Hip-hop

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.

There’s an amazing story that DJ Premier relates near the beginning of this excellent hour + interview with Chairman Mao. Although he’s now synonymous with New York hip-hop, the legendary hip-hop producer and DJ was born and raised in Texas. His grandfather, however, was a BK resident, and Premier would frequently visit him as a child. On his first trip to New York in the fifth grade, Premier was on a subway car that ran over a man who had jumped onto the tracks. The train backed up, and a young Premier peered out the subway window and watched as the man’s disembodied arm wriggled on the tracks. According to an excited Premier, this had been a suicide attempt. “Wow, this is where I want to live,” DJ Premier remembers thinking.To a certain extent, this is just a typical NYC origin story -- the sort of semi-mythological shit you say to sound like a comic book bad-ass. But it also embodies a lot of the qualities of DJ Premier’s music --gruesome, grimey, traumatic, and incredibly vivid. Hip-hop is clearly bigger than one person, city, or era, and any attempts to claim ownership are misplaced -- to say the least -- but few figures seem to embody the music and the culture better than Premier. It’s not that he invented it -- he was nowhere near its mid-70s birth -- but he created a style and sound that was uniquely and singularly hip-hop. Bleary, spiraling samples wrapped around and onto drums that were harder than nails -- pounding, body-rocking combinations of the snare and bass drums known by its onomatopoeia, “boom bap” -- and paired with rough-hewn, Mt. Olympus raps from a rotating pantheon of legendary emcees (Jay-Z, Nas, Rakim, and, of course, Guru). But more than being a singular touchpoint for ‘90s hip-hop, Premier was arguably the most important sample-based musician, ever; his vision of hip-hop pastiche was unlike anything before it, and, due to market forces, it’s doubtful anyone will return to such a nuanced, intricate manner of sampling music, in hip-hop or elsewhere.Like a lot of early hip-hop innovations, the quintessential DJ Premier sound was born partially of necessity. It took a while for Premier to hone his godlike sound, though the journey there is almost as compelling as the destination. Listen to the early albums with Gang Starr, his flagship group with the Boston emcee Guru, and the sound is looser, jazzier. The instrumental “DJ Premier in Deep Concentration” from the 1989 album No More Mr. Nice Guy serves as an initial calling card of sorts for the young producer. The track is anchored by a liberal sample Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness” that achieves the neat trick of gliding off the track with soaring, croaking synth line, while also feeling diffuse and guazy -- it’s a multi-textured sonic illusion that be-bop musicians were particularly skilled at pulling off. There are no rapped vocals in “DJ Premier in Deep Concentration,” but Premier weaves in a variety of samples and callouts to various producer (“Prince Paul!”), so that the track both has vocal presence and texture and even a narrative focus. All of the components of his later masterworks are there: the sample-based pastiche, the self-referential callouts, the swagger, the soul.Around 1992, Premier begin to switch up his style. Like a lot of early hip-hop innovations, this evolution was born of necessity. In 1991, Biz Markie was sued for his use of Gilbert OSullivans 1972 hit, "Alone Again (Naturally)." Judge Kevin Duffy’s ruling against Markie not only cost the rapper $250,000, but also meant that hip-hop producers had to be much more careful and either clear their samples before use or cut them up to the point that they were unrecognizable. Premier largely, though not exclusively, decided for the latter course of action. He recognized that it was not just the rhythms or melodies that drew him to classic soul, jazz, and funk, but the textures and sound of the music, so he would cut his drums into millisecond intervals and overlay them on one another, combining them with a cache of synth and piano samples that seemed to emphasize their pure otherworldliness. For Gang Starr, this made sense. They had largely been marketed as a jazzy, college hip-hop, but that didn’t feel entirely true to either Guru’s personality or DJ Premier’s artist ambitions. They were nostalgist, to a degree, but their milieu was more modern and urban. The music they made on 1992’s Daily Operation and 1994’s Hard to Earn reflected this grimier reality. The dizzying organ sample laid of “Soliloquy of Chaos,” the chaotic swirl of “Brainstorm,” or the urgent, corporal drum breaks of “Code of the Streets” signal Brooklyn. It’s broken crack vials and loosey butts, summer nutcrackers and skelly sketches. Rarely has a music so embodied such a particular time and space.This would be the template for all of Premier’s best known productions, from Nas’ hip-hop totum “NY State of Mind” to Biggie’s dizzy disorienting “Unbelievable.” Though the sound undeniably strange and novel, it’s also immediate and visceral, which allowed it to ascend the charts in the mid to late-90s. It’s hard to believe, but, at one point, Premier was among hip-hop’s most on-demand commercial producers. The specificity of his music meant that designation wouldn’t last. Beginning in the late 90s, Southern hip-hop would loosen the genre’s focus -- bringing back the more overt homages to funk and soul -- and the music would move back onto the dancefloor. And New York hip-hop would adopt the more polished nihilism of G-Unit and Dip Set, before later seeming to abandon any notion that there was a unified, tri-state sound. But, for a minute, thanks to Premier, the music was pure, aberrant, and purely hip-hop.

