This Big K.R.I.T. tape has become one of my favorite mixtapes in awhile. There's a huge space in rap right now, and a lot of places for audiences to go, so it's like a sort of arms race while folks figure out who they're backing while rappers who came up in the late 90s & early 00s hit the ends of their creative arcs. And of course having Gucci, T.I., Wayne & Boosie all in jail at the same time is like imagining that BIG, Pac, Snoop & Scarface were all incarcerated at the same time in '96. There's a huge space for up-and-coming artists to fill, especially now that dudes like Gucci and, to a lesser extent, Gotti have moved on to the upper tiers of rap stardom.
But, if you could even determine such a thing, which rapper was the most important in this decade? Lil Wayne's shit, as great as it could be, is so creatively disconnected from the actual functional craft rappers partake in, so loosely based around working as a rapper, that his influence is one-dimensional. To sound like Lil Wayne, you just ... sound like Lil Wayne (Drake anyone? Please). Or take a whole bunch of drugs. Jeezy is a great rap artist with some classic LPs, but as rappers go he's only solid. Gucci rose too late and too gradually to have any impact this decade. Boosie broke too late as well, his peak impact hitting probably around the time of that '07 Trill Ent. compilation, plus now he's doing four years. Z-Ro? An incredible rapper no doubt, both soul-baring artist & skilled craftsman, but his lack of interest -- on a musical level at least -- of even coming within a stone's throw of pop charts means its hard to make a case for a dude satisfied with rapping to the choir. I'm not sure who NY dudes would like to push for this decade (hmm... Jadakiss? haaa!). Jay-Z's probably Tip's only real competition, a rapper with truly national influence. But his biggest accomplishments as a rapper occurred in the late '90s; once the new decade hit he still had some shit to say (for two years anyway) but had ceased to develop much as a stylist. His voice had already made its impact. For all the worshipful attention his more intricate Reasonable Doubt verses have gotten, it was Jay's slowed, pop-friendly Life and Times of S. Carter style that Lil Wayne built on. Of course, Jay's impact definitely carried over, but spitting on the "Ha" remix & getting UGK on "Big Pimpin" was a baton pass to the south, whether he realized it or not. Plus, WE DONT BUMP THE BLUEPRINT THREE.
I'm gonna go ahead and say that T.I. is the most important rapper of the 00s, bar none. The guy basically reinvented gangster rap for the decade, down to the label; Trap Muzik was the blueprint for how rapping developed, thematically and stylistically. T.I. moved away from New York's staid & stiff enunciated style & shifted towards the smooth, drawl-inflected southern flow. He retained the kind of Tupac & Scarface-derived thematic focus on real talk, bringing moral & ethical lessons learned on the streets to the forefront, writing as a multi-dimensional human being who bares his soul on record. And T.I. was, at the same time, a lyricist, a guy who wrote raps in great detail & with all that structural nerd-rap shit we love, internal rhymes & double-time flows and nimble tongue-twister shit he probably got from T-Rock. Then, drawing on these separate strains, he made great songs that hit on a breadth of subject matter and showed exactly how to be a major street rapper with popular success, without sacrificing what made your work great. He also did it his own way, with his own producers -- a harsh lesson learned from the under-performance of his debut record no doubt. Even when King hit, he ducked when they expected him to weave, hitting his popular stride while dropping a record with technically-proficient raps over Just Blaze beats. (Of course, there were guys earlier than him drawing on all these influences with similar styles -- I think an argument -- a less solid one -- could be made for Juvenile as well. But T.I.'s career success was perfectly positioned, which gave him a chance to fill a void when crunk was coming up for a lyrical rapper; Juve the Great is an incredible, underrated LP, but his popular impact & rapping innovations had already passed).
Back to Big K.R.I.T.: I don't think he's the next T.I., the next anything really -- at this point, he's early in a career, as far as the world is concerned, an unproven developing talent who just released a really fucking strong mixtape. T.I. is an obvious influence on dude's style, and -- unlike the influence of Lil Wayne -- I think that provides a really good springboard for showcasing who dude is in a real way. He's got a great ability to switch up through a variety of flows, spits over a diverse bunch of instrumentals and has the right kind of thematic breadth for a rapper you should be feeling in 2009 2010.
