Hip-hop

Weve spent the better part of a decade watching Tyler, The Creator grow up. On the early Odd Future mixtapes, he embodied a particular type of post-adolescent id—petulant, terrifying, frequently brilliant, and consistently offensive. He gobbled cockroaches, incited multipleriots, declared that “rape’s fun,” squabbled with LGBT activists, and, ultimately, was banned from the UK and New Zealand. Throughout these various ordeals, he used his age as both a weapon—taunting “40-year-old rappers talking about Gucci”—and as a defense, confessing, “Im not a fucking role model, I know this/ Im a 19 year old fucking emotional coaster”.This was at least somewhat tolerable because Tyler and his friends were talented, and, perhaps more importantly, it was all presented as a joke. This wasn’t the crack-era nihilism of Mobb Deep or the urban-trench warfare of Tupac. It was a lot more low-stakes than that. O.F.’s various offenses were wrapped in the detachment and filters of post-Tumblr irony. If you were offended, you didn’t get it, and, if you didn’t get it, you were old, irrelevant, etc. Yeah, Tyler was a serious person, but he was also very serious about letting us know he’s not particularly serious. The dynamic was both exhilarating and confounding, but it hit a dead end. Cherry Bomb’s mishmash of cloned, clamoring N.E.R.D. beats was nearly unlistenable, and Tyler’s shouted adolescent angst schtick was wearing thin. He was still squabbling with his critics over saying “faggot,” and there was one hackneyed line (“Im so far ahead you niggas, Im in the future”) after another (“The boys a fucking problem like turbulence, boy”). The initial shock-of-the-new transformed into the tedium-of-the-rote, and even his admirers begin to wonder if there was actually any there there.Flower Boy is supposed to be his coming-out party. This is the point where Tyler pulls off the bandages, and reveals a true(r), more mature self. And, for the most part, it works. He still has the same tools in his kit—he’s still ripping off the Neptunes, and he’s still a very self-conscious provocateur—but he does refine, expand, and, ultimately, negate his prior persona. It’s an exciting and unexpected transformation. For our corresponding playlist, weve collected the albums key tracks, as well as its influences, collaborators and sample sources.The album hits a high point with “911/ Mr. Lonely.” The song is restless, sonically and thematically, skirting between various movements and motifs. The first few seconds sound like a lark, a tongue-in-cheek riff on the sort of pleading R&B love songs that serve as a decades-spanning through-line for that genre. Over a trainwreck of stacked drums, vocalist Steve Lacey coos, “call me, call me sometimes,” before quickly adding the punchline, “911.” Then the song shifts; the drums fall into place, a lovely, melancholic piano melody peeks through the haze, and Tyler emerges to deliver one of the albums most startling lyrics: “My thirst levels are infinity and beyond.” The line is both corny and transcending, and, throughout the song, Tyler mines the space between kitsch and confession, declaring himself the “loneliest man alive,” while referencing Elon Musk, Celine Dion and Hasbro toymaker Arto Monaco. Later in the song, he’ll admit that “I’ve never been good with bitches,” because “I’ve never had a goldfish.” ScHoolboy Q briefly appears, and declares Tyler an “old lonely-ass nigga.”The track is surprising, funny, a bit unstable, and aggressively self-negating. It’s also revealing and shocking in a way that is not merely “provocative.” Tyler’s comfort with ambiguity is one of the album’s defining qualities, and Tyler uses these gray spaces to his advantage. Much has been made of Tyler’s line about “kissing white boys,” and whether or not this means that Tyler is queer. It’s what everyone is talking about, except Tyler. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter who Tyler hooks up with—he’s found new, exciting ways to make himself vulnerable, and, ultimately, Flower Boy works because it feels high-stakes. Tyler understands the old maxim that he needs to destroy in order to rebuild, and the danger inherent in that process has pushed him to create his most refined, focused, and satisfying work to date.