This is a track of the day. Be sure to subscribe to The Best Songs of 2018 (So Far)for regular updates.There are an increasing number of second acts in indie rap. Little Brother’s Phonte recently returned with his strong new album No News is Good News, and Kool Keith reunited with Dan the Automator and Q-Bert for their thankfully batshit indie synth-hop opus Moosebumps: An Exploration Into Modern Day Horripilation. There’s also been plenty of chatter about Mos Def and Talib Kweli reuniting for a sophomore Blackstar album, produced by Madlib. Still, the return of Jean Grae is surprising. When indie rap was really popping in the late 90s and early 00s, she was always a bit of an outlier. To state the obvious, she was one of the few females in hip-hop’s boys club, and unlike her counterparts in mainstream hip-hop, she didn’t position herself of a hyper-stylized, endlessly sexualized ubermensch. She was emotionally neurotic, with a thematic palette and persona that was more straight-forward, more real. She was also a supremely technically gifted emcee; her bars stood up next to the rhymes-for-days, meat-and-potatoes emcees of that scene. But, despite this, she never achieved the success or acclaim she deserved.But it’s 2018 now. She’s changed and so have we. It’s seems a little aspirational to say that we as a culture are more inclusive and tolerant when Trump is president, but certainly there are pockets that have opened up to be more accepting of different voices, hip-hop among them. Grae is still doing Grae, but Everything’s Fine -- her recent collaboration with Detroit rapper/producer Quelle Chris -- is the most conceptually adventurous work she’s ever done. It’s also perhaps the most outward looking. Yes, she’s still wrestling with her own competing impulses and trying to reconcile her own conflicting internal narratives, but she’s also doing this in the context of the shitstorm that’s raging outside (Trump, police shooting, etc).“Gold Purple Orange” is an obvious standout track from the album. The beat has a droopy, loopy quality and sounds like the hip-hop equivalent of a giant, stoned sloth. It’s the perfect backdrop for Quelle Chris’ loose, punch-drunk flow and intoxicatingly ironic raps that examine racial and gender stereotypes: “Everybody black dick gotta be long...Every Jew, golden rule, gotta save bills...Every young nigga gotta deadbeat daddy.” His verse kicks off the song, and is a nice counterweight to Grae’s verse, which is both more structured and more personal. She’s the frizzy hair, bookworm” who’s an “immigrant children watchin Buckwheat late night” and listening to “Depeche Mode, Big Audio-o Dynamite.” This leads to an “identity crisis” and “coming later, vices.” It’ deeply autobiographical, and also pretty self-critical, but this is part of her process. Later, she’ll conclude that “With difficulty comes learnin” and “I aint got to be nothing for you but me.” Despite the new collaborators, focus and sonic veneer, this is archetypically Grae -- difficult, honest, and dope.