His ferocity on "Don't Lose Count" makes it sound like he slept with "ASAP.mp3" on loop for most of '05. One of the weirder moments was realizing he was rapping over the "Can't Stop the Prophet" Jeru sample on his incredible "I Ain't Gon Play Witem" freestyle. That track is virtuosic, although in parts it sounds like he's too concerned with enunciating (a Gucci fan would say that right??) to let his flow just roll off like it should. One of T.I.'s serious drawbacks, though, were pimping raps -- he was always too genuine, too much of a ladies man kinda rapper. K.R.I.T.'s innovation is to draw on Pimp's style in those situations; he does a great Pimp C-style verse on "Get Up Off Me": "black on black lac, batmobile /wrist out the window chrome lips on wheels / tell her pucker up, buckle up, yeah we goin places / to the telly with a yella-belly, swappin fuck faces." That Pimp C influence also shows up on a reversion of "Take it Off." Then you've got tracks like "Like Rhonda," where he almost seems to balance it all, & sounds simply like himself.
Best of all, this tape is perfectly sequenced; the shit kicks off with a huge amount of momentum, barreling through beats and switching up styles before you could possibly get bored, trading off with Big Sant (from K.R.I.T.'s group Alumni) intermittently to spice it up. Then for the final section of the record, things start to space out a bit, more mid-tempo and introspective raps, like the incredible "Players Ball" freestyle (Youtube'd below).
Despite all this talk of influence, what makes this all work is that K.R.I.T. sounds like he's actually begun to transcend them. It's a tape that succeeds as much because you're watching a rapper develop as it is about how great he could one day be. There's no critical injustice that he's not well known yet, no forgotten dropped-from-his-label drama narrative to hang on to, no over-reliance on gangster styles of the past. Instead I get the feeling that he's channeling his favorite rappers to become one of mine.
now you 808 heartbroken, goin crazy
confused about yo life cuz you ain't felt the same lately
as you did when you did it for the love
recordin in the closet, play it back for yo cuz
writin about the truth and the way that it is,
to be a n**** from the minors on the way to the bigs.
This is one of my absolute favorite songs -- Sade wishes she wrote this. (I kind of wish she had sung it).
It's been quiet on the site, but not so much in my life. Tomorrow I'll be co-DJing/hosting a private loft party with some friends for Halloween -- if you'll be in the Chicago area & are a reader, are generally not creepy (except in a Halloween-appropriate way), feel free to contact me. You can also become a "fan" of me on the facebook, which means I'll let you know when I'm spinning parties etc. in the Chicago area.
So Pitchfork's end-of-decade articles & lists have all been published. Obviously, a lot of that stuff isn't music I'm particularly into. & I don't mean that as a judgment of those who are; it's just that over the past decade I've been drawn to other music. When being absolutely honest with myself about the kinds of music I enjoyed & (as importantly, I think) the kinds of music I wanted to discuss, I was much more heavily involved with rap, R&B, dance, pop and jazz, the music that I grew up with.
I'm not particularly enamored of Pitchfork's final albums list as a canon. I think the "Pitchfork canon" is frankly guilty of all kinds of biases & blind spots, that its continued centrality and 'significance' to wider music discussion is in some ways damaging, its treatment of other genres often arbitrary and skewed. It's not so much something Pitchfork itself is guilty of; rather it's the continued reverence to 'indie' as a primary trait of ‘quality’ in the wider discourse of popular music, the assumption that a truly discerning listener must or should be keyed in to this particular subculture's aesthetic worldview. Indie can be an interesting window through which to experience culture; it can also be an oppressively limiting one.
Pitchfork is also home to some of the best music writing that I've ever read, and I feel honored to be able to write alongside guys like Scott & Mark, Tim Finney, Tom Ewing and a few others, because really there is no better venue to write and be read by a wide and engaged audience. Even if 70% of that audience only reads the number (ugh) or the ranking of a record, yr still talking about 30% who read for insight and discussion.
So at any rate, here's my not-particularly-strategic list of favorite albums released in the past decade.
More on some of these soon.