This is our track of the day. Be sure to subscribe to The Best Songs of 2018 (So Far)for regular updates.What It IsIn 2017, at the ripe age of 26, Tyler, The Creator seemed a bit artistically exhausted. His teen-savant Southpark-lite provocateur pose was becoming a drag, and his last album -- 2015’s Cherry Bomb -- was a pretty-much unlistenable hodgepodge of N.E.R.D. retreads. For a second, it seemed like he was best suited as a fashion magnette -- his clothing line Golf Wang was pretty fresh -- with a side career as a sub-Hannibal Buress sketch comedian. The 2017 Flower Boy changed that awfully fast. Full of uncluttered, delicate melodies and surprisingly mature emotional themes, the album was ambitious without being pretentious. If his earlier work was intentionally distancing, Flower Boy felt subtle and embracing. Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN may have been the most important hip-hop album of 2017, but Flower Boy was the most enjoyable, and surprising. “Okra” is his first song released since that album dropped.So, which version of Tyler shows up on Okra?This isn’t exactly the adolescent Tyler of old -- nothing here seems intentionally provocative, per se -- but this also feels like a bit of a retreat from his more emotionally nuanced persona of 2017. He talks a lot of shit. He tells critics to fuck off. He brags about his cars. There aren’t a lot of pretty melodies here.Is that a bad thing?Not really. The track bangs. Beneath a bed of churning, speaker-busting sub-bass, Tyler simply raps his ass off. It features some of the most dexterous flows of his careers, and it also pushes forward a couple of Tyler’s personal uber-narratives. He’s sexually fluid (he calls out Tim Chalamet from last year’s LGBT-friendly indie movie Call Me By Your Name). Odd Future is over (“Golf Be the Set/No More OF”). It feels more like a low-stakes victory lap than a big next step, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

One of the ugliest figures in rap is obsessed with some of the prettiest music. But we should expect nothing less from Tyler, the Creator, a self-described “walking paradox” whose music has been obscured by his public persona ever since he disrupted rap with his Odd Future crew in 2008. You could be forgiven for writing him off entirely after reading his notoriously homophobic Tweets. He’s since walked back most of that language, and has perhaps even come out as gay—or at least inhabits a gay character on his 2017 album Scum Fuck Flower Boy.As a rapper and producer, he’s been open about his influences since day one, and theyre all over the place: Pharrell’s sweet falsettos and uneasy chord progressions; the alien pop and library music of Broadcast; late ‘80s R&B (not a lot of that on Spotify, sadly); the harsh provocation and technical wizardry of Eminem; the stagey, orchestral hip-hop of Jon Brion-era Kanye West. He’s particularly into deep album cuts and soulful music with cinematic aspects.There is still nobody quite like him, even outside music, with his brightly colored fashion line and Neverland-esque penchant for throwing carnivals. And while his music has developed a capacity for gentleness over the years, he’s still a man who will shout vulgarities, if only to drive people away so he can sit at the piano alone with his jazz chords.At any rate, the most interesting paradox of Tyler, the Creator is that while he always seemed bent on fame for himself and Odd Future, he never “dumbed down for dollars” a la JAY-Z—or seemed to ever consider watering down his art in any way.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.On “Celebrate,” the second last song on Malibu, Anderson .Paak sings “time never cares if you’re there or not there.” Time’s infinite indifference to our finite human experience elicits reverence, not concern or fear, from .Paak, who reasons at the end of the verse, “lets celebrate while we still can.” From growing up in Oxnard, California, to his pursuit of love and building a meaningful career as a musician, it’s made abundantly clear throughout Malibu, that .Paak’s life experiences have informed the perspective that his brief time on earth is an opportunity that cannot go to waste. This awareness arrives as a lyrical theme, but the songs themselves move with a life and freedom that suggest he’s motivated by his biggest limitation of all, time, not burdened or rushed by it.Part of what makes the record so compelling is .Paak’s use of place in conjunction with the theme of time. Parallels can be drawn to Kendrick Lamar’s relationship to his hometown, Compton, on To Pimp A Butterfly, which Lamar uses as a kind of measure for the ways success has changed him. There’s a dissonance within Lamar between the Kendrick that grew up in his hometown seeing his city’s place within hip hop history, longing to start a career of his own, and the Kendrick that now returns as a major star. For .Paak, Malibu is an aspirational place, and having finally made it there, much of the record is about him wanting to make the best of things while he’s still can, feeling as though he’s on the cusp of greatness. This philosophy is represented in his thoughts on his career and creativity, but also finds its way onto the dancefloor and into the bedroom.For someone so bound to the idea of “living in the moment,” .Paak’s music moves effortlessly through time via style, channeling vintage soul, funk, disco and boom-bap as needed, uniting these sounds with his mix of sung and rapped vocals. Also helping to make Malibu’s omnivorousness sound seamless is a sizeable cast of contributors, from his tried and true backing band, The Free Nationals, to more seasoned players like jazz pianist Robert Glasper and bassist Pino Palladino. Beats provided by luminaries like 9th Wonder, fellow Oxnardian Madlib, and DJ Khalil fluidly intertwine with more modern productions courtesy of Montreal-based DJs Pomo and Kaytranada. Paak trades verses with contemporaries like Rapsody, BJ The Chicago Kid and Schoolboy Q, while also getting nods from The Game and Talib Kweli. Though such an impressive lineup could overwhelm the record, each guest contribution has been deployed thoughtfully, playing to their strengths as well as .Paak’s.This playlist takes a close look at the supporting cast of musicians, producers and samples on Malibu, finding a throughline between their work and .Paak’s own in both sound and theme.

