Five years ago, Mike WiLL Made-It took over the airwaves, his murky, undulating trap beats powering Juicy J’s “Bandz A Make Her Dance,” Rihanna’s “Pour It Up,” Ace Hood’s “Bugatti,” Lil Wayne’s “Love Me,” and many more hits. Meanwhile, he orchestrated Miley Cyrus’ emergence as a Top 40 libertine, delighting poptimists and infuriating others in the process. His sound was difficult to escape.Today, while fellow Atlantan Metro Boomin has taken over as mainstream rap’s omnipresent producer, Mike WiLL Made-It has scaled back. He’s focused on his Ear Drummers’ camp, particularly Rae Sremmurd, the brothers from Tupelo, Mississippi who made surprisingly durable pop-raps like “No Flex Zone,” “No Type,” and last year’s Billboard chart-topper “Black Beatles.” When it seemed impossible to play a mainstream rap hit without hearing his Brandy-supplied audio signature, Mike WiLL Made-It’s beats swung like pendulums—sort of like a trap version of those damned drops that bedevil electronic dance music. Listen to “Bandz A Make Her Dance” and “Love Me” back-to-back for those similar percussive builds.Mike WiLL Made-It’s latest full-length production showcase, Ransom 2, reveals that his techniques have grown far more complex. For “Razzle Dazzle,” he arranges a frizzy feedback storm over a booming kick drum; on Rae Sremmurd MC Swae Lee’s “Bars Of Soap,” he pairs 808 drums with icy synths reminiscent of Giorgio Moroder aficionado Alchemist; another Ear Drummers protégé, Andrea gets “Burnin” with a flurry of menacing cowbell percussion and dancehall chants.With cameos by Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, and other boldfaced names, Ransom 2 proves that Mike still has plenty of juice. And while no one may have paid attention to his 2015 Miley disasterpiece, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, he can still orchestrate a beautiful pop catastrophe: On the one-off single “It Takes Two,” Carly Rae Jespen and Lil Yachty remake Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock’s funky hip-hop classic into a thinly veiled advertisement for Target. Hear the latest evolutions of Mike WiLL Made-Its sound on this playlist.Click here to add to Spotify playlist!

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Damu The Fudgemunk operates in a niche known as instrumental hip-hop. It’s a subgenre that has existed since the late ‘80s, in the days of DJ Mark The 45 King, and has occasionally drawn wide attention through DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. and Clams Casino’s Instrumental Mixtape. But it’s mostly limited to listeners who like hearing beats without all that talking—or “wavy singing”—over it, as well as fledgling MCs looking for loops and breaks to rap over. Then there are the chic hair salons, hookah lounges, and coffee shops that occasionally sprinkle in a little instrumental hip-hop amidst the chill out, downtempo (yes, this still exists in 2017), and smooth deep house that make up their daily aural wallpaper. As a result, instrumental beatmakers like Damu tend to go ignored by all but the most committed listeners.Damu hails from a mid-2000s era when underground hip-hop drew an ever-decreasing audience as an industry dazzled by the rise of Dirty South virtually ignored it. He started out as a DJ with Panacea, a duo whose ghostly new age excursions—like 2007’s The Scenic Route—elicited few critical notices. He established himself by working with Boston rapper Insight as Y Society, and their zippy, ecstatic sunshine tones on 2007’s Travel At Your Own Pace made the album a cult classic among true-school rap fans, with OG vinyl copies trading for hundreds of dollars. Damu has since created a virtual cottage industry of beats, compiling them for indie labels like Redefinition Records and Kilawatt Music.His latest album, Vignettes, reveals how the Washington, D.C. producer is so much more than just a Pete Rock disciple. On the standout track, “Get Lost to Be Found,” he weaves a midtempo beat that slowly ripples and roils like an ocean wave. It’s a hypnotic body of music, full of subtle changes in rhythm that last for stretches of over 12 minutes, and it’s emblematic of how Damu can subtly twist instrumental hip-hop tropes—the Pete Rock-ish horn lick, the DJ Premier-like sample chop—into his own elegant sound signature.There’s so much Damu The Fudgemunk material on the market that it’s difficult to recommend a canonical release for listeners who aren’t immersed in beats culture, the intricacies of which can’t fully be explained here. But in light of the enthralling Vignettes, this playlist is a good start.

