As always, the same rules apply: one song per featured artist –with exceptions for Kendrick and Future because they are Kendrick and Future.
“Singles” prioritized over deep cuts, American rap only, West Coast over everything. Your favorite song didn’t make the list because we are vengeful and biased creatures.
Releases from POW Recordings artists are not included, but songs from Phiik and Lungs’s Carrot Season, Kent Loon’s Swamp Water, Gabe Nandez’s Object Permanence and False Profit, Chester Watson’s montisona, and any of Fatboi Sharif’s projects certainly deserve inclusion.
No owls were harming in the making of this list. – Ed
100. Joey Valence & Brae ft. Danny Brown – “PACKAPUNCH”
99. Chito Rana$ – “Dead Man Walking”
98. Cypress Moreno feat. ASM Bopster & 03 Greedo – “DRUMLINE”
97. Conrdfrmdaaves feat. OTM – “Big Body”
96. stoneda5th feat. Remble – “War”
95. Key Glock & Young Dolph – “Let’s Go (Remix)”
94. Denzel Curry feat. That Mexican OT – “BLACK FLAG FREESTYLE”
93. Zelooperz – “Euphorbia Milli”
92. VonOff1700 – “On Deck”
91. YN Jay feat. Babyfxce E, Rmc Mike, Bfb Da Packman, Louie Ray, KrispyLife Kidd, Ysr Gramz & GrindHard E – “Flint Stones”
90. Angry Blackmen – “Stanley Kubrick”
89. Talibando – “W.D.W.”
88. RiTchie ft. Niontay – “How?!?
87. EBK BCKDOE – “House Games”
86. Quin Nfn feat. 03 Greedo – “House Call”
85. HOODLUM – “New Cadillac”
84. Quadry – “I’m Wrong”
83. Saviii 3rd – “w r o n g i d e a”
82. Babyfxce E – “PTP”
81. ShrapKnel feat. Controller 7, Curly Castro & PremRock – “Deep Space 9 Millie Pulled A Pistol”
80. G Perico feat. Steelz – “Toxic Love”
79. Chicken P feat. 42 Dugg – “People’s Favorite (Remix)”
78. Nino Paid – “Pain & Possibilities”
77. LAZER DIM 700 – “Asian Rock”
76. Hurricane Wisdom – “Giannis”
75. Quando Rondo – “Life Goes On”
74. RXKNephew – “Walmart”
73. SieteGang Yabbie – “Gix in Da Mornin”
72. Cavalier & Child Actor – “Knight Of The East”
71. LaRussell, D-LO, P-Lo, Raymon Marco & MALACHI – “YANKIN!”
70. Seafood Sam – “Can’t Take the Hood to Heaven”
69. Papo2004 & Subjxct 5 – “Had 2 Ball”
68. Ghostface Killah feat. Method Man – “Pair Of Hammers”
67. Boldy James & Harry Fraud feat. Tee Grizzley – “Cecil Fielder”
66. LL COOL J feat. Nas – “Praise Him”
65. Mutant Academy feat. Quelle Chris – “Liberation”
64. Chris Crack – “Card Declined At The Abortion Clinic”
63. CEO Trayle – “4 And A Quarter”
62. Heems & Lapgan – “Accent”
61. MILC – “Rose Parade”
60. Glokk40Spaz – “My Last Breath”
59. J.U.S & Squadda B – “Don’t Do Drugs”
58. Stunnaman02 – “Eat A Salad”
57. Meet The Whoops – “Where I’m From”
56. Heembeezy – “On My Own”
55. AKAI SOLO – “FORTNITE”
54. Z Money feat. Valee – “What Happen”
53. Erika de Casier feat. They Hate Change – “ice”
52. Rich Homie Quan – “One of Quan”
51. OT7 Quanny – “Get That Money”
Whether he knows it or not, Big Sad 1900 is really the only L.A rapper coming close to filling the space once held by the late great Nipsey Hussle. Both artists come from Crip roots, both were known to lock in with single producers for full albums, and both were known for their relentless release schedule at one point in their careers. The similarities don’t stop there though. They both possess an ability to communicate the harsh realities of gang life with precision and compassion. Both artists experienced personal tragedy in their careers, pushing forward and turning their pain into art along the way.
“4 AM in Los Angeles” reminds me of cruising down the 10 Freeway in the early morning as the sun rises, skipping most traffic , windows down and a slight breeze clearing the weed smoke out the car. When Big Sad says “I’m the only rapper in the city out here buzzing” you can’t help but know it’s true, at least to him. His dedication to burrowing into his LA roots, yet making it sound accessible to any one in the country is impressive. I can see Big Sad 1900 entering a Larry June level of fame, becoming a rare example of an intensely LA artist being able to break out of their regional prison without compromising anything in the music. – Donny Morrison
Following the messy breakup of superstar California rap group SOB x RBE, Vallejo rapper DaBoii appeared set to launch a solo career and contend for the crown of the Bay Area’s top rapper. He turned in one of the best West Coast rap albums of 2022 in Can’t Tame Us, and followed up with a mixtape anchored by production from the legendary East Oakland duo the Mekanix – but his positive momentum was unexpectedly stymied by a gun charge that saw him spend much of 2023 and early 2024 incarcerated.
Since his release in April, a decision to go sober has given DaBoii the clarity to unleash a string of potent new singles. The most exhilarating of them is “Fresh Out The County,” his take on a “first day out” freestyle that is delivered over a thundering Bay Area bassline. Gone is the gleeful, upbeat shit-talker who buoyed the house party anthems of SOB x RBE; this DaBoii is grizzled and indignant, unsure of whom he can trust in a world full of snakes (“Everybody switching, everybody fake / I ain’t hear from a lot of n—-s when I caught that case,”).
DaBoii’s core strength remains the same though — punchlines that hit like cannonballs. They are blunt and straightforward, but his concussive delivery engineers them for maximum impact. He’s decked out in Palm Angels but the “baby do-ers” are raising hell for him; he’s got a legion of field chiropractors on hand ready to “stretch” any opposition; and no, he’d certainly never be caught dead in a Zara. When coupled with his new defiant, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude (“I rap now, they forgot that I was with this shit?”), the final result is a track that sees DaBoii – who’s now over 7 years deep in the game – deliver some of the hungriest raps of his career. – Dario McCarty
Suga Free remains the undisputed champion of slick talk, no matter the age, no matter the era. “Get Cha Mind Right,” off his Street Communion album with the very SEO-unfriendly Sporty features Mitchy Slick, the much-easier-to-google San Diego legend, and is objectively the 48th best song of the year. There’s a stunning, stuttering beat by Cricet, the San Diego lifer who’s been around long enough to have sung the hook on MC Hammer’s “Sultry Funk” way back in 1995, that feels tailor-made for strolling down an avenue in a Carolina Blue tuxedo (no shirt on underneath, natch). Okay also, while researching for this blurb I found out that MC Hammer is super into AI now and identifies with the “effective accelerationism,” or e/acc movement. Like, I get that Hammer’s from the Bay and probably got put on to this stuff through being booked for cushy tech industry gigs, but also, come on, man — Suga Free lives in the woods and spends all day fishing. That seems like a way better way to live your life. –Drew Millard
Like most heads, I have a bone-deep love for LA’s regional rap exports. The bounce and swing of Los Angeles hip-hop—the continuous linguistic tricks making our collective heads spin—has the scene going down, year after year, as the most fun you can have with the otherwise brittle English language. LA rap is like those old stories of painters who scribble on a napkin and sell it for millions because they’ve earned the right to appear effortless. If only we knew what went into every flick of the wrist.
CUZZOSX5 — an LA rap group comprised of Teaawhy, BB, Jasscole, Milly Mo, and Big I-N-D-O — stir and grind the rigid sounds of English into a silken putty. “POP OUT” is one of a handful of breakout singles from their March STAY SAFE tape that sent them on the interview circuit this year, culminating in an appearance on Kendrick’s own LA coronation show of the same name this summer.
“POP OUT” eludes all of the usual tropes we default to in music writing — it does not blitz, it is not ephemeral, and no one is “gliding on the track.” No white-knuckling through the beat. It’s all show, no force. In an era of LA rap where crews are being decimated by the middling music, the DA, or worse, these five women rock the mic with loose and playful punchlines that amount to a single message: We run shit. – Donna-Claire
Hearing this track for the first time while riding around with my former client — and Inkster’s resident supervillain — LOM Rudy, felt like the perfect way to experience this masterpiece. The subtle yet haunting piano, Loe Shimmy’s slurred, drug-laced flow, and the blunt, almost threatening lyrics made “For Me” the ideal soundtrack for driving behind 5% tints, hoping you make it home safe — and your enemies don’t.
Hailing from Pompano, Florida, Loe Shimmy finds himself on the list of Florida artists currently dominating rap music. With the release of Shimmy’s album, ZombieLand 2, in March, it’s like Loe Shimmy knew this was the one that would break him into the mainstream. Not a single bar goes to waste in the tight 1:44 runtime. I pushed for this record to rank higher on the list because it’s that good. Short, raw, and unforgettable — “For Me” hits every time. – William Reed
In an era of rap gentrifiers, Sexxy Red and Tay Keith will fuck up your property values. While your average rapper might add a pop punk vocal inflection to his hooks as stream bait, or worse, “pivot to Country,” Sexyy Red remains seemingly blissfully unaware of any musical trend that didn’t start on DatPiff or Worldstar circa 2009, and all of us that remember peak Brick Squad are extremely thankful for it. “Get It Sexxy” serves as Red’s biggest freak anthem yet, blowing past sex positivity into the kind of ratchet hedonism and excessive materialism that inevitably leads to pearl clutching among internet prognosticators, until they’re five drinks in and start singing along.