To state the obvious, Chance the Rapper is a good emcee! The Chicago rapper has a nice, soft voice that telegraphs his “boy next door” charm. He mixes up his flows from verse to verse (and, sometimes, line to line), so things never get monotonous with him. And while he’s not a syllabic-stacking, thesaurus-thumping rappity rapper like a Kendrick or Nas, he’s able to draw thematic through-lines through his tracks and (especially) albums that give his work a narrative focus and arc. In short, he’s more of a performer than a technician -- which is awesome -- and, to be a little more abstract, he’s more of a feeling than he is a place, and that feeling (joyous, personal, a little pious) defines his tracks.This works perfectly marvelous for his own music, but it can make his guest verses hit or miss, but, when the energy works and the vibes align, it’s awesome. Kanye West basically fashioned much of his 2016 album The Life of Pablo around Chance’s swaggering choirboy euphoria -- Yeezy even began to adopt Chance’s trademarks yelps -- so Chance feels more than at home on the deconstructed gospel of “Ultralight Beam,” and the lumbering, twilight R&B of SZA’s “Child’s Play” mines much of the same quixotic nostalgia that framed Chance’s 2016 album Coloring Book.This, of course, requires some alignment or compromise on the part of the hosting artists, but as Chance is a marquee star, and a guest spot from him is becoming increasingly coveted, more artists are willing to go there, which is just fine with us.

There were two things we were looking forward to in 2018: Robert Mueller indicting Donald Trump, and Migos releasing Culture II. After all, Migos has been at the forefront of pop music for the better part of this decade. If we’re being 100% honest, we’ll admit that we dismissed them as one-hit wonders when “Versace” first dropped in 2013, even if we kept it in rotation for a long minute. But they’ve proven much more resilient, creative, and influential than we ever imagined. “Bad and Boujie” and “T-Shirt” helped get us through the past year-and-a-half of this orange-stained apocalyptic shitshow, and the first Culture felt like a coronation not only of Migos as the kings of hip-hop, but also of a new generation of hip-hop stars. So we just assumed Culture II would be like Easter with triplet flows, pinging trap beats, and wealth-porn punchlines.We can’t blame Migos for taking a victory lap, but, at 24 songs stretching nearly two hours, Culture II feels like a victory slog. There’s some hot tracks——“Stir Fry,” “BBO,” and “MotorSport” are all career highlights——but there’s a lot of bloat. Whether they did this because they lacked any sense of quality control (sorry), or because they were trying to game the streaming system, doesn’t really matter to us. The fact is, it gets tedious.So we’re asking you, our loyal readers and keen discerners of good taste, to help us make Culture II great again. Please, EQ the speakers, stake out the X-Actos, and carve out the amazing, taut album that we feel is lurking in there somewhere. You can see how we’d cut this up in the playlist above, but we want to hear your version, too. So, visit our Facebook post here, post your tracklist and Spotify playlist link in the comments, and/or give the thumbs up to the other version you like the best. We’ll feature the winning version of Culture II on our homepage and in our social feeds, attributed to you. Playlist away.

Hey, it happens: You neglect to keep up with all that’s new and cool in rap for a month (or several). Then you snap back into focus and, all of a sudden, the hip-hop landscape is completely populated by adolescents with face tattoos who’ve named themselves after prescription pharmaceuticals. “Where am I? How did I get here?”, you might wonder, feeling approximately 5,000 years old. Not to worry——“rap time” moves at a speed that defies all commonly understood laws of physics, anyway. For those who scan through Rap Caviar and feel lost, we’ve compiled a handy user’s guide to rap’s new generation, taking you on a tour through SoundCloud rap, Latin trap, and all things 2018. (Cue up the playlist above for a general overview of the contemporary hip-hop landscape at large, and then dig deeper into each scene below.)