It’s 2018, and the economy (for now) is booming. We live in an age in which we consume more pop culture and feel worse about it than ever before. We are more aware of the taboos and criminal acts that percolate beyond the stage lights, if not beyond the withering gaze of social media. We look for heroes, and everyone seems to be found wanting--too flawed, too corrupt.When you survive a chaotic, contentious year like this one--most fans will agree it wasn’t great, but will debate just how bad it was--you narrow your gaze from the forest and turn towards the trees. There is Pusha T’s Daytona, a marvel of economy and caustic wit. There were innovations that worked, such as Tierra Whack’s medley of minute-long pop R&B and rap suites, Whack World. There were innovations that didn’t work, like G.O.O.D. Music’s summer series of EP-length albums, all produced by Kanye West, which after a strong opening with Daytona went rapidly downhill from there. There was the surprisingly poignant return of Lil Wayne, the one-time child star who has grown into an elder statesman after a series of tragic, near-fatal setbacks. There was a boomlet of fast-talking, sexually-forthright women who dazzled rap aficionados, even as a true commercial breakthrough for them (save for City Girls’ appearance on Drake’s “In My Feelings”) remained just out of reach.Rap has atomized so much that it’s possible to ignore the headline-grabbing noise and simply find something you like. Fans of idiosyncratic street-rap flows glorified 03 Greedo, Key!, and Maxo Kream. Meat-and-potatoes backpackers contented themselves with PRhyme and Roc Marciano. Followers of the Chicago school of poetic, jazzy lyricism flocked to Noname and Saba’s new work. In the Bay Area, there was SOB x RBE, Mozzy and Nef the Pharaoh. In Los Angeles, there was Nipsey Hussle and Jay Rock. In New York, there was Sheck Wes and Flatbush Zombies.However, hip-hop culture remains a consensus culture. We exult in its nooks and crannies, its regional curiosities and local flavors, but we turn to the mainstream to make sense of it all. Cardi B, a woman whose big, boisterous personality and social media prowess outpaced her musical talent, proved an unusual choice for Most Valuable Player. Drake is Drake, and with nearly a decade of sad-boy vocals and tough-titty bars in his catalog, he seemingly has few surprises left to offer. Travis Scott is a blockbusting Michael Bay of rap, all maximalist noise that signifies nothing. The less said about Post Malone, the better. Future, J Cole, A$AP Rocky, YG, Nicki Minaj...they seemed to falter in 2018 with work that paled in comparison to past glories.In 2002, another semi-lousy year for hip-hop concluded with the promise of 50 Cent’s “Wanksta,” and the following twelve months brought Jay-Z’s triumphant “retirement,” OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, T.I.’s Trap Muzik and the commercialization of crunk. Today, hope continues to animate a culture that’s poised to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” next year. Who will rehabilitate this aging genre and prevent its deterioration into bland rap singing and Spotifycore? Who’s going to take the weight?

Mary J. Blige’s new album, Strength of a Woman, is unapologetically devoted to heartbreak. Chronicling the strains and inevitable tears in a relationship, the album is inspired by the recent end of her 13-year marriage. For fans who’ve followed her career for the past quarter-century—yes, it’s been that long—Strength of a Woman feels like a return to vintage Mary, or as she once called her former self, “sad Mary.”During those early years, she struggled with fame, substance abuse, and bad affairs, but made some of the best soul music in recent times, including the classic album, 1994’s My Life. But in the past decade or so, especially after 2005’s The Breakthrough, she’s recorded a sometimes-gratifying, often uneasy mix of self-help anthems and earnest attempts at recapturing the pop zeitgeist, regardless of her collaborators. Her last album, 2014’s The London Sessions, found her working with au courant chart-toppers like Sam Smith, Disclosure, and Emeli Sandé. For 2011’s My Life II... The Journey Continues (Act 1), she assembled a grab bag, including a cameo by Drake, a nostalgic look back at her Bronx B-girl days with Nas, and motivational tunes like “The Living Proof.”Strength of a Woman is remarkably consistent. It indulges our desire to relive the vintage, somewhat mythical, Queen-of-Hip-Hop-Soul sound that she did so well early on in her career. Many of its tracks find her riffing over classic soul arrangements, just like when she used to cover quiet-storm chestnuts like “I’m Goin’ Down.” As this playlist demonstrates, she included a few breakup testimonials in every album, though they didn’t have as much purpose and artistic flair as now. Sad Mary never really went away.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