1 Avalanches Since I Left You
2 T.I. Trap Muzik
3 Beanie Sigel The B. Coming
4 The-Dream Love/Hate
5 Daft Punk Discovery
6 Ghostface Killah Supreme Clientele
7 Luomo Vocalcity
8 Three-6 Mafia Da Unbreakables
9 Kylie Minogue Fever
10 Andrew W.K. I Get Wet
11 Aaliyah Aaliyah
12 DJ Quik Trauma
13 UGK Underground Kingz
14 Madvillain Madvillainy
15 Shanks & Bigfoot Ayia Napa – The Album
16 D'Angelo Voodoo
17 Various Artists Get Physical - 2nd Anniversary Label Compilation
18 Basement Jaxx Rooty
19 Missy Elliott Miss E ... So Addictive
20 Kaito Special Life
21 50 Cent Get Rich or Die Trying
22 Scarface The Fix
23 Devin the Dude Just Trying Ta Live
24 Ricardo Villalobos Alcochofa
25 Erykah Badu Mama's Gun
26 Gucci Mane Back to the Trap House
27 Big Tymers I Got That Work
28 Common Like Water for Chocolate
29 Michael Mayer Immer
30 M.O.P. Warriorz
31 Richard “Humpty” Vission Big Floor Funk
32 Pastor Troy Face Off
33 Lil Boosie & Webbie Gangsta Musik
34 Jay-Z The Blueprint
35 Anthony Hamilton Comin from Where I'm From
36 DJ Green Lantern, DJ Vlad & DJ Harry Rap Phenomenon Part II: 2Pac
37 Luomo The Present Lover
38 Young Jeezy Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101
39 DJ Harvey Sonic Disco #1
40 Killer Mike I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind
41 N.E.R.D. In Search Of...
42 DJ Shadow The Private Press
43 Lil Wayne The Carter
44 Various Artists Total 3
45 The Knife Silent Shout
46 Z-Ro Let the Truth Be Told
47 Res How I Do
48 Chemical Brothers Come With Us
49 Erykah Badu New Amerkyah Part 1
50 Cut Copy In Ghost Colours
51 Exploding Hearts Guitar Romantic
52 Juvenile Juve the Great
53 Brandy Full Moon
54 Lindstrom & Prins Thomas BBC Essential Mix
55 MRI All That Glitters
56 Big L The Big Picture
57 Justin Timberlake Futuresex/Lovesounds
58 Trick Daddy Thug Holiday
59 Teedra Moses Complex Simplicity
60 Theo Parrish These Days & Times
61 OG Ron C Fuck Action 40
62 Bubba Sparxx Deliverance
63 Vybz Kartel Up 2 Di Time
64 Trae Restless
65 Soulja Slim Years Later ... A Few Months After
66 The Beatnuts Originators
67 Abdullah Ibrahim Cape Town Revisited
68 Young Dro Best Thang Smokin
69 Lil Scrappy/Trillville Lil Scrappy/Trillville
70 Maxwell BLACKsummers'night
71 Tha Dogg Pound Cali Iz Active
72 8Ball & MJG Living Legends
73 DJ Quik & Kurupt Blaqkout
74 T.I. King
75 Project Pat Mista Don't Play
76 Suga Free The Features, Vol. 2
77 T-Rock Rock Solid/4:20
78 Diddy Press Play
79 Mariah Carey The Emancipation of Mimi
80 Simian Mobile Disco Attack, Delay, Sustain, Release
81 Queens of the Stone Age Songs for the Deaf
82 Al Kapone Memphis Drama Vol. 1
83 Ghostface Killah The Pretty Toney Album
84 Basement Jaxx Kish Kash
85 Logan Sama RWD AAA Mix
86 Mary J. Blige The Breakthrough
87 El-P Fantastic Damage
88 Coup Party Music
89 Sean Paul Dutty Rock
90 Monster Magnet God Says No
91 The Streets Original Pirate Material
92 Louis Logic Sin-A-Matic
93 Roisin Murphy Overpowered
94 Fabolous Street Dreams
95 Clipse Lord Willin
96 Shyne Shyne
97 I Self Divine Self Destruction
98 G-Ha & Olanski Sunkissed
99 T.O.K. Unknown Language
100 Diverse One A.M.