SOUNDCLOUD RAP

Have you, a full-grown adult, ever been shaken to your core by sheer proximity to a group of teens, certain that they will roast your entire existence simply because they can? Welcome to the lawless land of SoundCloud rap: the movement that, over the past year and a half, has eclipsed the DIY implications of its somewhat dismissive moniker and officially infiltrated the mainstream. Originally, its biggest songs gathered steam on——you guessed it——SoundCloud’s weekly “most played” charts, which ostensibly bypassed stodgy industry gatekeepers to gauge exactly what fans respond to most. But for a while now, the movement’s been gradually outgrowing its home base, with curated playlists becoming the preferred platform for “discovery.” (Scare quotes intended.) And its biggest songs have ascended to the upper echelons of the Billboard charts in recent months: Lil Pump’s “Gucci Gang” hit No. 3 on the Hot 100 in December; 6ix9ine’s “Gummo” peaked at No. 12 later that month; and, most recently, two separate singles from Lil Skies have been simultaneously cruising up the charts.It often feels as though these rappers are more united in visual aesthetic than they are in sound: Crayola-colored dreads, bountiful face tattoos, and worrisome Xanax references abound. (For a while, the scene was also disproportionately stationed in South Florida, though it’s branched out a bit, with Trippie Redd based in Columbus, 6ix9ine repping Brooklyn, and Lil Skies heralding from Waynesboro, Pennsylvania.) But aside from its brash attitude, there are a few common threads that tie the scene’s disparate acts together. The mix is often purposefully overblown and heavy on the digital distortion. Track run times are generally short enough to sustain a social media-saturated attention span. Influence-wise, SoundCloud rappers take cues from the improvisational sing-song style of Chief Keef, the gothic scuzz of ‘90s Hypnotize Minds acts, and the melodies of ’00s emo. Perhaps the most unpleasant quality of the movement is that its biggest stars have been regularly revealed to be terrible human beings——but what else is new in 2018?

TRAP 3.0

It’s impossible to come up with a concise expression of what trap music sounds like in 2018 when the style is easily more diverse than it’s ever been——not to mention more prominently represented within mainstream hip-hop. (Hell, Taylor Swift albums come with Future features these days.) No one needs an introduction to Migos or Young Thug in 2018; but perhaps you’ve breezed through Rap Caviar lately and wondered, “Who the fuck is Lil Baby?” Atlanta remains the trap-music capital of the universe, and if there’s any one label that represents the style’s most popular iteration right now, it’s Quality Control Music, the label founded by legendary A&R rep Coach K. Migos are the label’s marquee act, but the label’s recent Control the Streets, Vol. 1 compilation provides a slightly more in-depth overview of sound of the moment: mostly downcast, with plenty of minor keys to go along with the stuttering snares.Beyond the Migos, though, Atlanta’s most ascendant trap stars over the past year have been Playboi Carti and 21 Savage. Carti’s supremely bass-boosted “Magnolia” was everywhere last year; and if trap’s most recognizable beatmaker these days is Metro Boomin, its most promising newcomer is Pi’erre Bourne, the Atlanta producer behind the single, whose sparse but immersive style is starting to take off. Meanwhile, 21 Savage’s slurry delivery, eerie beats, and nihilistic lyrics have infiltrated the charts over the past year; his understated “Bank Account,” produced by Metro Boomin, was a breakaway hit in 2017, and lately, it’s felt like half the Hot 100 has a 21 Savage feature, from Post Malone’s “rockstar” to Cardi B’s recent “Bartier Cardi.” You can’t talk about trap in 2018 without mentioning Cardi, who had the biggest come-up in 2017 rap with her explosive No. 1 hit, “Bodak Yellow.” That song, in turn, interpolates the flow from Kodak Black’s 2014 single “No Flockin” (hence the titular reference). South Florida’s answer to Lil Boosie, Kodak’s also seen a boom in notoriety, despite what seems to be constant legal trouble; his “Roll in Peace” single, featuring fellow problematic rapper XXXtentacion, has sat near the top of SoundCloud’s most-played charts for what feels like centuries in rap time (more accurately, about five months).Clearly, then, trap’s purview extends far beyond Atlanta in 2018. Baton Rouge prodigy YoungBoy Never Broke Again (formerly known as NBA YoungBoy) has been making waves in recent years for his wise-beyond-his-years storytelling, in the lineage of hometown heroes like Boosie or more recently, Kevin Gates. Chicago’s Famous Dex might not be a household name (which is probably a good thing, given the rapper’s alleged history of abuse), but his minimalist, slippery style looms large over the purposefully off-kilter sounds of 2018 trap and SoundCloud rap. He’s far from the only trap star with a troubling rap sheet: see Arlington, Texas MC Tay-K, whose raw 2017 breakthrough single, “The Race,” literally narrates the 17-year old’s run from a murder charge, for which he’s currently awaiting trial. Newcomers Tee Grizzley and Molly Brazy represent the dichotomy of Detroit street rap: Grizzley’s pathos-heavy “First Day Out” is a masterful mix of the joy and pain felt on his first day released from prison, while Brazy’s party anthems harken back to the bounce of Cash Money and No Limit productions from around the time the 18-year-old was born. And as evidence of Chief Keef’s underwritten influence over how trap music sounds in 2018, Dallas’ Cuban Doll named her recent turnt-up tape Aaliyah Keef, after the 19-year old’s two biggest inspirations.