The despondent cover image of Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. may reveal more about the unsettled nature of 2017 than the music itself. Yes, its lyrics contain references to far-right demagogues as well as his usual spiritual crises. But at heart, Lamar is an optimist, and he’s more likely to find strength in his self-lacerating critique than despair. The same could be said of the rap music we’ve heard so far: increasingly aware that something is wrong with the state of the world, but unclear as to how to respond. Life goes on. Future continues to issue his sepulchral takes on Southern trap; Migos fuels their rising fame with insatiably hooky memes; Drake cannibalizes trendspotter styles (and uses too many laptop filters in the process); Rick Ross regurgitates his luxury rap sound to pleasing but diminishing returns. There aren’t many new storylines, though the revival of Detroit street rap (via Tee Grizzley) may be a trend to watch. But the rap scene continues to unfold as it always has. If you’re waiting for the end of the world, what else can you do?

On Vic Mensa’s debut album, The Autobiography, the young Chicago rapper’s personal travails come sharply into view. He raps about his very public struggles with addiction, occasional troubles with the law, a complicated relationship with his hometown’s hip-hop scene, and stray thoughts about ending his life. Yet somehow, his musical identity lies just out of reach.That’s not surprising for a teenage prodigy whose first group, Kids These Days, was profiled in the New York Times when he was just finishing high school. The hip-hop/emo-pop band yielded many of the players who have driven the Windy City’s current renaissance, including trumpeter Nico Segal (a.k.a. Donnie Trumpet of The Social Experiment). Their rise preceded that of Chance the Rapper, who guested on the band’s EPs—and co-founded the SaveMoney crew with Mensa—before embarking on his own stellar career. But while Chance is now widely known as a good kid who connects a secular post-millennial generation with its spiritual potential, Vic has experimented as a solo artist, sometimes fitfully. His best single so far is arguably “Down on My Luck,” a terrific hip-house number from 2014. Like so many next-gen rappers, his work with electronic producers like Flume and Kaytranada is second nature, not a cross-genre gimmick. Yet he’s also tried to translate his industry buzz into songs with Kanye West (2015’s “U Mad”) and Gucci Mane (“What It Takes”), with little crossover success.Much of The Autobiography opts for an airy emo-rap sound typical of recent big-budget hip-hop like Logic’s Everybody and G-Eazy’s When It’s Dark Out. But Vic’s too sharp of a stylist to drown in the indistinct mainstream beats that mar some of his debut. He works real magic with Pharrell Williams and Saul Williams on “Wings,” and his collaboration with controversial South Side iconoclast Chief Keef on “Down 4 Some Ignorance (Ghetto Lullaby)” is long overdue. Then there are those diary-like lyrics, which range from comic tales like the Weezer-assisted “Homewrecker” to anguished meditations on blackness like “We Could Be Free.” Throughout, he remains an engaging performer, even if we’re not always sure where he’s leading us.

