far away he is from the sun is anyone’s guess. —Frazier Tharpe

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Future, Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole
On Nov. 12, Future took the stage on Jimmy Kimmel Live and performed “Blow a Bag” and“Where Ya At.” It was odd timing as the album the songs are featured on came out in July. The performance with a live band proved muddier than expected, but the audience surprisingly didn’t mind or care and rapped every word back to him. The message couldn’t have been any clearer: Future is once again a star. All it took was a run that stretched back into 2014, featured three exemplary mixtapes with his closest and best collaborators, a No. 1 album that bested all of them, and another one-off project with Drake that all but hushed any lingering doubts about his prolificacy. Future had become a monster just as he predicted. He didn’t release, nor was he attached to, any pop-leaning, love-tinged singles. Instead all he released was therapeutic id. One of his best songs, “March Madness,” has him belting about having sex with women he really didn’t want to bed all because he was high as a giraffe’s ass. Other songs had him detailing that the reason he buys jewelry that mimics constellations and makes it rain when he’s in a club is to simply “hide the pain.” It’s all deep shit that, in the hands of any other MC, would make for super downer music. However, Future made us turn up all year long.

The only rapper talked about as much as Drake or Future in 2015 was Kendrick Lamar. He followed up his critically acclaimed major-label debut with, well, another critically acclaimed major-label album. Much has been written about To Pimp a Butterfly and the response the album garnered from fans, critics, DJs, and other musicians. If TPAB wasn’t the best rap album of the year, it’s tough to argue that it wasn’t the most important. It’s perhaps the most ambitious rap album of the past half decade. No other album this year made us look into ourselves as deeply or as far outwardly. It questioned nearly everything (blackness, whiteness, religion, social responsibility), which in turn made us question everything: the role of rappers, the role of rap music, respectability politics, the role of music press, the idea that art can be at once great and distasteful. The album cast a shadow over the entire year, out of which came one of 2015’s brightest gems: “Alright.”

Unlike the aforementioned three, J. Cole was rarely talked about this year. His third album, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, dropped in December of last year, and despite failing to birth any singles as big as Born Sinner’s “Power Trip,” it managed to sell 371,000 in its first week, notching Cole his third No. 1 album. Going into the new year, J. Cole embarked on a three-pronged global tour as headliner with Big Sean, Jeremih, and YG in tow. Elsewhere in 2015, Cole hopped on the official remix to Janet Jackson’s long-awaited comeback single, was asked by A Tribe Called Quest to remix “Can I Kick It?”, finally previewed what an album with Kendrick might sound like by dropping twin freestyles on Black Friday, signed two new artists to his Dreamville imprint, and released the label’s second compilation album. To top it all off, he signed a deal with HBO to air a documentary about his momentous tour. Without dropping a solo project in 2015, Cole managed to make more moves than nearly everyone save for Drake. Not bad company to be in. —Damien Scott

2016: CHANCE THE RAPPER

 

 

CREDENTIALS: Coloring Book, “Ultralight Beam,” live performances on Saturday Night Live and at the ESPYs, Magnificent Coloring Day Festival, staying independent

The good guys are supposed to be boring.

Chance the Rapper opens Coloring Book with a declaration: His life is good. He’s got a girl, and a child, and he’s happy. He bellows, almost embarrassingly earnest, about what he has to be thankful for. It’s triumphant and euphoric, over brass backing and the cooing of mentor Kanye West.

This shouldn’t work. Great art, we’re told, is rarely made by the good guys, the happy or the content. Ambition isn’t measured in what you have, it’s striving for what you want. Hip-hop is for the strivers, and braggadocio is rarely applied to things so pedestrian. Unless you’re Chance.

I’m not pointing this out to suggest something as anodyne as Chance’s potential importance as a role model, or the part joyous music can play while the world burns around us. Instead, Chance’s persona is impressive because Chance has created a world for himself, out of the unlikeliest of parts, and 2016 was the year we all began living in it with him. He went from outsider to the center of the rap universe. He had the best verse of the year (on “Ultralight Beam”), arguably the best full-length—I mean, “mixtape”—and seems committed to a level of artistry few can match time be performs. And he did it while remaining his own goofy, good-hearted, Christian self—an archetype we haven’t seen in hip-hop before, and an innovation in and of itself.

The sound of Coloring Book—and of Chance the Rapper, writ large—is one of openness. He’s excited about his life, and wants you to be excited about your life, too. But, more than that, he’s trying to bottle up that feeling. He’s trying to evoke exactly what his particular brand of happiness—one colored by empathy and nostalgia as much as pure moment-to-moment joy—feels like musically. And over the past few years, he’s come thrillingly close.

He’s carved a sound—major chords and warm keyboards and stuttering drums—that’s entirely and recognizably his own. Coloring Book didn’t arrive fully-formed; Chance has been shaping his unique brand of music since 2012’s 10 Day, refining what his artistry means and sounds like with his close-knit band the Social Experiment for years. This album, though, was where everything cohered. His rapping is instinctual, bounding from carefully measured measured bars and wordplay to rapturous and guttural expressionism. Not since Kanye West has a rapper so plainly attempted to put every feeling they had into their music.