Soundtracking the madness is Tay Keith, whose 808 snares go up to 11 but who otherwise gets out the damn way, letting Sexxy brag about her bag, hair, Benz and a litany of other status symbols in a sing-songy flow that might bring a tattooed tear to Gucci Mane’s eye, had the spot not already been filled by an ice cream cone. Will it bring about world peace? Probably not, but in a year of failing institutions and warmed over Chingy hooks, maybe what the world truly needed was thundering bass and a drawl so thick it counts as a solid, with Sexxy Red counting off the ways she’s got it going on. – Son Raw
The Century Freeway is a lot of things, and most of them are bad. It’s been the conduit for soul-deflating airport traffic, the subject of federal lawsuits, and the wrecking ball to thousands of Black single-family homes. Who better to eminent domain the eminent domainers than Jay Worthy (our carefree sample king) and Dām Funk (the human bass line of LA County)?
I obviously wouldn’t begrudge anyone bumping that Kendrick heat check or the Chappell Roan WeHo cheerleader anthem. But “105 West” was far and away my song of this summer, rendering an otherwise joyless stretch of interstate highway into a velvet and neon victory lap for the whole West Coast. Worthy runs point on the opening verse, turning in yet another chapter of his prolific anti-square thesis. Quik sounds wholly rejuvenated, as he did all year — chuckling through his decelerated flow, still absolutely magnetic after three decades of late-night tour-guiding. Fellow Comptonite Channel Tres takes the back streets as Ty Dolla hits the three-wheel motion. I’m not really sure what A-Trak contributed, but every second of this song bops, so I’m thankful for whatever he did.
Look, I was once like you — in that I didn’t own a pair of black leather driving gloves. But “105 West” changed all that. It’s definitely a thumper for all seasons, but we should realistically put it on ice until maximum sunlight exposure. I’ll probably plead to Jeff for the right to write this up in next year’s list. – Steven Louis
Even in the streaming environment, when listen counts tend to heavily favor the first few songs on an album, the album closer remains an important position on a record. There are a few different ways that rappers tend to approach this assignment; valedictory tracks summing up the album’s themes, lighthearted vibey tracks with jokes and shoutouts, or laments in remembrance of people who are no longer with us. Freddie Gibbs chose to close his back-to basics album You Only Live 1nce with “On The Set” an idiosyncratic take on the latter, a “dead homies” track that sees him paying tribute to fallen rap peers and beginning the complicated process of reckoning with Diddy’s role in hip-hop culture as he spends the holidays behind bars.
In between mentions of his burgeoning acting career, Gibbs pays tribute to the fallen Rich Homie Quan, Young Dolph, Nipsey Hussle – his own personal “In Memoriam” segment for the kinds of acts who are rarely remembered at award shows. However, his thoughts on Diddy are the most intriguing part of the song. At first, he seems almost rueful that “they got” the controversial producer, that even someone with the level of fame, wealth, and power that Diddy amassed leading Bad Boy can be prosecuted. Then he describes some of the awful things that Diddy is accused of doing, not making judgements necessarily, just describing the void that is left at the top of the culture now that this important chess piece has been removed from the board. Gibbs ponders Diddy’s situation having been exonerated for his own crimes, closing this record on an understandably down beat. – Nate Leblanc
There was a loud thump against the window. Startled, I opened the front door and saw it lying in the lavender bushes below the windowsill: a dove, shook, but still alive. I picked it up and I was surprised by how light it felt. Doves are plump birds, but they don’t register as such once you hold them in your hands and suddenly feel the lightness of their feathers and how brittle their bones are.
“Doves”, the nine minute drumless coda to Armand Hammer’s We Buy Diabetic Test Strips finds the duo painting with murky grays, distorted guitars, and grainy textures to create an ode to life by focusing on its end. It’s a movement in three parts, starting with Benjamin Booker (who produced the song along with Kenny Segal) singing of love, with a voice that sounds both warm and thin, as if expressing contentment after a life well lived. billy woods then raps about dealing with a loved one slipping away, lacking the will to say goodbye, and his inability to focus on his own life after having done so. And then there’s ELUCID’s gripping finale, in which the protagonist finds out his time has come. While the atmosphere of the music grows increasingly darker, he mimics a child noticing his weird posture and unresponsiveness: “Daddy, you’re so silly.” It’s the sonic equivalent of Vito Corleone slumping in his seat.
We tend to take love and peace for granted until we have to become more involved and recognize how fragile they actually are. I gently put the dove that hit my window in a shoebox which was picked up by a veterinarian soon after. Whether it made it through another day I do not know. – Jaap van der Doelen
Let’s take a step back and pretend this is just a rap single. Plenty has been written about the fact that it’s not.
When The Thief next to Jesus dropped, it first felt easy to decode from track one: a gospel-themed Ka album in which he comments on the state of “dummy rap” from a plateau of righteousness. But by the time you reached “Such Devotion” — the rare video single hidden in the final third of an album — and you remembered that nothing in Ka‘s life and work has ever been non-complex, non-conflicted.
Throughout the record, Ka tackles Christianity, the fragility of faith, the sociopolitical function of Church (white and Black), its potential and hypocrisies from every angle. With “Such Devotion” he‘s bringing it all back home. It’s a metaphor not only for determination and believing in yourself despite the cruelty of one’s past, but also a testimony to surrendering to the creative act.
“Such Devotion,” like the rest of the album, is self-produced. Under the song’s YouTube video you can find Montreal-beatmaker Nicholas Craven going, “bro this might be the greatest Ka beat of all time.” He has a point. A lot of Ka‘s beats are low key going hard, and this one in particular, just minus the loud drums and overproduction. “Such Devotion” is the skeleton of a banger. He treats it as such by spiking up the intensity of his voice every time the chorus comes around.
As for our initial premise: of course, it doesn’t work. This album will never not be examined, felt, celebrated outside of the devastating context of Ka’s passing. Instead, this song specifically remains a stark reminder that indeed “we’ve never seen such devotion” from any MC of Ka’s generation. In or outside the booth. – Julian Brimmers
2024 was a difficult year for Rio Da Yung OG fans, but “Olympic Shit Talkin” provided a glimmer of hope. BFB da Packman teased the song with a snippet on a Facebook livestream and dropped the news that Rio was coming home from prison in December. The fanfare around this news was compounded by the song itself, which was somehow the first collaboration between two of the most influential rappers from Flint, Michigan.
Rio and BFB complement each other well, using rap to cope with everyday horrors under the guise of “shit talking,” a favorite phrase of Rio’s which has since become synonymous with the scene; it seems rappers from this endlessly fucked city know better than anyone else that there’s a fine line between tragedy and comedy. The brashness of Rio’s voice, full of absurd imagery and unlikely personification (“I’m soft-spoken, but this Glock I got make hella noise”), is a yin to BFB’s yang, whose lyrics are steeped in joyous, dystopian realism. BFB delivers his lines with more levity than Rio; he might not have the same ability to warp the English language to suit his vision, but lines like “Your baby daddy’s broke, I can tell ‘cause his kitchen’s small / If I was ’round Mike Vick, I would’ve casually took the fall” are the words of a man who uses humor to mask pain. The video is intriguing in its own right. BFB’s use of physical comedy is on display – at least 20% of the video his bare belly is fully visible – and the choice to use a seemingly A.I. version of Rio, while a bit uncomfortable, underscores the void felt by his absence.
Flint’s hip-hop reflects the culture we live in; sometimes, things are so bad, all you can do is laugh. Writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai once said, “Get it into your thick head that jokes are just like life. Things that begin badly, end badly.” Rio and BFB capably demonstrate that the only worthy companion for the horrifying indifference of the universe is black comedy— an honest exposition of life’s macabre truths. – Jameson Draper
You would be hard pressed to find two rappers with more pride for their pedigree than YL and Starker. They were raised on Rawkus and Ruff Ryders and formed RRR Music Group back in 2010 after bonding over their mutual interests in rap, graffiti and fashion native to their birthplace. Starker is one of the foremost collectors of vintage Polo Ralph Lauren on the planet, and within the same home as his coveted walk-in closet, he and YL have created over a dozen projects, including their latest Diamond Collection. The album is named after the highly-desirable game-worn Major League Baseball apparel of the same name. After a decade and a half in the game, YL and Starker are unafraid to show off their hard-earned diamond dirt stains.
On “Boyz 2 Men,” the duo roll out raspy bars over a sample of “Intimate Friends” by Temptations vocalist Eddie Kendricks chopped up by producer Look!Damian. They stitch bravado bars like “Shorty’s giving me head like she was crip walkin’” alongside praise for bygone cult spots, sneaker stores, and homegrown brands over a beat that could fit seamlessly on a Guru Jazzmatazz record.
Earlier this year, the track melted out of the speakers at the invite-only release party for Diamond Collection in fashion brand Aimé Leon Dore’s private sound room, while rap luminaries like Freddie Gibbs, Mach-Hommy, and Wiki clinked cocktails with rising East Coast MCs like Papo2oo4 and members of the New York City graffiti crew LNE. “Boyz 2 Men” is a toast to YL and Starker’s coming of age within a proud lineage of New York underground rap. – Tracy Kawalik
When Drakeo shook the LA underground with I am Mr. Mosely in 2016, Playerrways was in grade school. Stinc Team influence soon seeped through the halls of Fremont High, where Playerrways and his friends started writing to emulate their favorite rapper who grew up just fifteen minutes away. By the time Playerrways graduated in 2022, he had Ralfy the Plug inviting him to studio sessions to refine his craft and to sign with the label he grew up idolizing. The Angeleno has since become a mainstay on the Stinc Team roster, dropping two solo projects this year and linking up with fellow LA native GMoneyDT to release GrimeyLocWays.