Chance the Rapper owned hip-hop in 2016. He provided the musical backbone of Kanye’s Life of Pablo, partied with Beyonce at the VMAs, hung out with Obama at the White House, headlined his own festival, and released the groundbreaking mixtape/album Coloring Book. In terms of larger cultural impact, there’s very few rappers this decade who’ve matched Chance’s 2016 run. To an extent, it seems destined that Chance the Rapper would reach this stature -- he’s been buzzed about in underground circles since his 2012 mixtape 10 Day, and he comes from the upper echelons of Chicago’s political elites: his father is currently serving as the chief of staff for Mayor Rahm Emanuel -- but his moment in the limelight is a weird by-product of a dark political and cultural moment. The joy and euphoria of his rhymes, and the mindfulness and positivity of his persona, provide an anecdote to 2016’s riots, terrorism, police shootings, and political demagogues. He embodies the way we want to see ourselves, our future and our culture. For hip-hop fans, particularly those who fashion ourselves purists of a certain variety, he also reflects how we’d like to think of the genre. And part of the joy of listening to Coloring Book is picking apart his influences and how he reflects hip-hop. The smartly euphoric uplift of “No Problems” recalls Kanye during his pop maximalism peak, while the “Blessings” channels the strands of gospel that pops up in everyone from Tupac to Anderson.Paak. Though he reps his hometown of Chicago -- and his music contains echoes of everyone from Juke legend DJ Rhashad to classic boom bap icon Common -- he’s also has omnivorous tastes, channeling LA underground absurdists Freestyle Fellowship and the sludgy H-Town hip-hop of Mike Jones. For this playlist, we trace some of those influences and try to unpack Chance’s deceptively dense masterpiece, Coloring Book. You can subscribe to the playlist here. We’ve also curated a playlist of some of our favorite interviews of the rapper. Check it out below. -- Sam Chennault

Calling Anderson .Paak an R&B singer shortchanges him. Under the moniker, NxWorries, his 2016 collaboration with producer Knxwledge, Yes Lawd!, the LA musicians pleading, lurching voice carries the weight of that genre’s history -- most distinctly recalling the bluesy soul of O.V. Wright -- but you can also hear the heft and bravado of hip-hop, a byproduct of both .Paak’s early years at the seminal underground label Stones Throw and his association with Dr. Dre and Aftermath Records. He’s of a generation of singers who came of age in rap’s shadows, and this makes for a strange nostalgia; a hall of mirrors where soul refracts hip-hop refracting soul, creating a sound that is uncanny.And while Yes Lawd! feels singular and very much of this moment, the sound that Knxwledge and .Paak crafted is the culmination of a strain of soul that has been bubbling in the LA underground scene (and beyond) for at least a decade. The twin pillars of the sound are J. Dilla and Madlib. The former worked with D’Angelo and Erykah Badu to craft neo soul in the 90s, while the latter opened the door of hip-hop towards psychedelia and outre world music. Their syncopated drums, hazy samples and penchant for compensational pastiche can be heard in the everyone from Flying Lotus to OmMas Keith, the latter of whom helped craft Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde.Yes Lawd! feels like a distillation of that sound -- Madlib’s presence is most clear in the compositions sketch-like quality, but there’s also a pop sensibility grounded in 90s R&B and the generation of forgotten alt. soul groups of the ‘00s, most notably Foreign Exchange (a group comprised of Little Brother vocalist Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolary) and the underrated LA group J*DaVeY, a trashy, funky duo who proclaimed themselves the “Black Eurythmics.”For this playlist, we peel back onion on this universe, tracing the influences of NxWorries; .Paak and Knxwledge’s solo work; as well as samples and the work of guest and collaborators. If you love the new album, as many do, this should provide great complimentary listening. Subscribe to the playlist here.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!There may be no other contemporary player who’s logged as many miles, taken as many left turns, or made as many friends on his musical journey than Thundercat. The artist more prosaically known as Stephen Bruner began playing bass at age 15, absorbing the lessons of jazz fusion greats like Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, and Jaco Pastorius. He soon joined his older brother Ronald Jr. as a member of Suicidal Tendencies, serving the L.A. thrash-funk-metal institution for the better part of a decade, while still making time to tour with Snoop Dogg and build a rep as a session musician for the likes of Erykah Badu and Bilal. Even after Thundercat established his own flair for spaced-out, vanguard R&B with his debut solo album The Golden Age of Apocalypse in 2011, he continued collaborations with Flying Lotus on the Brainfeeder label and forged a new one with Kendrick Lamar. He and brother Ron were also a part of Kamasi Washington’s formidable group for The Epic.The influence of these past hookups are easy to hear in the astonishingly diverse sounds of Thundercat’s new album, Drunk. Yet the album contains fresh surprises, too. Appearances by Lamar and newbies Wiz Khalifa and Pharrell may not be so shocking, but who could’ve known that Thundercat’s allegiance to yacht rock was so fervent that he’d enlist Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins for cameos on the ultra-smooth “Show You The Way”? The album’s crackpot humor and abundance of short, weird tracks are equally suggestive of his devotion to Frank Zappa, and at some shows he’s performed a cover of “For Love (I Come Your Friend)” by George Duke, the R&B maverick who was one of Zappa’s best musical foils.Drunk could only be a product of Thundercat’s vast and vivid musical universe, one that we explore here via songs he’s either created or helped craft, plus equally vibrant tracks by other artists he’s covered, sampled, and loved.