THE NEW RAP-ROCK

The most memorable outfit on last weekend’s Grammy red carpet was not an ethereal gown or a suave tuxedo; instead, it was the ever-so-over-it Lil Uzi Vert’s mall-goth cargo pants, a triumphant comeuppance for anyone who spent the early ‘00s lurking Warped Tour, replying to flirty AIM messages with “Rawr xD,” or raving beneath the nearest underpass. It was bound to happen eventually: At some point over the past couple years, the well of ‘90s nostalgia ran dry, rap merch began looking like a Hot Topic sales rack circa 2002, and a new rap-rock movement had kicked into high gear. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug——especially when it sets its dreamy gaze on a trend so deliciously garish——but this isn’t your older brother’s rap-rock. Instead of macho mosh-pit metal, rap’s new generation is drawing from the more sensitive strains of ‘00s emo and pop-punk, which makes sense given hip-hop’s embrace of melody over the past decade. Along with the past decade’s steady blurring of genre boundaries, this moment seems inevitable. In fact, it may represent a more fully-realized vision of rap-rock than its original iteration——not to mention finally vindicating Lil Wayne’s “rappers are the new rock stars” mantra on Rebirth eight years ago.Uzi’s 2017 breakthrough, “XO TOUR Llif3,” is so far the defining hit of the new rap-rock movement, with ultra-depressing lines like “Push me to the edge/ All my friends are dead” sung in Autotuned pop-punk cadences. An even bigger hit (and one that’s even more on-the-nose) is Post Malone’s “rockstar,” with its callouts to Jim Morrison, TVs tossed out hotel windows, and the actual lyric “I’m with the band.” But as far as a figurehead, the scene’s most promising leader was by and large Lil Peep, the heavily-tatted, deeply emotive rapper who died of an overdose last November at age 21. Emo-inspired anthems like “Awful Things” capture the romantic nihilism of a doomed generation; in his stead, members of his GothBoiClique crew, like Lil Tracy and Horse Head, keep the legacy alive.

