I didn't listen to very much new hip hop in 2015. I've been in kind of a slump with the genre for going on two years now, with my interest in adjacent genres like grime and in re-workings of rap verses over dance beats I like better, particularly ballroom voguing stuff, taking precedent. That said, I've maintained an interest in the more melodic rapping styles that have developed lately coming from people like Young Thug and Future. I am just starting to work through their mixtapes and have found that I much prefer them in a single format ("Stoner" is probably the best hip hop song I've ever heard, and "NASA" has been remixed and sampled to unreal heights repeatedly this year), but I continue trying. I don't see myself spending much time in the next two weeks working through that angle, so consider them honorable mentions just because I feel like they have good potential to replace the album I chose but just haven't yet and won't for me before 2015 ends.
I listened to a ton of Future Brown and the new Sicko Mobb at the beginning of this year, too, and both were close contenders for this prize here. I think bop is pretty fucking cool and keep meaning to dig deeper, but these Super Saiyan tapes scratch the itch so well that I've had a hard time moving away from them. I thought Vol. 2 was a bit of a step down, but it was still awesome. Their feature on Future Brown was one of the highlights there, and that album as a whole had very few low points. I need to probably give it another listen too because it's occurring to me that I'm having a hard time thinking of a good way of describing the sound right at the moment. I remember nothing being as good as "Wanna Party," though, which was a bit of a disappointment, if it's fair for me to have held it to that standard. I'm still working through Nobody 2 and my impression of it, but after a listen or two, it definitely sounds like what it apparently is - a series of outtakes from the Nobody sessions that someone at Keef's label just kinda threw together. Outtakes from sessions for one of my all-time favorite hip hop albums are highly prized objects for me, but it's losing more sheen each time I listen, I fear. Sorry 4 the Weight suffered a similar fate. To round out the pop rap stuff, I also liked the Rae Sremmurd album a little tiny bit. The singles were really cool. Lil Wayne's new mixtape, too.
Okay, one last paragraph covering the wider hip hop landscape as I saw it before I try to sell you on my choice here. Like I said, I've been less interested in traditional hip hop and its developments this year. That Kendrick Lamar is good, but I honestly think you could lose twenty minutes or more from it for a small bump in quality and probably more to make it a really good, consistently replayable album. I can get behind dense and challenging, but To Pimp a Butterfly, to me at least, didn't really reward repeat listens. It just turned into more of an endurance test. It's awesome that it's done so much to seemingly unify a lot of different types of music listeners in praise of it, but it really does less and less for me each time I listen, and now that we're several months removed from the initial hype, it reminds me of my arc with MBDTF minus the obsessive relistening that one inspired. It's not cool that this feels more worn out after probably half a dozen listens over several months than that other record did after dozens in the span of a few weeks. Not trying to paint sonic parallels there, of course - they exhaust for different reasons - but the hype was similar. I also checked out a lot of the "experimental" hip hop darlings of the year. I thought the Dr. Yen Lo and Busdriver albums were fine, but they didn't do anything at all for me personally. Lil Ugly Mane got one listen and it was cool, but I never ended up wanting to revisit it. I owe that and the new Oneohtrix Point Never relistens before putting together my year-end list, so maybe I'll prioritize it here soon and edit this post.
Alright, so this is all to cover some inevitable bases to kinda establish myself as someone who was really outside the hip hop loop this year and touched down quite rarely, typically leaving disappointed. My pick is by no means something I hold up as revolutionary, genre-defining, or even essential listening for everyone. But it is by far the best hip hop record I've heard this year from the standpoint of how often I wanted to throw it on, how much fun I had listening to it, how vital it was in my own listening rotation, and how much it pushes a sound that I really like. My favorite hip hop album of 2015 is:
Like I said above, I've been getting into more melodic rapping styles and especially the extended autotune stuff that Chief Keef and Sicko Mobb are using for a couple years now. Fetty Wap takes elements of this sound out of their native context and turns them into something really weird, actually. This self-titled album is a loose love story version of the kinds of nihilistic subject material in drill or the ecstatic, extended odes to the drug game that Sicko Mobb employs in their bop. Fetty puts himself at the intersection of one of the most forward-thinking, boundary-pushing forms of rap music getting made today and classic idioms of desire expressed through vocal delivery. In other words, the secular lean-induced haze and malaise of the Chicago sounds he's copping get infused with a borderline sacred expression. Yeah, the vocal hooks can tend to sound similar, but the minor textural variations make me view this album more as a 64 minute exploration of a very narrow system of musical coordinates that have infinite permutations. The hooks are all probably made of like three notes total, and they continue to hook and never to repeat. It's absolutely fascinating to listen to, but it also actively eschews whatever sort of pseudo-intellectual analysis you could offer up based on this as it entertains the FUCK out of you. The amount of heart swells, dopey smiles, and refreshing sonic highs I felt biking real fast with no handlebars on my way home for the weekend listening to Fetty chant about whatever the fuck jugging is all justify this to me as the representative hip hop album of my 2015 listening habits.
I didn't listen to very much new hip hop in 2015. I've been in kind of a slump with the genre for going on two years now, with my interest in adjacent genres like grime and in re-workings of rap verses over dance beats I like better, particularly ballroom voguing stuff, taking precedent. That said, I've maintained an interest in the more melodic rapping styles that have developed lately coming from people like Young Thug and Future. I am just starting to work through their mixtapes and have found that I much prefer them in a single format ("Stoner" is probably the best hip hop song I've ever heard, and "NASA" has been remixed and sampled to unreal heights repeatedly this year), but I continue trying. I don't see myself spending much time in the next two weeks working through that angle, so consider them honorable mentions just because I feel like they have good potential to replace the album I chose but just haven't yet and won't for me before 2015 ends.