No track on the project embodies the Stinc Team quite like “20 Ball,” the Chicano posse cut featuring the grimey style of Paramount rapper Swifty Blue. Playerrways steps out in purple denim and some Ferragamo accessories over an LA-style nervous beat from Loera flexing the $20K fit while keeping it nonchalant with his serpentine cadence. He has a knack for fitting an absurd amount of syllables in a single bar, rolling through Drakeo slanguage like it’s his native tongue while racking up the bill at Neiman Marcus. Swifty Blue comes through tossing ones at the strip club while warning how money makes everyone change up. GMoneyDT keeps the energy up to close it out, counting up his $100s to get some new diamonds after spending a few on his next girl. Three years after Drakeo’s death, the new generation of the Stinc Team is bent on keeping the truth alive. – Kevin Crandall
In the 12 months since being released from a nine-year prison stint, the 27-year-old, Baldwin Park-born Lefty Gunplay has lived up to his self-proclaimed status as rap’s Rookie of the Year. Yes, there’s his feature on Kendrick Lamar’s “TV Off” that took his streaming numbers to new heights, but he’s been regional royalty basically from the moment he walked free and dropped his first few singles. He’s a quintessential L.A. personality, fusing influences from West Coast artists he listened to growing up as well as Drakeo the Ruler and his fellow Mexican rappers from the San Gabriel Valley. Rapping over a key-laden beat that would be pensive if it weren’t so damn groovy, “Walk Em Down” is at once Lefty’s triumph and his tribute to the hood that made him. A natural people’s champion, it’s a reminder that his rise also belongs to his community.
Beneath the street machismo, there’s a sincerity and even a tinge of melancholy to Lefty’s music. “I think there would be no Lefty Gunplay if there wasn’t all the heartbreak and the prison time,” he said this year. Historically, few people make it out of Baldwin Park, a predominantly Latino city in the SGV where the clutches of the carceral state can feel like an inevitability to its young and disaffected. Lefty’s success has resonated with locals from the area as well as Latino fans from beyond, who litter his YouTube comments with support. (“I grew up in BP. Worked with you in Irwindale man you dont understand how happy i am for you and putting baldwin park on your shoulders lefty.”) From his prolific post-prison output – four full-length projects, a record deal with an independent label, sold-out shows across the country and even a movie with Jon Bernthal and Jenna Ortega in the works – one gets the sense that Lefty’s done wasting time. He’s been up, he’s been down and he isn’t going to let his moment pass. Here’s looking forward to the sophomore season. – Kevin Yeung
Babyface Ray and Veeze have an idiosyncratic chemistry. You could try to graft some referential duo onto the Detroit rappers—my worst impulses lead me to a strained comparison to Deleuze and Guattari—but that wouldn’t capture how their connection is linked to their artistic medium. They’re not co-authors. Two rappers can’t sound exactly alike and make a compelling pair. There should still be tension in their synthesis, the way Rio Da Yung OG combined his intrusive-thought-laden flows with RMC Mike’s grizzled exclamations in their run a few years back. Ray and Veeze operate like light: one appears as particles while the other moves in waves, but the roles aren’t static. Ray can coast in the manner usually associated with his mumbly counterpart and Veeze can give verses bumpier than his typical liquid flow. Their bond is apparent in their live performance of “Gallery Dept” at a Pistons game in 2022. Nothing could detract from the unimpeachable charisma: not the out-of-tune violin, the masked dancers, nor a nonverbal reminder from Ray to Veeze to edit out the lyrics that would incur FCC fines.
This year’s “Wavy Navy University” feels like a celebration between two teammates after running up the score. Veeze makes sure to remind us they’re not athletes, even though they ball out like they just got signed and Ray raps about driving with the fury of Mario Andretti. “Wavy Navy University” has the same qualities as a sports highlight. It’s a combination of instinct, precision and improvisation that happens in a flash, leaving us to marvel at the replay. – Miguelito
A$AP Rocky has had a hard time transforming his life of luxury into compelling music lately. In the six years since TESTING – four years if you’re a “Babushka Boi” believer, or maybe even two years if you thought that “D.M.B” was cute — A$AP Rocky’s legacy has overshadowed his music. He couldn’t find solid footing in the New York Drill scene with “RIOT (Rowdy Pipe’n);” he was replaced as a fashion ambassador by Tyler, the Creator on the West Coast and Pop Smoke on the East Coast; even his pretty boy charm has been refigured by Cash Cobain’s new wave of sexy drill.
Surprisingly enough, his latest single “HIGHJACK” works. A$AP Rocky smears his brand of psychedelia over luxe-folk croons from LA singer/songwriter Jessica Pratt. Mr. Fenty raps about buying out the whole floor of a boutique, and the music feels elegant to match his high fashion acumen: Pratt harnesses the whispers of a hallucinogenic heroine to tell mystical stories of traveling through the unknown. Getting together for a virtual studio session was as simple as one of Rocky’s producers reaching out to one of Pratt’s. “HIGHJACK” works because it makes an unexpected collaboration sound just as organic as its origins. – Yousef Srour
There’s a moment near the end of “Gold Crossbow” that feels like Roc Marciano’s thesis statement for this stage of his career: “Shit isn’t new, we need a reboot/They took what we do and repeat the loop/It’s gettin’ easier to sleep through.” Marci’s solo career is a long, unparalleled run of innovative and influential street rap that laid the groundwork for the fertile underground we have today. Dead-eyed hustler tales recast as brown acid psychedelia? A return to trudging, grey skies boom bap? Drumless beats? Thank Marci — he has a legitimate claim to the title of Greatest Of All Time. Even with outsized influence and a nearly unimpeachable discography, he keeps showing up at regular intervals with another piece of work that proves no one can do it better.
What’s most interesting about “Gold Crossbow” is how it shouldn’t work. There’s no bassline to speak of, and the rudimentary piano sample that sits at the front of the mix is glassy and uncanny, almost chintzy. The drums feel too perfectly quantized to be organic, sounding as though someone in the next room hit the demo loop on an old Casio keyboard. But when you submit to the song’s hypnotic hold, you can catch the gravity of Marci’s threats. “Motherfuckers got the gall to call my phone/Talkin’ ’bout the bullet holes in your daughter room/That’s the warning when you ignore the rules” is especially chilling. He’s a menacing auteur, a deft world builder who continuously offers fresh blueprints for us to study. – Dash Lewis
Some rappers reek of effort, and that’s not a bad thing. Michigan guys like Bfb da Packman, for instance, sound like they’re trying to spit every last bar in their lungs before management turns the lights off. The biggest thing that jumps out about south LA rapper HBK Jachi is his sense of ease. Despite how hyper-efficient Jachi is on “It Ain’t Nun”—which clocks in at 1:41 but wraps up its vocal component by 1:05—he never seems to break a sweat. “It ain’t nun to a real n***a that’s just simple” is the chorus and, one presumes, his credo. That’s not to say his work ethic is lacking: Jachi has released six mixtapes since he dropped “Shady Freestyle,” his biggest song to date, in 2021, and he has appeared on tracks by Ralfy the Plug and R3 Da Chillman. Good company to keep.
You can tell how much work Jachi puts into his craft by tracing the line from “Shady Freestyle” to “It Ain’t Nun” three years later: his flow is tighter, slipping in and out of bars while staying squarely in the pocket. You can also hear the influence of the ‘90s R&B and hip-hop he grew up listening to with his mom in the song’s plinky 808-laden beat and laid-back tunefulness. HBK Jachi’s Twitter handle is “i rap on weekends.” Imagine what he could do with a 40-hour work week. – Jordan Ryan Pedersen
If you were hard-pressed to introduce a newcomer to MIKE’s discography, his 2024 collaboration with Brooklyn producer Tony Seltzer isn’t a representative sample. Whether it’s on his own production or rapping over beats from the Alchemist, the New York rapper has largely shrouded himself in the morose on his own projects, allowing his personal philosophies on fate and grief to naturally oscillate between hopeful and sullen.
