There’s so much to love about the "Old Town Road" saga - how a teenager from Atlanta bought a beat off a teenager from the Netherlands, built around a sample from a Nine Inch Nails deep cut that came out while both were in primary school, rapped a bunch of hokey cowpoke lyrics over the top, went viral on TikTok, caused consternation among the country chart compilers before ascending to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, added collaborator after collaborator (starting with Billy Ray Cyrus) to remix after remix to help keep him there for an entire summer, before coming out as one of the first openly gay male hip-hop stars and generally being thoroughly charming throughout the whole process - that it wouldn’t really matter if the song wasn’t a banger. This consciously self-de(con)structive streak produced diminishing returns as the decade progressed but on something like "Bound 2" it felt genuinely transgressive - the lush, dusty soul samples of 'the old Kanye' but artificial-seeming (like that ludicrous green screen music video) and jarring clever-dumb lyrics that mashed together the crude ("don't get spunk on the mink") and the affecting ("I'm tired, you tired / Jesus wept") in the space of a few bars.Ģ0. Having reached his artistic and technical peak somewhere around the 7 minute mark of the monumental "Runaway", Kanye began taking his creations apart to show how they worked. It's a thoroughly charming musical "will this do?" One to which we answer: Sheck yes. #Best lyrical rappers seriesTake the breakout hit from Harlem native Sheck Wes: a twinkly one-fingered melody over a gut-shaking bass drone shouty rapping that can most kindly be described as functional a bit in the middle where the computer playing the beat conks out and Wes is reduced to acapella swearing a series of half-hearted boasts (“I’m the best drug dealer”) overshadowed by its central tribute to the titular Mo, a good-but-not-yet great NBA player who went to school with Wes. There was something lovably low-key about a lot of this decade’s big moments. Hot Topic pocket rocket Lil Uzi Vert made the most compelling case for that something being a good thing. But then along came of clutch of face-tattooed, hair-dyed introverts making drug-addled bedroom sing-rap about feeling alienated and girls treating them badly, and it was… something. Of all the stylistic twists you might have expected of hip-hop at the start of the decade, becoming more emo was probably low down the list. With a cocktail of intersectional feminism and very specific 90s references we didn't know we needed, Princess Nokia (FKA Wavy Spice) thrillingly pre-empted hip-hop’s woman-dominated late decade. Rich Homie Quan's near-incomprehensible 2015 breakthrough was a mumble-rap milestone - 35 years of rhymes, metaphors and punchlines refined to their purest essence: a series of joyous noises. Rapper after rapper lined up to reject tired old concepts of “being a competent MC” kids thrilled to 21 Savage's monotone mutter and Kodak Black's stumbling, mush-mouthed flow, while their parents cried into old Lyricist Lounge compilations. The first casualty of rap's 2010s version of the punk wars was good diction. Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh) – Rich Homie Quan (2015) Entirely subjective (but also correct), here are the 30 best and most important songs that helped it get there.ģ0. So that, in 2019, hip-hop is no longer part of the pop mainstream, it is the pop mainstream - a chart-devouring, genre-blurring beast borne out of bedrooms and built on the good old internet. #Best lyrical rappers how toNext the hedonistic, high-sheen 00s, where hip-hop truly went mainstream - often assisted by R&B hooks, or club beats, or just by being done by a white guy - and severed ties with an increasingly purist, craft-focused underground.Īnd finally the 2010s, a strange sort of decade, where the music seemed to turn its back on both the big-budget gloss of chart rap and self-consciously worthy "real hip-hop", and enter its awkward art-school punk phase - dressing weird, taking drugs, forgetting how to rap properly and making strange, spooky beats on its laptop.Įxcept that, somewhere around the era’s midpoint, the same internet tools that had allowed hip-hop to get more DIY, deconstructed and democratic - DatPiff mixtapes and Soundcloud streaming lo-fi music videos on YouTube and song snippets on Vine and TikTok - began to propel this strange, uncommercial new vision of rap to global domination.
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