TEAM POSI-VIBES

It’s easy to feel beaten down by the world in 2018. And if things weren’t dark enough as it is, it’s all the more disheartening when hip-hop headlines and playlists feel increasingly dominated by unrepentant abusers and the gatekeepers who support them. Meanwhile, minor keys and eerie vibes have dominated rap production for the past few years, thanks in large part to the influence of Metro Boomin. Have we officially descended into full-time cultural nihilism? Well, not yet: A largely unconnected group of artists from across the map are keeping the flames of optimism flickering by basking in rap’s sunnier side.For the past couple years, Lil Yachty’s lighthearted trap has been an easy target for haters of “rap these days.” But along with his Sailing Team crew, the 20-year-old’s purposefully rinky-dink take on the past decade of Atlanta hip-hop——from Soulja Boy’s playful ringtone rap to the exuberance of early-‘10s groups like Travis Porter——has demanded serious consideration. Just as bubbly, but even more impressive rap-wise, are Sailing Team member Kodie Shane’s “Drip On My Walk” (buoyed by two simple piano keys) and Maryland rapper Rico Nasty’s Nickelodeon-themed bops. And it would seem that the boy-band format is back in style, minus the choreography and major-label svengalis. The super-ambitious Brockhampton crew has amassed a cult-like following for their inclusive, genre-spanning DIY jams. And perhaps the least expected ray of light in the 2017 rap landscape came from Baltimore’s Creek Boyz, whose trap chorale “With My Team” is a genuinely heart-warming ode to crew love.

LATIN TRAP

As trap has evolved into the dominant sound for popular rap, Spanish-language hip-hop has responded in kind, and Latin trap has exploded into an undeniable force. Reggaeton had been the defining sound of the Latin urban charts for the past decade, but over the past two years, Latin music has adopted trap music’s lurching bass, 808 drum patterns, and half-rapped, half-sung cadences. Southern hip-hop’s influence has bled into Latin music for much longer than this particular moment, but artists within the scene seem to agree that “La Ocasión”——the moody 2016 smash from De La Ghetto featuring Arcángel, Anuel AA, and Ozuna——officially sparked the Latin-trap boom; the track currently has more than 465 million views on YouTube. However, the scene’s biggest star, and the one most primed for a mainstream crossover to English-speaking audiences, is Bad Bunny——the Puerto Rican rapper who, just two years ago, was uploading his songs to SoundCloud in his time off from bagging groceries at a San Juan supermarket. He hasn’t released an official album yet, but you’ll find his name all over popular Latin-trap playlists, Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart, and, increasingly, the Hot 100. English-language rappers are taking notice of the movement’s massive popularity, and in the past year, there’s been an increasing amount of bilingual collaborations. Late last year, Nicki Minaj and 21 Savage hopped on the remix to Puerto Rican artist Farruko’s hit, “Krippy Kush,” which also features Bad Bunny and former dancehall producer Rvssian. And in August, Cardi B released an official Spanish remix to her No. 1 single “Bodak Yellow” featuring NYC-based Dominican rapper Messiah.

THE WILD CARDS

Though it may feel like rap in 2018 is overwhelmingly dominated by teenage SoundCloud upstarts and corporate-curated Spotify playlists, that doesn’t mean there isn’t space for genuinely idiosyncratic individuals to step out, too. There’s no formal connection between these particular rappers, many of whom stand apart stylistically even within their respective local scenes. But in 2018, as ever, rap is nothing without its sui generis weirdos, even if these artists aren’t yet represented on the charts, or on the most prominent streaming playlists. Watts, California’s 03 Greedo is impossible to pin down, as evidenced by his sprawling, versatile mixtapes that often clock in at 30 or 40 tracks long; from super-tough West Coast gangsta rap to spacy R&B ballads, you never know what you’re going to get from the rapper/producer, though he’s described his own style as “pain music that’s popping.” Along with Greedo, Drakeo the Ruler’s currently shifting the sound of L.A. street rap, with his deft, free-associative flow and vivid vocabulary. (Does anyone truly know what “Flu Flamming” means? No. Does it matter? Not in the slightest.) And Sacramento’s Mozzy has quietly become one of the most striking voices in West Coast rap, with his intense, super-detailed street-life narratives; Kendrick even gave him an unexpected shout-out at the Grammys this past weekend. Meanwhile, Chicago continues to breed true individuals, from the hyper-minimal, two minute bursts of subdued trap from Valee (whose shape-shifting flow has gotten him the attention of Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music imprint) to CupcakKe, whose colourful, outre sex raps have earned her a sizeable LGBT fanbase. And Chattanooga, Tennessee’s BbyMutha channels the energy of trailblazers like Gangsta Boo and La Chat into tough, thoughtful, bad-ass underground anthems.