In the process, he’s emerged as one of the savviest music industry players in an unstable environment. In 2016, several artists used the still-nascent streaming economy to their advantage, getting ahead of the sea change the music industry’s been struggling with. Drake signed up with Apple Music, getting millions of dollars and billions of streams in the process. Frank Ocean, with some deft maneuvering that’s remained largely under the table, slid his way out of his label contract and released Blonde independently, for which streaming accounted for most of its listens. Chance, too, is at the forefront of a new kind of music industry—but he was the only one to predict it first.

For likely close to half a decade, Chance has been fending off label offers, even when the career path seemed hazy and the potential for failure seemed, to everyone but him, great. Instead, he was the first to figure out how the artist succeeds with the internet, rather than in spite of it. His other releases were completely independent, and his latest came with a partnership—like Drake’s and Frank’s—with Apple Music, which in its ambitions to corner the streaming market has begun operating as a de facto Medici family for artists like Chance. If that deal were to dry up tomorrow, though, Chance has proved he is nimble and inventive enough to handle any changes, and has a rabid fanbase that will follow him anywhere he chooses to go. It’s not Jay Z-style moguldom; it’s something more modest than that. Something we haven’t seen before. —Brendan Klinkenberg

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Q-Tip, Kendrick Lamar, Young Thug
In Sept. 1991, Q-Tip rapped that “the job of resurrectors is to wake up the dead.” He delivered the line in the same verse, on “Jazz (We’ve Got),” that saw him explain “the aim is to succeed and achieve at 21,” which is how old he was at the time. Twenty-five years later, at 46, Q-Tip brought the members of A Tribe Called Quest together to record a new album. During that process, in March, founding member Phife Dawg passed away. But Tip and Jarobi and Ali Shaheed Muhammad didn’t forget their jobs, and in November they released We Got It From Here...Thank You 4 Your Service, the final Tribe album. They resurrected the dead.

The album is a miracle, in large part because of Tip’s rapping. In his post-Tribe solo work he explored the possibilities of a more jazz and scat-inflected style, and the results sounded less written and more like tossed off freestyles than the brilliant displays of rhyme found on those early Tribe albums. Not here, though. He obviously had things he needed to say—about his country, about music, about aging, about friends, present and lost—and his lyrics sounded more deliberate and calculated than they had in years. This focus resulted in finely crafted verses likehis contribution to “Lost Somebody,” in which he memorializes Phife and tries to explain the sometimes coarse texture of their long relationship. “Malik, I would treat you like little brother, that would give you fits/Sometimes overbearing though I thought it was for your benefit,” he raps, nearly out of breath but still enunciating. As youth-driven as hip-hop is, Tip’s performance in 2016 showed that it’s possible to make adult rap, sober and frank, that’s just as urgent and vital as the energetic displays of the genre’s youngest innovators.

Kendrick Lamar didn’t release career-defining work in 2016, like he did in 2015 and 2012, withTo Pimp a Butterfly and good kid, m.A.A.d city, respectively. Instead, Untitled Unmastered, a rough collection of apparent studio leftovers, felt of a piece with the storm of jazz and American turmoil that produced Butterfly. Many of the songs were studio-cemented versions of live late-night performances; many of those songs were brilliant. They left no doubt that Kendrick is one of the best rappers in the genre’s history, but they didn’t deepen his story or lead the listener down a new, surprising path.

Elsewhere, he contributed verses to songs from Beyoncé, Danny Brown, A Tribe Called Quest, the Weeknd, Travis Scott, Kanye West, DJ Khaled, Maroon 5, Sia, BJ the Chicago Kid, and Isaiah Rashad, among others. Of those, “Really Doe,” “Goosebumps,” “No More Parties in L.A.,” “Holy Key,” and “Wat’s Wrong” were most deserving of praise, but none felt essential. It’s hard to imagine that he’d perform any of them during a show of his own in five years, the way certain guest features of, say, Jay’s have penetrated his solo catalog. In some ways, Kendrick Lamar was in cruise control in 2016. But what was startling is that his cruise control output now matches other rappers' career-making years.

Young Thug may never be the best rapper alive for as long as he raps, but that’s in keeping with his artistic mission. Unlike Kendrick Lamar, who raps at a scholarly level, armed with history and precedent, Thug raps to complicate the act itself. What he does under the banner of hip-hop—toying with song structure, exploding his voice—prompts critics and listeners to coin words and subgenres. Still, in 2016 he released some of his most streamlined projects to date. Slime Season 3and Jeffery in particular are compact machines, with so many strange twists and turns jammed into eight or ten track releases, like the exposed motherboard of a pocket-sized device. Songs like “With Them,” “Drippin,” “Webbie,” “Kanye West,” and “Pick Up the Phone” are crammed with creative turns of phrases, off-the-wall flows, and brief moments that would be repeated hooks for less adventurous artists. There’s no telling if this year will go down as the first sign of Thug trending toward more steady, stabilized musical output, or if his focus and stability last year was itself an anomaly. That sort of unpredictability is very much keeping in the spirit of Young Thug. —Ross Scarano