Every December, hip-hop debates tend to get a bit contentious. End-of-year discussions regarding the best rap albums often turn into heated in-your-face spats. The only downside? We had to omit several powerhouses from the list because of their decisions to drop at the tail-end of the year.
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From her vivid spray of hair and platform boots to her hyper-energetic, rascally sweetness, Rico Nasty is a technicolor character like the cartoons she loves and references. Her two projects in , Tales of Tacobella and Sugar Trap 2 , are full of irreverent humor balanced by a never-too-cute earnestness. Yet there are also hints of sinister grime in the margins.
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Rock was more than a genre. It was the genre of genres, a sound whose audience sprawled over social divides. For decades, rock was the exception to this nominalism. It was a mansion large enough and hospitable enough that everyone could fit within. Rock as a mega-genre lived the knowledge its individual stars had already discovered: Once it peaked, there was only one direction left to go. Taken collectively, rock acts plummeted in commercial potency, aesthetic quality, and social resonance. The bands that still did huge sales were of middling quality at best.
If there's one thing that we learned in , it's that hip-hop is definitely in good hands, courtesy of so many young and hungry stars. The beautiful thing about all the records that made tremors this year were the stark differences in sounds and content. Detroit MC, Tee Grizzley , won the streets over with his honesty and grit, while Lil Uzi Vert grabbed the minds of hapless teenagers grappling with their adolescence. Yeah, the Pi'erre Bourne-produced track was an earworm all by itself, but once Carti peppered the beat with his swagger, he milly-rocked his way into the hearts of the hip-hop world.