Pinball arrives as an exercise in lyrical calisthenics. Seltzer’s bounding trap production acts like a jungle gym for MIKE, coaxing him further out of his shell. “On God” bottles up the excitement of meeting your friends at the corner of the playground to make up freestyles, where all the pressures of the outside world have melted away for just a moment. Frequent collaborator Earl Sweatshirt glides about feeling like Lil Uzi Vert on the hook and Tony Shhnow interjects to speak on his trust issues without any fear of the vibe souring. MIKE lets boasts and kernels of truth ramble into each other, espousing about milly rocking when he sees the check hit his account and using the weed to forget about his pain for a second. For an otherwise un-flashy artist, “On God” is the purest distillation of a heat check. – Matthew Ritchie
ZAYALLCAPS is always repping his three homes: Sacramento, LA, and the internet. The rapper grew up in suburban Sacramento, relying on online spheres as a creative outlet and way to access cultural hubs before moving down to LA and starting the indie rap boutique and management company autotuneKaraoke with some friends. Now, he’s hosting his mixtapes through the company, paying homage to both his NorCal roots and LA residency while flexing his prodigious autotune bag and knowledge of internet music lore throughout.
iMessage Platinum: Hosted by autotuneKaraoke is the tape that made it out the group chat folders after getting the homie-equivalent of an RIAA certification in iMessage. The whole project seems like a basket of Easter eggs, with references ranging from Björk to Trap-a-holic mixtape tags littering every track. Standout “boof” starts with a flipped Young California (REAL 92.3) radio show tag before Zay croons an autotuned dance hook so nice it’s got people hitting the dougie in his Twitter mentions. The single verse has that NorCal swag feel, with Zay likening himself to a swordfish while repping Sacramento-based Pizza Guys. With a runtime of 1:23, “boof” emits a quickhitter high before moving on, refusing to overstay its welcome. Some songs are simply made for a quick 7-Eleven run to snag a slurpee and dance in the back-up cam: just ask ZAYALLCAPS. – Kevin Crandall
MAVI’s lyrics are composed in meandering lines, each bleeding into the next, that would almost feel like stream-of-consciousness rap if it wasn’t also offered in such resplendent detail. The twists and turns in his writing hold space for multiple, often conflicting, thoughts, but he’s so emotionally honest that it can be therapeutic just to listen as he navigates his feelings and his fuck-ups, contradictions and all. Speaking to a former lover on “the giver,” MAVI is at once wanting his girl back, lashing out at her and knowing he’s the one who’s really at fault. He wants her to be happy, but not with another guy, and part of him wishes that other guy were dead – oops, he meant to strike that line, but it just came out.
Gone are the scratchy lo-fi samples from some of MAVI’s earlier work, replaced by producer Beach Noise’s earnest piano harmony that suggests some sense of uplift or found peace by the end. Not quite so. “Baby, make it make sense,” he pleads as his ex ends with the other guy in the song’s video. Clean breaks in life are rare. If there’s any solace at all here, it’s that MAVI doesn’t deny this for the sake of easy art or a neat conclusion. – Kevin Yeung
Four albums into a prolific 2024, Ralfy the Plug saved the best for last with GRANDMASTER RALFY. The project’s third track, “EL PRESIDENTE” is both its spiritual center and perfect karaoke song. Take the effortlessly hysterical wisdom Ralfy dispenses: “You shouldn’t be in the club unless your rent got paid.” Or the way he uses the beat to dictate his flow, weaving in and around the rhythm like a midfielder.
The beat is typical Stinc Team fare (Long Live the Ruler), but the string synth patches allude to something damn near Victorian. Ralfy doesn’t make peasant music. But the patience Ralfy possesses is what elevates the song to something singular. Each word on “EL PRESIDENTE” is placed like a chess piece, every breath studiously deployed or saved as if there might not be any more. Just five seconds in, the various components of the beat and Ralfy’s voice both cease at once, leaving complete silence. It sounds like a heart skipping a beat; both small and all-consuming. It’s jarring, but it sounds like Ralfy might finally be finding some peace. – Will Schube
Rome Streetz and Daringer are tinkerers, better now than five years ago; five years from now, they’ll be better than this. “Starbvxkz” is a classical composition, one that couldn’t have happened without all that came before. Daringer has graduated from the two-bar loops of Griselda’s landfall while retaining their flinty immediacy, diversifying his percussion with a fusillade of bass and snares. The bells and swarming vocal bites are textured in three dimensions, periodic key shifts providing subtle cues for a receptive collaborator.
Streetz punches in and out, rapping through pockets instead of around them; when Daringer pulls the beat, the bars surge forward with gravitational pull. The hook arrives so casually, it’s less a chorus than a link of fluid movements. It is close but never claustrophobic, both artists able to stretch their limbs in tight spaces. In hindsight, this may prove the divergence in Griselda’s trajectory: where their comrades built up and out, Streetz and Daringer have tunneled deeper and deeper. – Pete Tosiello
When ScHoolboy Q raps, “If I die right now, I’m fine”, you might take this as some kind of fatalistic, Makavelian foreboding. And perhaps there is a shadow of it in there. We are listening to an anti-snitching anthem, after all. But rather than threaten those that might snitch, Q just strings words together with an exuberant, almost reckless joy.
Examine that drop after 40 seconds. A lesser rapper would’ve ridden out the majority of the song to that menacing beat, content to watch the mosh pit rage for as long as it doesn’t tire. But Q actually switches back to the breezy flute melody after a mere minute of it, and then sticks with it for the rest of the song. It’s a masterclass in “less is more” restraint. – Jaap van der Doelen
“Sticky,” reminds me of this part in the Cherry Bomb documentary when Lil Wayne calls Tyler a perfectionist because he knows exactly what he wants from artists. The execution of “Smuckers”- the song Tyler made with Wayne- feels like “Sticky,” with its surprise features from Sexyy Red, GloRilla, and Weezy.
An encyclopedic ball knower, the Hawthorne California native understood bringing together artists from St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans for an HBCU stomp and shake would make for a perfect fit. The whistling and shouts in the beginning are an orchestra prepping for the chaos. The brass section warms up, “N***a, give a fuck ‘bout pronouns, I’m that n***a and that bitch” Tyler boasts, making a statement about his sexuality. “It’s getting sticky” is a great way to describe mounting tension before a fight. The lunchroom cipher transforms, sounding like a growing crowd pounding on tables and lockers as more competitors jump in.
“Sticky” has all of Tyler’s calling cards: amped vocals, the beat switches (this time it’s Young Buck’s “Stomp”), and his signature, Pharrell-esque chords to get lost in. The song had a viral moment in college football as a fight song, shared by Tyler on X, and confirmed he arranged it this way for marching bands like Jackson State’s Sonic Boom of the South to do their renditions. When Tyler’s having fun, so are the rest of us – Eric Diep
LA street rap in 2024 was consumed by the minimalist pairing of producer F Beat and X4, the self proclaimed Famous Crip with the stature of Lil Uzi Vert and the face tattoos of Crip Mac. Recently released from jail, X4 began his slow takeover of the region in late 2023, but it didn’t really crystallize until this year with “Trophy Flow.” Not since the early days of Shoreline Mafia and Drakeo the Ruler has LA street rap sounded so effortless and fun. Every line on “Trophy Flow” has been relentlessly stuck in my head at some point this year, whether it’s “I threw up and recovered, on instagram on some drunk shit,” or, “Better have insurance beefing with me, Geico.”
I joked most of this year that I wished all music sounded like X4. There isn’t an occasion an F Beat production doesn’t fit well into. Like Fenix Flexin before him, X4 is able to make the most out of F Beat’s simple drums by slipping into pockets other rappers wouldn’t find. X4 has never once appeared excited or animated enough to rap above a soft mumble. “Trophy Flow,” however, is the closest we get, and if he and F Beat can lock into this sound for an entire album, it might be the best LA street debut since Drakeo’s Cold Devil. – Donny Morrison
Following last November’s mature, reflective Quaranta, Danny Brown spent 2024 ushering two modern Detroit classics into the world: J.U.S.’s 3rd Shift and Bruiser Wolf’s My Story Got Stories. The late-career success of the latter is emblematic of everything Danny could have hoped to achieve when he established Bruiser Brigade over a decade ago. The label has been a beacon for hard-working, eccentric Detroit-grown artists who, like Danny, don’t fit neatly into any traditional categorization. Bruiser Wolf is a character based on no exact archetype: a fedora-wearing middle aged family man whose wise yet nostalgic tales of his hustling past will have you crumpled over with laughter at one line and stunned by the underlying pain in the next. He delivers it all in a falsetto that shows no allegiance to conventional musical logic.
Over a looped guitar strum on album standout “Crack Cocaine,” with nary a kick drum in earshot, Bruiser Wolf contorts his voice, bouncing from conversational delivery to dramatic croon. The beat has ample breathing room throughout the hook—“I risked my life… selling nicks and dimes… of that crack… cocaiiiine. I sold crack cocaine!”—like each line is a quick burst of a Selmer horn. Crack drops in with “Uh… That’s my name though,” rips through a verse and dissolves. He’s perfectly paired here, one of the few artists left who shares Wolf’s same strange humor, unique style, and integrity. – Will Hagle
Banditdamack is from Hemet, California – a place “where they don’t make it from” and that most readers will never make it to. At 20, he’s already served two jail stints, and he’s described his commitment to rap as a way to avoid going back (“it’s this or nothing low key”). On “Free the Messmakers”, the single that proves he is one of the best new voices out the West, he’s bogged down by endless thoughts “about that shooting that October night”, but he’s also going to perpetuate violence if he catches you mouthing off about his partner. He covers all of this weight from his surroundings in a sub-two minute single that defies gravity at a cruise in mid-air.
The rapper born Bryce King makes sense of his artistic and personal contradictions more succinctly than many of his predecessors: “I love my n*ggas right or wrong, because right or wrong we all we got.” It’s a cleareyed worldview, and the type of direct and lived-in writing that makes Bandit such a natural honors student of the broader SoCal school he’s operating out of, alongside Remble, Ralfy the Plug, and OHGEESY. Even the song title, “Free the Messmakers”, shows more colorful and invention than most rappers’ catalogs. Economy and empathy are an unstoppable combination when wielded by a voice with as much to say. – Pranav Trewn
It was an odd year for Future, simultaneously on the margins and at the center of culture, releasing two instant classics which semi-inadvertently loosened a great, world devouring evil that overshadowed all of them. As such, the “patron saint of misogyny,” the generation’s preeminent toxic king, somehow was also the safest mainstream entity of 2024? While the titans of industry made conflagrations of their public goodwill, Future dropped THREE No. 1 albums. But Mixtape Pluto isn’t his two pop blockbusters with Metro Boomin. It’s a sparse, featureless 17 tracks of no-nonsense trip-trap. And “LIL DEMON” is a particularly Future-ass Future song, with muddied 808s and a percussive, unflappable base flow. Noses are wiped, bales are imported, fiends fund yachts, and the ever-expanding cadre of b-words all have princess cuts.