I listened to a ton of Future Brown and the new Sicko Mobb at the beginning of this year, too, and both were close contenders for this prize here. I think bop is pretty fucking cool and keep meaning to dig deeper, but these Super Saiyan tapes scratch the itch so well that I've had a hard time moving away from them. I thought Vol. 2 was a bit of a step down, but it was still awesome. Their feature on Future Brown was one of the highlights there, and that album as a whole had very few low points. I need to probably give it another listen too because it's occurring to me that I'm having a hard time thinking of a good way of describing the sound right at the moment. I remember nothing being as good as "Wanna Party," though, which was a bit of a disappointment, if it's fair for me to have held it to that standard. I'm still working through Nobody 2 and my impression of it, but after a listen or two, it definitely sounds like what it apparently is - a series of outtakes from the Nobody sessions that someone at Keef's label just kinda threw together. Outtakes from sessions for one of my all-time favorite hip hop albums are highly prized objects for me, but it's losing more sheen each time I listen, I fear. Sorry 4 the Weight suffered a similar fate. To round out the pop rap stuff, I also liked the Rae Sremmurd album a little tiny bit. The singles were really cool. Lil Wayne's new mixtape, too.
Okay, one last paragraph covering the wider hip hop landscape as I saw it before I try to sell you on my choice here. Like I said, I've been less interested in traditional hip hop and its developments this year. That Kendrick Lamar is good, but I honestly think you could lose twenty minutes or more from it for a small bump in quality and probably more to make it a really good, consistently replayable album. I can get behind dense and challenging, but To Pimp a Butterfly, to me at least, didn't really reward repeat listens. It just turned into more of an endurance test. It's awesome that it's done so much to seemingly unify a lot of different types of music listeners in praise of it, but it really does less and less for me each time I listen, and now that we're several months removed from the initial hype, it reminds me of my arc with MBDTF minus the obsessive relistening that one inspired. It's not cool that this feels more worn out after probably half a dozen listens over several months than that other record did after dozens in the span of a few weeks. Not trying to paint sonic parallels there, of course - they exhaust for different reasons - but the hype was similar. I also checked out a lot of the "experimental" hip hop darlings of the year. I thought the Dr. Yen Lo and Busdriver albums were fine, but they didn't do anything at all for me personally. Lil Ugly Mane got one listen and it was cool, but I never ended up wanting to revisit it. I owe that and the new Oneohtrix Point Never relistens before putting together my year-end list, so maybe I'll prioritize it here soon and edit this post.
Alright, so this is all to cover some inevitable bases to kinda establish myself as someone who was really outside the hip hop loop this year and touched down quite rarely, typically leaving disappointed. My pick is by no means something I hold up as revolutionary, genre-defining, or even essential listening for everyone. But it is by far the best hip hop record I've heard this year from the standpoint of how often I wanted to throw it on, how much fun I had listening to it, how vital it was in my own listening rotation, and how much it pushes a sound that I really like. My favorite hip hop album of 2015 is:
Like I said above, I've been getting into more melodic rapping styles and especially the extended autotune stuff that Chief Keef and Sicko Mobb are using for a couple years now. Fetty Wap takes elements of this sound out of their native context and turns them into something really weird, actually. This self-titled album is a loose love story version of the kinds of nihilistic subject material in drill or the ecstatic, extended odes to the drug game that Sicko Mobb employs in their bop. Fetty puts himself at the intersection of one of the most forward-thinking, boundary-pushing forms of rap music getting made today and classic idioms of desire expressed through vocal delivery. In other words, the secular lean-induced haze and malaise of the Chicago sounds he's copping get infused with a borderline sacred expression. Yeah, the vocal hooks can tend to sound similar, but the minor textural variations make me view this album more as a 64 minute exploration of a very narrow system of musical coordinates that have infinite permutations. The hooks are all probably made of like three notes total, and they continue to hook and never to repeat. It's absolutely fascinating to listen to, but it also actively eschews whatever sort of pseudo-intellectual analysis you could offer up based on this as it entertains the FUCK out of you. The amount of heart swells, dopey smiles, and refreshing sonic highs I felt biking real fast with no handlebars on my way home for the weekend listening to Fetty chant about whatever the fuck jugging is all justify this to me as the representative hip hop album of my 2015 listening habits.
I didn't like this very much at all, and I felt like rather than paying homage to his influence, Scott kind of just ripped them off. It seems like a lot of people were really into it, so what made it one of your favorites of the year?
I said Favorite.. Not best. I think TPAB is technically a better album however I enjoy this project much more. And yes I own both Time Astonishing, and The Night Took Us In Like Family and I like Jae's much better. Just because Kool Keith's been in the game longer doesn't automatically make it a better album. It was good, just not as good.
I didn't like this very much at all, and I felt like rather than paying homage to his influence, Scott kind of just ripped them off. It seems like a lot of people were really into it, so what made it one of your favorites of the year?
Honestly, I just think it's super consistent and it is really fun to listen to when I'm out with friends or something. The production was interesting for me, too. I love the late night-ish vibe that it gives off. Hearing the end of "Antidote" on a night out was just lit.
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