Hip-hop brought black America at its most unfiltered into the mainstream like never before. And rappers have been pushing the envelope for sexual content dating back to even the genres earliest pop crossover moments. (Recall the "Rappers Delight" verse about "super sperm.") But it took some time for hip-hop to get really dirty. In the late 80s and early 90s, it was often gangsta rap pioneers like Ice-T and N.W.A. that set the bar for explicit sex talk, but it felt almost like a side effect of their penchant for breaking other taboos.Miamis 2 Live Crew became one of hip-hops first major acts to center their image on sex, and, in the process, upset the same censorship advocates that had been so focused on Prince a few years earlier, becoming unlikely champions of free speech. Throughout the early 90s, gangsta-rap albums continued to be peppered with odes to orgies and oral sex, and even relatively clean-cut acts like MC Hammer made ass-shaking anthems like "Pumps And A Bump." LL Cool J evolved from hip-hop love-song pioneer to the sex god of "Doin It." Sir Mix-A-Lots "Baby Got Back" became a pop phenomenon in part because of his cleverly cartoonish approach to sex, but, as his career continued, he got even more anatomical with songs like "Put Em On the Glass."In the mid-90s, the burgeoning hip-hop underground allowed more leeway for kinky lyrics that didnt even try to get past radio censors. Akinyele of "Put It In Your Mouth" fame dedicated his career to obscenity. Kool Keiths Dr. Octagon project became an indie-rap touchstone with a playfully absurd cocktail of sci-fi themes and sex raps. And R.A. The Rugged Mans 1994 debut album contained such perversely nasty lyrics that even the presence of rising mainstream star Notorious B.I.G. on "Cunt Renaissance" couldnt keep it from being shelved for several years.Early sex-positive female rap stars like Salt-N-Pepa gave way to X-rated pinups like Lil Kim and Foxy Brown, and in the early 2000s, Khia and Trina. By the 2010s, nearly every female rapper of note is as comfortable and unapologetic in rapping about ass and pussy as their male contemporaries, from superstars like Nicki Minaj to underground upstars like cupcakKe. Meanwhile, the rise of the Internet has reduced radios role as a gatekeeper, giving tracks like "Fuckin Problems" and "UP! (Beat the Pussy Up)" more room to thrive on the pop charts without being cleaned up for broadcast.

Chicago native Kanye West is one of midwest hip-hop’s biggest stars, and he made his name producing hits for JAY-Z and other New York rappers. But West has maintained his relevance over the years in part by keeping a finger on the pulse of southern hip-hop, drafting rising stars from Atlanta, Houston, and Miami to appear on his albums and producing hits for Dirty South stars like Ludacris and Jeezy. Most recently, he served as “executive producer” on Atlanta trio Migos’ new album, Culture II, where he co-produced the 21 Savage collaboration “BBO (Bad Bitches Only).”Kanye West’s track record below the Mason-Dixon line dates back to the late ‘90s and early 2000s, when he was a relatively unknown producer placing tracks with southern trailblazers like Goodie Mob and Scarface. In 2003, he notched his first No. 1 on the Hot 100 producing Ludacris’ club banger “Stand Up,” along with a pair of tracks on an album that would help define the next wave of southern rap, T.I.’s Trap Muzik. Over the next few years, as West became a solo star who bridged many divides in hip-hop, he became the kind of rare stylistic chameleon who could make trap hits with Jeezy or screwed ’n’ chopped grooves with Paul Wall in between his excursions into east-coast boom bap and futuristic EDM.As the founder of G.O.O.D. Music, Kanye West has signed Atlantans 2 Chainz and CyHi The Prynce, and helped mentor Houston rapper/producer Travis Scott. G.O.O.D.’s 2016 posse cut “Champions” brought together some of the above with Gucci Mane, Yo Gotti, and Quavo. Some of Kanye’s southern collaborations are better off forgotten, like the treacly Future duet “I Won” and the ill-fated Lex Luger-produced Watch The Throne single “H.A.M.” But by and large, Kanye West has been present for moments of greatness in southern rap, from Scarface’s The Fix to Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III.