Southside’s beatwork is both minimal and spacious. “LIL DEMON” would’ve sounded comfortable on the Monster / Radical / 56 Nights triptych. In a music landscape where surprises usually connote bad news and expiration dates are hyper-accelerated, Future won his year by being precisely who he’s always been. – Steven Louis
To think it was almost a snippet. After a few years indulging in therapy raps and a summer spent stuffing Drake in a locker, “Squabble Up” is proof that Kendrick can still have fun. Yes, the influence of the late great Drakeo The Ruler will continue to spark debate, but while Mr. Get Off definitely owes Mr. Mosely credit for that flow, “Squabble Up”’s hyper animated vocal inflections and syncretized G-Funk bounce could only have come from Dot.
Mashing up nervous music, the ghost of Hyphy, house party chants, acid house, and a Debbie Deb record direct out of Uncle Jamm’s crate, “Squabble Up” is the sound of a man intimately familiar with the bones of West Coast hip-hop, distilling its essence to forty proof. Full of veiled threats and coded boasts, the record sees Kendrick simultaneously prickly and unbothered, with foes and friends alike compared to sitting ducks while the listener gets hit with hook after hook after hook.
Above all, it highlights that while the big ideas and shrewd political positioning may have turned Kendrick into the voice of a generation, he’s at his musical best when he gets to nerd out on a granular level, obsessively stuffing his tracks with ideas while using his budget to crank blockbusters. I’m just left with one question: what the hell did Jack Antonoff contribute? – Son Raw
E L U C I D’s recent solo work has a heavy rock influence that runs perpendicular to the sound of his duo Armand Hammer. On his latest album REVELATOR, the New York rapper/producer’s authoritative delivery is spiked with punk super-serum provided by bassist Luke Stewart of Irreversible Entanglements and live drums by producer Jon Nellen. The clatter was inspired by the industrial sounds of South Jamaica, Queens, bordered by the LIRR and JFK.
“The World Is Dog” is the opening salvo, hitting with the force of jet wheels on tarmac. The dance-punk-rap hybrid reminds me of “Dancing Choose,” from TV on the Radio’s Great Recession masterpiece Dear Science. Whereas fellow Brooklynite Tunde Adebimpe overexplains his portrait of an “angry young mannequin-American,” ELUCID embodies a 21st century schizoid man in a collage of images, each pared down to minimal syllables like a haiku. He is “voided, razor walking, bridge to nowhere fast,” his life in the balance under an uncaring, monochrome sky straight out of a Fritz Lang film. The song doesn’t end so much as it wears itself out. ELUCID has always been an expressive performer, and he has found a new freedom in stomping over these higher tempo tracks. Things are grim, sure, but listen close and you can hear the grin of an experienced artist invigorated by the possibilities they have yet to uncover within. – Jack Riedy
Maxo Kream has been waiting, two weeks, to be exact. In that time, he admits he could’ve hooked up with ten different women. But his impatience takes a tender (or perhaps Maxo’s version of romantic) turn as he asks boldly, “Quit playin’ with that pussy / When I’ma get my chance to fuck?” In “Bang the Bus,” the Houston rapper’s double-time flow glides effortlessly over evilgiane’s beat, a celestial blend of jittery hi-hats and ethereal vocal samples. The production feels weightless, as if your bones have turned to foam. Maxo, typically grounded in gritty storytelling and no-nonsense delivery on collaborations with East Coast artists like Benny The Butcher, takes a different approach here.
Teaming up with the Brooklyn producer, he ventures into a dreamlike realm. Ever the innovator, evilgiane continues his streak of sample drill hits. His chops are dynamic yet steeped in a dreamy nostalgia, creating the perfect backdrop for Maxo’s deadpan delivery. While his voice still carries the weight of the violence and trauma chronicled throughout his discography and on Personification—the album this track calls home—, Maxo loosens up here, and the result is infectious. “Doja pack, stash it in her pussy, call it Doja Cat,” he raps, clearly relishing the moment. “Bang the Bus” is raunchy, imaginative, and unapologetically fun, built on the undeniable chemistry between Maxo and evilgiane: chaos and revelry in perfect balance. After all, the song’s premise is as simple as it is outrageous: watch porn in the van, and if the vibe is right, make your own movie. – Santiago Cembrano
In 2023, Doechii performed on Coachella’s mainstage, an achievement that for most would mark a meaningful cultural “arrival”. Except I walked away from the Tampa breakout’s set convinced that after stockpiling a gunpowder magazine worth of hype with infectious and indisputable singles like “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” and “Persuasive”, maybe she didn’t actually have the spark. It was a confused set, with mismatched energy between an incessantly yapping DJ, a garrish early aughts award show outfit, and her evident but unrefined technical talent. It was as though TDE was unsure whether to position her as a hard-knocking traditionalist or a club R&B ingénue, so she split the difference while throwing in some backup dancers to cover their bases. I worried her talent would go perpetually unrealized because of middling creative decisions, like we saw with JID or her labelmate Ab-Soul.
Then in 2024, Doechii confirmed that everything prior was a prelude to the real breakthrough. She dropped this year’s best Tiny Desk and late night performance, and arguably its most inventive and playful rap album. She outshone the other features on Tyler’s guest-laden Chromakopia and if the rumors are true and she opens the Kendrick/SZA tour next year, she’ll carry an equal weight on the bill and justify the obscene ticket prices. The moment her remarkable run hit its stride was “NISSAN ALTIMA,” an athletic mission statement for her ready-to-conquer-the-world spirit. Everything about the two-minute sprint speaks to a self-possessed style that is bisexual, bicoastal, and full of bite. She dubs herself the “new hip-hop Madonna” and “the trap Grace Jones,” but with her polymath talents and diamond-sharp visual sensibilities, she’s gunning to be the true heir to Missy Elliott. I have no doubt she will only be crushing mainstages for the rest of her career. – Pranav Trewn
On “Bounce Out,” Drexthajoint spits like he’s presiding over a Santa Ana street war. Before 2024, the 18-year old Orange County native hadn’t so much as touched a mic. A year later, he has emerged as a promising voice in a new wave of Gen-Z So-Cal rappers. His breakout run has highlighted his knack for turning life’s chaos into street scriptures wherein he chronicles the relentless hustle needed to survive.
“Bounce Out” is distinguished by its visceral simplicity. Built around a stark piano loop, the beat feels like a skeleton frame, leaving Drex’s rhymes to carry the weight. There’s no flash, just the raw energy of a young kid putting his soul on wax. It’s rap stripped to its barest elements – brash, unrelenting, and completely captivating. The video encapsulates the song’s energy: a DIY snapshot of Drex and his crew, flashing hardware and skipping pretense, embodying the essence of guerilla artistry.
“Bitch, I’m a south side jacker, in the field, I ain’t no rapper/Fuck I look like brining peace, lil n****, I ain’t no pastor.” It’s the kind of line that stands out as a rare warning, because more often than not, Drex skips the warning all together. He’s the kind of guy who’ll run up on you and snatch your girl just because he feels like it. “Bounce Out” is less a song and more a manifesto, a no-nonsense reminder that Drexthajoint isn’t playing by anyone else’s rules but his own. – Diego Tapia
“Next year, I’ll for sure be on the Forbes list,” Drakeo the Ruler raps in the opening bars of “No Hard Feelings”, an essential song from his posthumous album The Undisputed Truth. It’s a hard listen as a Stinc Team fan; January will mark three years since his tragic assassination, and February will mark four years since Ketchy the Great was run over on Signal Highway.
Drakeo never got to see his wish through, and at this point, we’re years — both literally and culturally — from when he spoke that line. But it’s impossible to ignore his influence on today’s rap scene. The biggest album of the year, Kendrick Lamar’s GNX, is so clearly influenced by Drakeo — on the album’s best songs, Kendrick raps with the exact paranoiac cadence that Drakeo popularized (Kendrick’s never directly attributed his stylistic evolution to Drakeo the Ruler, but as always, We Know the Truth.) We may never see Drakeo on the Forbes list, but his unending influence on the biggest stage of rap isn’t a bad consolation. Long Live the Ruler, Long Live the Great. – Jameson Draper
BigXthaPlug is used to being the biggest person in the field. Before he broke into mainstream rap consciousness with 2023’s Amar, he was breaking into the second level of defenses as a 6’ 2” 315lb offensive lineman for Ferris High School’s football team, located about twenty miles south of Dallas. The potential shown in his 2016 senior year highlights wouldn’t be realized in college after he was expelled for selling weed from his dorm, a punishment that seems draconian in light of the NFL’s now lax policy toward the substance. Had history developed differently and BigX did have a prosperous football career, we might not have been privy to his unmistakable interpretation of Southern trap. “The Largest” is a microcosm of what makes him great, though he might prefer to use ‘macro’.’ BigX usually employs a wordy flow that can make it seem like his verses are trying to catch up to what his brain’s already effortlessly hammered out. Voice is an element of rap that is largely left up to chance.