Nas may be known primarily for classics albums such as Illmatic and It Was Written, but his work on other people’s tracks reveals new dimensions of his work. On earlier classics such “Verbal Intercourse” or the vastly underrated AZ collaboration “Mo Money, Mo Murder (Homoside),” Nas seems primarily concerned with sensory detail and pure sound -- the clanging consonants and sly insertions of internal rhymes that melt the rusted metal of his harrowing imagery into pure liquid poetry. As his career would progress, he became more interested in carving out meaning, and tracks such as “Road to Zion” -- his collaboration with Damian Marley -- and “Music for Live” are thoughtful post-colonialists critiques set to boom bap. His recent verse of DJ Khaled’s “Nas Album Done” verifies that, 20+ years into an already legendary career, the rapper is still near the top of the game. The power of his voice is matched by the subtlety of his language as he pushes for equality through economic re-investment in black communities. Yeah, it’s admittedly strange this is taking place on a DJ Khaled track, but the track has to be encouraging for all Nas fans.

Vince Staples is the latest disciple of resisting any club that would have him. His sophomore LP, Big Fish Theory, combines one of hip-hops wickedest pens with the most dense, dance-happy BPMs this side of a Burial record. Its a brave gamble for Staples, one previously pulled off by Danny Brown on his own sophomore LP, XXX.Like Danny Brown, Staples loathes convention. Unlike Danny Brown, who telegraphed his fandom of left-field producers and dance music, Staples has previously worked heavily with hip-hop hitmakers like DJ Dahi, Clams Casino, No I.D., Mac Miller, and Tyler, The Creator. Brown made a fluid transition from hip-hop blog worship to massive festival crowds, yearning for beats that would appease the nonconvential rap fan. However, Staples Big Fish Theory—the proper follow-up to his breakthrough 2015 double-disc Summertime 06—feels less like a natural progression than an abrupt break from 2016s excellent Prima Donna EP.Big Fish Theorys production team (Sophie, Sekoff, GTA, Justin Vernon, Jimmy Edgar) would make Azealia Banks jealous, but it feels odd for a guy who doesnt drink, smoke, or party. Alas, his dead-eyed street poetry sounds more at home on previous goth neck breakers like "Señorita," "Norf Norf," and "Blue Suede" than amid the frantic EDM energy of "Party People" and "Homage.""Ascension," Staples collaboration on the latest Gorillaz album, shouldve tipped fans off as to what to expect with Big Fish Theory. While the record deflty pays service to his trunk-rattling west coast roots on "Big Fish" and "Yeah Right," the album is more Damon Albarn than DJ Quik. Albarn actually contributes vocals and keys to "Love Can Be...", and his total disregard for genre mustve rubbed off on Staples during their Gorillaz sessions. To get a full sense of the albums sonic scope, cue up our playlist of its key tracks and their eclectic influences. But as Big Fish Theory proves, sometimes, the best bet is the safest bet, especially when one of top writers under 25 has already made his greatest strengths apparent.

Vince Staples came to prominence as an associate of the L.A. underground rap collective Odd Future, making multiple appearances on Earl Sweatshirt’s 2013 album Doris. Two years later, Staples released the acclaimed album Summertime ’06 on Def Jam, which featured an appearance by frequent collaborator Jhene Aiko and established the Northside Long Beach rapper as a brilliant and distinctive voice in hip hop. Despite his irreverence toward traditional hip hop gatekeepers, Staples has proven an able collaborator for conscious veterans like Common and Dilated Peoples, as well as an agile MC who can tackle adventurous tracks from producers like Flume and Clams Casino. With the sheer variety of collaborators he sounds at home with, Vince Staples has enhanced the unique place his solo work occupies in the musical landscape and the ways he can express his sense of humor and political perspective.