Unlike Eminem fictionalizing his rap-battle life in 8 Mile, or JAY-Z pumping his hustler memoirs behind Frank Lucas story in American Gangster, Kendrick Lamars contribution to the upcoming soundtrack for Black Panther appears to be more than just autobiographical inspiration. The first hint was Kendricks collabo with Vince Staples in a trailer, the second being "All the Stars" with labelmate SZA. The newest single, "Kings Dead," features K Dot, Jay Rock, Future, and James Blake tipping the cap to Wakandas monarchy. And though Run the Jewels has been saluted by Marvel in print and featured in one Black Panther trailer with their banger "Legend Has It," Kendrick was a natural choice for curating the official soundtrack, given that his loyalty ‘n’ royalty theme "DNA." echoes the philisophies of Chadwick Boseman’s TChalla, the lone king of a country who sometimes kicks ass with The Avengers when not leading the most technologically advanced nation in the Marvel universe.Hip-hop artists have long used movie soundtracks to catapult some of the biggest hits of their careers, from Public Enemys "Fight the Power" in the 80s, to Coolios "Gangstas Paradise" in the 90s, to JAY-Zs "La La La" in the 00s. The Bad Boys II soundtrack, for example, was helmed by Puff Daddy to exploit the roster of early-’00s Bad Boy Records, while the previously mentioned 8 Mile and 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Trying corraled some outside rappers within a mostly Shady/Aftermath/Interscope package. In honor of Black Panther’s arrival, this playlist celebrates 30 years of hip-hop soundtrack hits, from the "left it off the album and we needed a home for it" variety to the "worldwide platinum single that just happened to be attached to a movie” kind.

Producer Xavier “Zaytoven” Dotson has been instrumental in shaping the sound of Atlanta trap music as an early ally of Gucci Mane and Migos. But perhaps his most revered work is Future’s 2015 mixtape Beast Mode. At the time, Future’s friend DJ Esco was locked up abroad with the hard drive containing all of the rapper’s unreleased music. So Future entered the studio with Zaytoven, and in three days recorded what became Beast Mode, one of a trio of acclaimed mixtapes the MC released in the space of a few months. And in 2018, it’s rumored that Future and Zaytoven will reunite for the long-promised sequel, Beast Mode 2.Future and Zaytoven first crossed paths on Free Bricks, the 2011 collaborative mixtape by Gucci Mane and Future. And the chemistry between Future’s throaty melodies and Zay’s lush piano and flute loops was cemented on 2012’s Astronaut Status, one of the mixtapes that built Future’s buzz before he began releasing major-label albums. Since then, Zaytoven has been a frequent presence on Future records, contributing a warmly melodic and relaxed sound that contrasts with the more aggressive textures of producers like Metro Boomin on chart-topping albums like 2015’s DS2 and 2017’s FUTURE.Future and Zaytoven’s biggest hits together include the tawdry Beast Mode highlight “Real Sisters,” the celebratory Drake collaboration “Used To This,” and “Too Much Sauce,” the Lil Uzi Vert-featuring single from DJ Esco’s 2016 mixtape Project E.T. The familiar sound of Future over a Zaytoven beat even opened “3500,” the epic lead single from Travis Scott’s debut album, Rodeo. But the duo’s dozens of collaborations include mixtape favorites of any Future aficionado, including “Just Like Bruddas,” “Space Cadets,” and the ominous, paranoid masterpiece “Feds Did A Sweep.”