BigXthaPlug smothers beats the same way he would pancake linebackers. And that’s a hard task with the turgid production he’s so fond of. “The Largest” was co-produced by Bandplay and frequent BigX collaborator Tony Coles and they give him regal horns and drums that seem to grow each time they pop in. BigX has crafted his image around being BIG, but it doesn’t feel like a gimmick. Whether he’s telling you he won’t buy a Corvette because he couldn’t fit in it or having the audacity to call a song “The Largest,” it’s a genuine reflection of the space he occupies in contemporary Southern rap. – Miguelito
I’ve always admired Rio Da Yung OG’s maturity and perspective surrounding his own incarceration. There was never any groveling or embarrassing proclamations of innocence. He simply took his sentence on the chin: 60 months in federal prison for possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug conspiracy. Songs he released before going to prison, like “Last Call” and “Last Day Out,” are sobering reminders of the immense odds Rio faced in the coming years, and his deft ability to navigate it all.
“RIO FREE” is more than just a first day out bop. It’s a four-year old promise coming true in front of our eyes. Rio’s music has always felt so vital and immediate because he doesn’t write down his lyrics. He just gets as fucked up as possible, hits the booth and freestyles whatever is on his mind, whatever can get a reaction from the room. With Rio, this ends up sounding like “$50K in all blues, I can’t fold it up, this .50 Cal is big as fuck, bro help me hold it up,” or “blue tips in the FN, they got a pedicure.” I wondered how this process would be impacted by four years in prison?
Apparently recorded within hours of his release, “RIO FREE” proves that Rio’s trademark observational humor, and his ability to convey what’s directly in front of him with gallows humor, has only gotten sharper. “I went to jail with tight clothes, now it’s big clothes, I had a 40-year-old man calling me big bro,” he says.
To me, Rio is the Tarantino of rap. He’s heavily referential, full of dark comedy and unapologetic pessimism. His songs walk a tightrope between profound and macabre. Details like how he hid his contraband prison phone in his lotion and drank more than 100 pints in jail are why he’s the best at what he does. He came home, was greeted by Peezy and the rest of his crew, took a private jet to Atlanta, and ripped his first song back. It almost brings a tear to your eye but this is Rio after all, so you have to laugh. – Donald Morrison
To be both anti-industry and a popular commercial product is generally an oxymoron. Usually, there’s a conflict of interest. Subversive and independent artists typically remain in their niches with little interest for imperial dominance in the industry. Meanwhile, artists with mainstream aspirations play the game to exhaustion, clawing for money in an industry handing out scraps. They’re usually two separate, unreachable ends of the spectrum.
But this is Playboi Carti, his legend and empire built on the ravenous, insatiable appetite of his fans and his broken promises to feed them. Die Lit and Whole Lotta Red are generation-defining rap albums, streaming pillars with legions of imitators. Conversely, some of his most defining songs only exist as leaks in the digital rubble of Soundcloud and YouTube. “Pissy Pamper” may never see the light of day on streaming but it doesn’t stop his rabid audience from lusting for its easy accessibility. Rather than maximize the benefits of the playlisting, his leaks fan the flames and keep Carti omnipresent in the conversation.
His rollout for I Am Music features videos for songs you could only find on random YouTube uploads and Instagram reels. He retreats inward into the shadows of his celebrity and releases on his own terms. “H00DBYAIR” is the crown jewel in this new era, sinister hedonism as filtered through the medium of Shawty Redd and John Carpenter. It’s sinfully indulgent, Carti hissing and warbling about drug-fueled sex and his massive musical influence. He chants “Put ‘em in a coffin” like his labelmates are conjuring spirits in the next room. Gone are the days where he cosplays Nosferatu on rage beats throughout Whole Lotta Red. Instead, he’s relishing in the lawlessness and belligerence of Three 6 Mafia and Atlanta street rap. Carti’s fans can live with his elusive nature if he sounds this dynamic. – Caleb Catlin
You’d be surprised how many of your favorite critics are stunningly cheap and petty when it comes to how they decide what artists they fuck with. It’s a supposedly objective medium that can turn on which outlet you decide to give an exclusive to for an album rollout, depending on how self-important the wrong powerful establishment writer might be. To quote Mach himself, how much “They make mountains out of mole hills”.
I say all this because if you subscribe to this flavor of retail level beef, I shouldn’t like Mach-Hommy’s music. He didn’t invite me to his big fancy listening party for this album when it came to New York at the beginning of the year, not that I care about that sort of thing obviously, and I generally find him way too self-aware as a public figure in the culture – one who’s constantly trying to stage direct how we think and talk about him and his music.
And yet, Mach-Hommy made my album of the year. Why? Because I keep it so fucking real, and because it’s so fucking good. What is this electro-shocked inspirational pop song with Kaytranada and Greedo taking on Nate Dogg duties doing in the middle of this grungy, neo-Gza album? Why is it the eponymous track? Why do I want to sprint through a chain link fence whenever I hear it? For a guy who understands his aesthetic- the kind of beats he works the best over, the tone of each project- better than any rapper in his class, it’s a shocking gambit, a startling left turn for the L.A. transplant. He fucking nails it. He’s as comfortable spitting aspirational “Juicy” lite auto-bio shit in between soaring, Route 1 with top down Greedo hook, as he is spitting dense conspiracy-laden album cut verses in Creole and pidgin Jersey. So congrats to Mach-Hommy, a genius-level artist who made a great song and a great album, even if he annoys me sometimes. Just, you know, invite me to the next fucking listening party, bro. – Abe Beame
Every once in a while, a regional rap scene will have a year with so many breakthrough artists that it totally redefines its stature on the hip-hop map and challenges the supremacy of the genre’s traditionally dominant hubs (in recent memory, Michigan rap’s year in 2020 comes to mind). This year, that honor belongs to Florida.
For a perfect snapshot in time of the players involved, look no further than the posse cut “4AM @ Coffee Zone” – a link-up of Sunshine State all-stars that rivals the ‘12 – ‘13 Miami Heat’s claim to being Florida’s most formidable superteam.
The upstart starting five of rappers come together on the track like an ensemble cast of comic book characters. Wizz Havinn’s laid-back, Tallahassee drawl refuses to be rushed by the beat’s foreboding bells and hi-hats, bending time and tempo to his will like a golden grill-wearing Doctor Strange; Luh Tyler’s slick shit-talking glides through the track with the ease of the Silver Surfer; Loe Shimmy’s flow shuffles and contorts through pockets like a fusion of Veeze and Future reanimated as a walker from The Walking Dead; BossMan Dlow yams down punchlines that would perfectly soundtrack a Blake Griffin highlight tape with superhuman strength; and C Stunna channels the nihilism of the Joker, spending “$1000 on ugly shoes, just for the name.”
Although the subregions and subgenres of Florida rap represented are a hodge-podge patchwork of influences – with notes of Detroit, the Nolia, and Southern melodic rap peeking through over production that cribs elements of drill – the indulgent get-money and stay-fly rap identity that these artists have cultivated for their state is unmistakable. – Dario McCarty
The first sound you hear is Aaliyah’s sensual but vulnerable voice, a sample lifted from “Are You That Somebody?” She coos “Are you Responsible?” in a faint cry that sounds like overhearing strangers argue from your project window. Repurposed as a skeletal and minimalist heat seeker made for the late Stockton rapper, Young Slo-Be, it offers a female softness to lighten his masculine bravado. He’s rapping in question-form — not loquacious, continuing the tradition of the smooth and alluring side of the greater Bay Area.
Slo-Be sounds so paranoid that it’s no wonder that he and the late Drakeo had such chemistry. “Are You Responsible” sounds fully-formed, but nervous. There’s a sense of dramatic romance and physical excitement. And for all of his violent themes and tough talk, Slo-Be was special because he could deliver deep meaning in just a few words. In the middle of a song that’s basically about pimping, he admits to his own trust issues, the way that his sense of love is complicated by his lust for money. And the way that producer Andrei Legend chops the sample makes it feel Slo-Be and Aaliyah are doing a haunted duet, crooning about the ghosts of the blade, the casual deceptions that we rarely think twice about, and the sweetness of counting money at the end of the day. Like life, or the song itself, it’s all over before you really know what happened. – Jayson Buford
The highest ranked true rap cypher on our year-end list, “Hot Boyz” is actually more akin to the meeting between Sicilian and American mafias at the Grand Hotel et des Palmes in Palermo, Sicily in 1957 than any conventional rap song. Legends from Vallejo and Sacramento meet with legends from Compton and Watts around a dimly lit long table, surrounded by greco-roman statues, to discuss illicit activities, except there’s blunt smoke floating around them instead of cigar smoke and “Ambitionz of a Ridah” plays softly on the keys of their mental piano.
They take turns ripping memorable lines. Nef The Pharaoh, our legend from Vallejo who once answered a question during an interview with Passion Of The Weiss, “most indubitably,” sets up the track with his staple growls, before revealing his newly-shaved head and comparing himself to Birdman. Watts’ resident mafioso, 03 Greedo, powers up with a hook about the color of the leather in his whip before revealing that he stores his weapons in a stone like he’s from Camelot. Compton’s Wallie The Sensei, now sporting a lean belly, steps in to melodize the song with a verse that (meanly) says that broke dudes don’t deserve to have any women before he uses the words “shindig,” and “doohickey” in the same bar. Shootergang Kony, representing Sacramento, admits he had to kill his former associates just like YNW Melly. How very Paulie Cicero of him. – Harley Geffner
To paraphrase the great modern philosopher and modern 3-and-D legend Shane Battier: reports of GloRilla’s demise in the face of heightened expectations were greatly exaggerated. After releasing two Howitzers in 2022 in the form of “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” and “Tomorrow 2” that could be heard blaring from car windows the second your feet hit the street, there were online whispers that GloRilla had failed to capitalize on her momentum following her ‘22 mixtape, Anyways, Life’s Great. Fair or not, the cannibalistic attention span of the modern music fan was waiting at the doorstep after a year of non-charting and lukewarm singles.