Afrobeats is the sound you heard on pop radio for much of 2016. It’s not to be confused with Afrobeat, the funk-based form that Fela Kuti made famous in the 1970s. (It’s a common error that even a New York Times story recently made.) Afrobeats emerged from Lagos, Nigeria and Accra, Ghana in the mid-to-late 2000s, and serves as an African response to post-millennial hip-hop, electronic music, Jamaican reggae and dancehall, and R&B. There are tracks that rely on familiar tropes—Auto-Tuned vocals, English-language lyrics about partying and sex—as well as build upon distinctive traditions like highlife and Afrobeat, resulting in songs that could only be African. It has informed some truly sublime music, like Maleek Berry’s sensuous, hip-swaying “Kontrol,” and WizKid’s “Ojuelegba,” a mesmerizing striver’s anthem about scraping together an existence in Lagos. The latter was featured on The Fader’s best tracks of 2015 list, a sign that Western tastemakers are keen on African pop.Much of what the U.S. mainstream has heard of Afrobeats so far are watered-down, chart-topping approximations like Drake’s “One Dance,” and Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself.” However, it thrives online, gathering hundreds of millions of YouTube views, and turning artists like Yemi Alade (whose “Johnny” has accumulated 75 million views thanks to its colorfully frenetic video), Mr. Eazi, DaVido, and others into virtual cult artists. WizKid has toured with Future, and his most recent album, Sounds from the Other Side, yielded a modest hit in “Come Closer,” a collaboration with Drake. D’banj’s new album, King Don Come, includes a number with Gucci Mane, “EL CHAPO,” that gives Southern trap form a distinctly Nigerian twist. It’s anyone’s guess whether the rise of Afrobeats results in African musicians cracking the Billboard Hot 100, or turns out to be a fad that burns brightly and dissipates. Regardless, it’s a sign of how global music has returned to prominence in America—as if Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” hadn’t proved that already—opening up a new world of Afrobeats to discover.

When SoundCloud launched in 2007, it was initially populated by DJs who posted hours-long sets, like the much-missed collective East Village Radio. It was the new MySpace, a service where Flying Lotus posted workshop demos, and labels like Warp and Ninja Tune posted advance singles of upcoming albums. Some of the service’s earliest legal battles were against major labels that objected to DJs mixing their tracks without legal consent, as well as musicians that posted their material without proper clearance. Eventually, it turned into a YouTube-style service where people uploaded “freeleases” in search of internet buzz. Bryson Tiller, Kehlani and, most famously, Chance the Rapper are just a few who uploaded their mixtapes to SoundCloud.Before SoundCloud rap was a phenomenon feted by Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Complex, and dozens of lesser trend-hunter publications, there was Tumblr rap, the nickname briefly given to buzzy acts like SpaceGhostPurrp and Antwon; and MySpace rap, which yielded “hipster rappers” like the Cool Kids, Uffie, Pase Rock, and Amanda Blank. (Before he signed with Lil Wayne’s Young Money and went supernova, Drake was one of MySpace’s most popular unsigned artists.) SoundCloud rap may be useful today to describe a gaggle of rappers that share sonic traits: lo-fi production, hooky chants, emphatic lyrics that are usually talk-sung, and vague shock tactics that are as punk rock as Billy Idol. But at the end of the day, SoundCloud is just a service.With that in mind, SoundCloud rap sounds like an extension of a thread that arguably began in 2010 with Odd Future (whom some publications compared to the Sex Pistols). As the genre of rap becomes more notional than actual—lyrics are harmonized and sung in barely recognizable hip-hop cadences, and beats are reduced to murky approximations of a boom-bap tempo—MCs trade form for texture, and professionalism for bellicosity. SoundCloud rappers are representative of the genre’s post-regional phase, when it’s no longer uncommon for a Philadelphia hook-man like Lil Uzi to sound like a trapper from Atlanta, a Texas melodicist like Post Malone to sound like a rapper/singer from Chicago, or a Florida bedroom producer like SpaceGhostPurrp to sound like a gangster from Memphis. In the whirlpool of internet culture, everyone is a digital representation of Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory.This doesn’t mean that SoundCloud rap isn’t responsible for vital work. Those aforementioned stories are motivated by controversial upstarts like XXXTENTACION, Tay-K (both of whom are facing serious criminalallegations) as well as Lil Pump, Lil Peep (RIP), Wifisfuneral, Smokepurrp and a handful of others landing on Billboard’s streaming-enhanced Hot 100 charts. Smokepurrp’s drawling “Audi”—with its chants of “lean, lean, double cup” and pummeling trap bass drums—is as vital as any 2 Chainz single this year, and Rico Nasty’s loopy nursery chant “Hey Arnold” replicates Lil Yachty’s charm. (In fact, the latter eventually appeared on a “Hey Arnold” remix.)Still, much of SoundCloud rap’s entrée into the 2017 Zeitgeist can be credited to its successful atomization. There are dozens of rappers who fit into the rubric, and it’s unlikely that you’ll remember most of them five years from now. But it’s fun while it lasts.