“Yeah Glo!,” by all accounts, is a silencing of whispers that the Memphis rapper would be victim to any semblance of a sophomore slump. The four-man production team (which produces a comical amount of producer tags at the beginning) lay out the red carpet for GloRilla: crafting a teeth-chattering Triple Six crunk beat that kicks off from the 0:00 mark and blisters without regard for human life. GloRilla’s low register matches the track’s elevated energy, turning the joyride into a signature moment for the 25-year-old rapper. The intoxicating call-and-response chorus almost beckons you to join in, allowing yourself to get lost in yelling “Yeah Glo!” before you even realize what’s happened.
In the meantime, her effortless doling out of violent threats rolls off the tongue (the way that she almost begs someone to run up on her is laced with frightening assuredness). If you put this on at a party, one can almost watch how the energy turns in a heartbeat — in a similar vein to the likes of “Knuck if You Buck” and “Crunk Ain’t Dead” — making you wonder how anyone could fix their lips to say that GloRilla still doesn’t have “it.” – Matthew Ritchie
“Words2LiveBy” completed Earl Sweatshirt’s transformation from angsty teenage exile to sly, slick-talking big bro. Musically, this rebrand began somewhere around Sick! (2022), where Earl shed the madness and abstraction of his previous two projects for upbeat, enlightened clarity. When this song dropped, everybody knew it was official.
Earl outside in a backpack, smirk-rapping over trap-adjacent production on a hot NYC night, while someone twerks for the low budget camera, feels like a vindictive triumph. A visual confirmation that he is, indeed, alright. Classifying Earl’s lyrics as anything too far removed from something like Future has long been a mischaracterization. It’s the presentation that differs. From “Making the Band (Danity Kane)” to “2010” to this verse, Earl’s sound has evolved without losing his essence. He’s come a long way but he’s always been here. Poets don’t stop being poets just because they’re no longer tortured.
Any isolated line of Earl’s could make a case for bar of the year, like a Godiva variety pack. “I’m not okay, but I’m gonna be alright” and “Free Gaza, we on the corner like Israelites” are the two most people pluck out on a casual listen, but the entire verse has near zero fat. Especially not, “Put on some weight, now I feel like a lineman.”
El Cousteau gets outshined on his own album, but “Renegade” moments don’t exist in the viral age. The song’s success is both a celebration of the DMV scene’s inevitable 2024 mainstream breakthrough (assisted by the inescapable Tommy Richman) and a crossover hit for the Brooklyn transplant underground. El Cousteau didn’t settle for one-hit virality, following through with his biggest and best album yet, Merci, Non Merci. His shell necklace and leopard-print hat are as loud and flashy as his flow. With “Words2LiveBy” and “Real Hip Hop,” Niontay’s song that he, Earl and MIKE also feature on, El Cousteau is in good company. The more fun they have together, the better off we’ll be. – Will Hagle
Kensington, Philadelphia exists in a world so far removed from most Americans’ consciousness that if it were introduced as a country in the Global South, the CIA would call for an immediate intervention and regime change. The region has a poverty rate at almost 45%, there is an estimated billion-dollar open air drug market run out of abandoned factories, and it has become something of an international spectacle and punching bag for Republicans looking to blame Democrats for the degradation of American cities. Both houses and people are left to rot in this neighborhood, where ⅓ of Philadelphia’s homeless population lives and local law enforcement and government have totally tapped out.
Rapper Skrilla, who hails from the area, concisely explained, “if you are from [Kensington], you’re no good to the world.” It’s de-humanizingly come to be known as “Zombieland.” Right next door, Frogtown, which used to be designated as part of Kensington, is a hub for $11 IPAs at breweries and young professionals who describe the neighborhood as “up and coming.”
This is the environment that Skrilla found himself in when he started rapping. It figures that out of a place so dysfunctional and so beyond belief from a human perspective, would emerge one of the most innovative and oddball rappers of the last half-decade. When everything is flipped on its head and so out of whack, conventional modes of thinking, rapping, talking, and moving are thrown out the window. Skrilla operates through the prism of these unorthodox modalities – viewing the de-stabilized world around him as regular through his clipped phrases, thoughts, and half-mumbles.
Skrilla raps over Philadelphia’s new signature sound, the haunted drill beats with ghostly backlines, where the bass subdues and the claps come to the front of the mix. The beats sound like they’re summoning a demon, and Skrilla is a parrot translating and squawking the musings of said demon. Something about it feels truly in-touch with the spiritual realm, in the same way that the ancient Greeks used mind-altering drugs to experience the divine.
Skrilla’s flows come with no real historical precedents, and listening to him sounds like watching the scenes from Inception where city-scapes start turning sideways and folding in on themselves. His style is much more than just its novelty though – the flows are hypnotic and shifty, lulling you into his spells as he raps lines like “God Damn, pop out with the God Damn,” or “Grinchin in this bitch like everyday Halloween.” He’s racked up millions of views on almost every video he’s released this year and a murderer’s row of features. He’s seen some of the best rappers in the world try out his flows and he’s wiped the floor with every one of them. – Harley Geffner
At the beginning of the year, I went to EBK Jaaybo’s first and last show of 2024. Before he was forced to turn himself in for illegal firearm possession, he performed a nearly sold-out show at the Aztec Theater in Fresno, California.
For the hour or so that Jaaybo was onstage, I saw Stockton’s first superstar in the making. The crowd roared the lyrics to “Apocalypse,” and he didn’t even need to rap a single lyric. Everyone in the audience crooned every word to “Street Love Song (PTSD).” He mixes introspection with venomous bravado, etching his discography with emotions that go deeper than anger and sadness. Jaaybo captures the fire that burns within himself — roaring with vulgarities and existentialism and survivor’s guilt, housed in vignettes of sample drill and field recordings that score the 2100 block of Nightingale Avenue.
Four months later, from the confines of the San Joaquin County Jail, EBK Jaaybo released “Boogieman.” For all intents and purposes, “Boogieman” could have just been a throwaway in his discography, a haunting deliverance from Northern California’s grim reaper. His producer, Yvnng Ecko, backs him with the shrieks of a choir, accelerating in tempo until the voices are met with the quake of rapturous 808s. The heavy bass fizzles into the beat over and over again, and Jaaybo uses each bar to menacingly bite into the skin of his unknown targets.
When Kendrick called himself the Boogieman, it’s fair to say that this was an homage to EBK Jaaybo: the self-proclaimed reaper from California’s Central Valley. Rapping about how he wants “all the smoke like a vape pen,” Jaaybo broke the glass ceiling that Young Slo-Be first shattered with “I Love You.” Even casual rap fans know who EBK Jaaybo is, thanks to TikTokers and content creators surprised at the shock value of the jarring rapper who keeps “dropping bangers with no hooks again.”
The viral success of “Boogieman” is an enormous step for Stockton hip-hop. Without even the help of his distinguishable sample flips, Jaaybo has brought more eyes to his city than ever before. Now, at 21 years old, EBK Jaaybo is the most famous rapper to emerge from his city, forever being the one to establish his scene’s unlikely pop appeal. – Yousef Srour
In 2023, Bossman Dlow established himself in Central Florida’s trap scene with his Too Slippery mixtape and its 2 Slippery studio deluxe. In 2024, he gained a national profile, riding a wave of TikTok hype and dance challenges to the Billboard charts, his signature caution-sign pendant glistening all the while. A more selfish up-and-comer may have kept singular control over his valuable Mr. Too Slippery brand (which, in case you were wondering, refers to being so dripped out that you leave wet floors in your wake). Instead, following the success of “Get in With Me,” Dlow teamed up with fellow Tallahassee rapper Luh Tyler to make “2 Slippery” a hot single for the 18-year-old’s debut studio album, Mr. Skii. (The significance of the titular moniker, you might be wondering? Just an inspired ad-lib that came to Tyler one day while he was rapping, don’t overthink it.)
Though they’re both young Panhandle stars with social media savvy and a fondness for the Sunshine State’s rich hip-hop heritage, from Plies to Ski Mask the Slump God, Tyler and Dlow are not the most obvious collaborators. The former is low-key, quietly funny, testing how softly he can walk the beat while ensuring you stay tuned in, while the latter is gregarious and boisterous, a bit more pronounced with the joking and bragging. But on “2 Slippery”—over a beat co-produced by Tallahassee regular x9beatz and Atlantan newcomer Prodrisk, featuring deep, clanging bells and piano keys matched by staccato horn riffs—Mr. Too Slippery and Mr. 2 Skii play off each other perfectly, their respective styles anchoring the track as both club banger and chill devotion to luxury.
On one hand, a triumphant Bossman Dlow playing with the big sharks, yelling into an oversize phone courtesy of his “Too Slippery Entertainment” office; on the other, a slyly cocky Luh Tyler beckoning you to lean in and peep his decked-out wrists and grilles. “2 Slippery” is readymade for any occasion necessary: On TikTok, it’s blown up as a soundtrack for Dlow dance imitators, thirst trappers, NFL highlight reels, and even Anthony Edwards’ parties. Dlow and Tyler don’t step on each other, but they do give their partner a chance to flex on tape the only way they know how. – Nitish Pahwa
The night We Don’t Trust You, the first and lesser of this year’s twin Future/Metro Boomin albums, was released, a friend was sitting at my dining room table, having just finished explaining to me a very violent and temporally fucked-up Christmas movie that he’s been writing. We put it on; we skimmed; we stopped when we heard the “Everlasting Bass” flip, choked out laughs when Future rapped about fishing 20-carat rings out of throats that might have been in Vogue. And so, on first pass, we talked over the Kendrick verse, snapping to attention only at the “dogs” line toward its end. On closer examination, though, this was more than a warning shot or a buried subliminal; there’s no ambiguity, no walking back “your best work is a light pack.” (You wonder if the Prince/Michael dichotomy was also supposed to set up a parallel with the latter’s extramusical entanglements.)
For as cynical as one can be about the sample—and that first night at my table I was, weary from a half-decade of streaming-fodder rap songs built on the scaffolding of other, better rap songs—Kendrick justifies and inverts the premise at once: “fuck rap, diss Melle Mel if I have to.” No one can say anything he’s done this year has been animated by anything but pure vitriol. On “euphoria,” that’s couched in playful taunts and quasiacademic games; on “Not Like Us,” it’s mutated into celebration. Here, it’s just acid. As it should be. – Paul Thompson
While most of America met and fell in love with Cash Cobain and his exciting perversion of drill on Tiktok this spring and summer, for many of us in New York it was the culmination of years of work, the actualization of an entire scene and the many artists that built it up. A decade if you want to tie this moment to the halcyon days of drill’s first iteration in Brooklyn.
For Cash, the Queens native and architect of New York drill’s third movement, it was a story of a slow and steady build, not the overnight explosion it appeared to be from the outside. In the event you remember the kid once thought of as a kind of Just Blaze to Shawny Bin Laden’s Jay-Z, it was a development that was as surprising as it was inevitable.
“Fisherrr” is proof that sometimes the most radical move you can make is the most obvious. There are echoes of the Hitmen taking the records off the shelf producers like Preemo eschewed because the flips were “too easy”, or applying an electric guitar to strummy folk designed for coffee houses and headphones. It is the sound of an artist rising above the petty internecine squabbles of his clannish regional peers, above the GSCs and 8 Treys and OYs and YGz, and evolved his creation- harsh and abrasive sample drill- into something so undeniable Eric Adams couldn’t say shit. A song, and a genre, you can dance to, fuck to, and clean the rug to on a Sunday morning.
The song has arguably been remade around a half-dozen times, with each version more potent than the last, attracting its cult advocates, but “Fisherrr” is and will always be the source code. It’s a two-hander with Slizzy assassin Bay Swag, a string of hyper-local and filthy come ons that you have to strain and study to fully wrap your head around – or the listener can relax, and lay passively on the surface of its fondant synth and persistent percussive clicks, enjoying it as much of America did, a perfect bauble of 21st century pop. A song that captures the horny and goofy tone that is the Slizzy house style, the experience of following Cash across social media platforms made drill.
All this explains how for many, “Fisherrr” is a new beginning, the announcement of a bright, and maybe soon, genre defining talent leading this generation of New York City artists. But for us, the Van Ronks of history and criticism few will remember, slumped and black eye swelling in an alley off Mercer Street, watching our proud son speed off in a cab, we can do little but salute, and wish him a final, wistful, “Au Revoir.” – Abe Beame
There are the normal follies of human miscalculation and the cataclysmic failures of the condemned. It’s important to know the difference. Anyone can absent-mindedly forget their wallet after smoking too much weed under star projectors, or accidentally seduce their incarcerated mentor’s girlfriend after a passionfruit tequila seltzer binge. You can always buy a new wallet or get a tattoo sleeve of your bosses face to apologize.
But there are the mistakes generated by a fatal flaw in character, an excess of delusion and ego, a transgression against the Gods or natural laws governing the universe. What the Greeks called hubris – one of the most prominent examples of which occurred when the gifted young weaver Arachne, was transformed into a spider because she said that if she wasn’t better than Athena, she was the closest one. After “Not Like Us,” Drake has yet to morph into a singing owl in a gilded cage, but his fate might be actually be worse. He’s been reducing to Christmas livestream giveaways with Adin Ross.
Let me remind you how avoidable this all was. Kendrick let off a tame boast on a 16-bar guest verse over the “Everlasting Bass” beat. He claimed what anyone with common sense already knew. He didn’t belong anywhere near the other two in J Cole’s holy trinity (if there was a modern 2010s Big 3, it was Kendrick, Future, and Young Thug). Meanwhile, Cole saw what was coming and wisely receded into the hazy mist of a North Carolina tobacco field. But Drake, the certified legal boy, has been too strung out on compliments for over a decade now. In retrospect, he should he should have reconsidered his “no new friends” policy because he exhibited the type of irrational and impulsive behavior that comes when you have no real allies left to tell you the truth – other than maybe a middle-aged Quebecois henchman with a sex trafficking conviction.
“Push Ups” had a few funny lines. Drake could’ve probably gotten away with it, too. But gambling addicts always double down, and there’s no way for Drake to understand how disrespectful “Taylor Made” must’ve seemed to Kendrick. By turning Kendrick’s artistic north star into a cheap AI gimmick, it mocked the entire culture and tradition of the West Coast. By calling him a coward in front of the world, he dared him to reveal his hand. There was no other choice.
The gambit will go down as one of the worst unforced errors in recorded history: right up there with Napoleon invading Russia in the winter, Apollo Creed agreeing to a friendly exhibition match against Ivan Drago, and Abraham Lincoln deciding to attend a light comedy on Good Friday at Ford’s Theater. This is the Hornets trading the rights to Kobe Bryant away for Vlade Divac and 24 cartons of imported Serbian cigarettes. It was like watching a small bird of prey drown in the La Brea tar pits.
A more conclusive defeat is unimaginable. When you respond to a diss song by saying the phrase, “the Epstein angle was the shit I expected,” you haven’t just lost the rap beef, you have been mass exorcised. When you sue the biggest record company in the world for allegedly faking streams to make your rival look better, you have not only been defeated, you are in danger of being deleted from the record books like you got caught taking performance enhancing drugs (or using Quentin Miller one too many times).
“Euphoria” and “Meet the Grahams” operated as a de facto ninety-five theses. They highlighted the reasons why Kendrick despised Drake: his fake accents and fake abs and fake hair, the child hiding, the weird issues with women, the exploitation of his safe “nice guy” mainstream appeal, his cynical reliance on hip-hop for pre-fab credibility, the numbing apolitical nature of his lyrics, the habitual lies, the shady manipulation, the fake mob boss talk mixed with empty virtue signaling to increase the peace, the time he wore this outfit, the ghostwriting, the way in which Drake admittedly never stood for anything but money and the city that he was from. And even the city that he was from was provisional – a Potemkin CN Tower to be swapped on his next vacation to Houston or Atlanta or Vegas.
Kendrick said it himself: this was about morals, integrity, and discipline. He viewed himself as a 20th Century man in a 21st Century nightmare. Drake as the Moloch embodying what has become warped and demented; Kendrick playing he vengeful Old Testament prophet arriving to immolate false idols. In Drake, he saw the hollowness of post-modern belief: the idea that authenticity is a false construct; that the self is merely something to be manipulated for digital rewards; that nothing matters in a cartoon reality. Kendrick refuses to believe that in an algorithmic age, a sense of roots, noble purpose, and adherence to art-first precepts are not vital concerns.
“Not Like Us” was bigger than hip-hop. Kendrick was fighting for the very notion of a personal soul and the soul of a culture, which has been corrupted for so long that anything goes. And when you are warring for what you believe to be sacred, you are often possessed by nearly invincible strength. You can even write a diss song that becomes a dance song that becomes a HBCU marching band anthem, which even gets cringe spins at the DNC.
The genius of “Not Like Us” is that you can interpret it however you want. There will always be an “Us Vs. Them.” It has jock jam simplicity and hierophantic possibility. It has goofy playground dozens insults for people to chant and an extended third verse metaphor about Drake as a cultural carpetbagger in post-trap Atlanta. It has Mustard supplying what sounds like the napalm strings from “Ether” and the best double entendre ever made about pedophilia and music theory. The Dodgers played it when they won the World Series. It salts with the earth with a shaker taken from Tam’s. This is what ‘Pac was talking about when he said that “my .44 [will] make sure all y’all kids don’t grow.”
Drake apologists are quick to point out that Kendrick is an imperfect vessel (even though this was the entire point of Mr. Morale) And it’s true that Kendrick overtly cribs slang and flow from Drakeo and EBK without acknowledgement. But you can just as easily point out that this is the entire point of “Not Like Us.” In a diluted, screen-damaged world, where regional traditions and pockets of cultural idiosyncrasy are in danger of fading away, “Not Like Us” is a reminder of the power of what cannot be easily mimicked. This is in Kendrick’s DNA.
It’s all made explicit in the video: The TDE reunion at Nickerson Gardens, the crip and blood walking, the Compton courthouse, the obligatory Tam’s shots, the krumping and the Tommy the Clown cameo, even DeMar DeRozan returning home from Canadian exile. This is a stadium anthem and a personal mission statement, a world-beating diss song and a ferocious affirmation of hometown pride and creative integrity. The world Kendrick celebrates might well be on its way to disappearing, but it’s a reminder that what was possible yesterday remains possible tomorrow, provided the same values, beliefs, and ideals are applied. Evolution is essential, but some things are timeless. The audience may occasionally get fooled, but they’re not slow. – Jeff Weiss
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