It was a weird year in American life. It was a weird year in hip-hop, too. Much of mainstream rap descended into a dark pharmacological haze that was alternately illuminating and horrifying; few embodied those twin impulses like the dead-eyed, flat-voiced rapper 21 Savage. Every major chart hit seemed to include Migos, or one of its members. Most rappers spent more time singing and harmonizing than actually rapping, whether it was Future, Lil Uzi Vert, or Kendrick Lamar. Drake entered his Aerosmith/rock-dinosaur phase—likeable enough, still one of the biggest stars, but no longer generating the kind of critical excitement and discourse he once did. And the top newcomer of the year (though technically her debut mixtape dropped last year) was Cardi B, a former Bronx exotic-dancer-turned-reality-TV-star-turned-social-media-darling who may not be a technically proficient rapper, but made up for it with a delightful mix of personality and panache.Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. was arguably the year’s best album, but it also seemed purposely muted and focused on addressing past triumphs, personal failings, and searching for a path ahead. Its defining quality may have been a surplus of hooky, memorable tunes that didn’t overwhelm intellectually like his past work. By contrast, Vince Staples’ Big Fish Theory delved into fame, disappointment, and UK beat culture in vivid yet perplexing fashion. Migos’ Culture simply offered a cavalcade of hits. Its magnificently scattershot quality was akin to a Stephen Curry highlight reel: Even the best shooters in the NBA merely average over 50 per cent makes. Playboi Carti’s self-titled debut was wonderfully ephemeral. Nothing felt like a genre-shifting achievement on the scale of last year’s Coloring Book, or 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly and DS2. But in a year when optimism about the world around us was in dangerously dwindling supply, modest artistic breakthroughs felt like small yet important steps forward.

Released on September 24, 1996, Illadelph Halflife marked a turning point in the Roots’ career from free-spirited jazz-hop players to soothsayers of doom. Much of rap music was obsessed with the Y2K apocalypse, the New World Order, and the presumptive demise of hip-hop – see De La Soul’s pivotal single “Stakes is High” – and the Philly ensemble was no exception. More than just Black Thought and Malik B launching cipher battles on “Uni-Verse at War,” and waging jeremiads against rapper “Clones,” the album sounds cloudy and introverted. The beats seem to mostly consist of organic bass, keyboards and drums, resulting in blue beats as sparse as a Wes Montgomery jam session, and moodily ominous vibes similar to contemporaneous works like A Tribe Called Quest’s Beats, Rhymes & Life, the Pharcyde’s Labcabincalifornia, and Slum Village’s Fan-Tas-Tic. When neo-soul and jazz guests like Raphael Saadiq (on “What They Do”), D’Angelo (on “The Hypnotic”), and Cassandra Wilson (on “One Shine”) appeared, they contributed pained vocals that contributed to the overall sense of melancholy.As a clear product of 1996’s pre-millennium tensions, Illadelph Halflife may have not aged as well as the band’s next album, the more successful Things Fall Apart. Its deeply rooted entropy is more suited for late-night listening, or perhaps the kind of contemplative smoke-out sessions the Black Thought, Malik and Bahamadia rhyme about on “Push Up Ya Lighter.” However, it established a theme. Led by drummer and group mastermind Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the Roots have continued to assess cultural and political trends with skepticism and occasional hope ever since.