2019: The Flows
First in my 2019 music retrospective list, the hip hop records that really grabbed me.
5. Bobby J from Rockaway — Summer Classics
Summer Classics kicks off with Bobby J asking the same question Kanye asked in 2007 — does anybody make real shit anymore? Where Kanye dropped that question in the middle of a Daft Punk track, the beginning of a major shift in Mr. West’s career toward electronic production, Bobby J poses the question front and center in his debut full length LP. And then he spends the better part of the next hour answering that question in the affirmative by delivering track after track of nostalgic, top down, bangers.
Sure, tracks like “Walter White” and “Really Real” show flashes of a young rapper going through the chip-on-his-shoulder motions, but it’s not hard to look past the posturing when the rest of the record reads like a laundry list of his bona fides. Bobby J, a Kwame discovery from Queens, doesn’t so much wear his old school, east coast hip hop influences like a badge of honor as he preaches them with a bullhorn from the street corner. The lion’s share of these 16 tracks is built on a solid foundation of live instrumentation, throwback samples and loops, confident, quick bars on every verse, and the hookiest hooks on any hip hop release last year. The four song sequence starting with “Let Me Breathe” and ending in “Hook Drop” is an addictive set of tunes, one of the best four-track runs anywhere in 2019.
Yet even with his commitment to boom and the bap, Bobby J delivers a record that takes risks. Some risks pay off all right — Killah Priest’s cold gangster bars on “The Collector” comes to mind — and some pay off less well, like the weird Green Day loop on “Really Real”, but Bobby J is so obviously having the time of his life on this record that it’s hard to begrudge him the less effective departures.
Summer Classics might not be the all time great that Bobby J claims it is, but it is a really promising first salvo from a young MC worth keeping an eye on. It’s a long, white walled convertible cruising the highway from New Jersey to the boroughs at 45 miles an hour, sun setting. It’s a good, good time.
4. Denzel Curry — ZUU
Curry follows up the hard hitting 2018 record, TA13OO, with another propulsive set of sparse, hooky tracks on ZUU. This record puts Denzel’s snarling, witty delivery over production that merges the sounds of sparkling, south Florida hip hop with contemporary trap beats. The effect is intoxicating, as on “BIRDZ” where Rick Ross’s guest spot turns queasy over a filthy subbass line and a lead synth line that sounds like a sitar run through industrial farming equipment. Other times the result is absolutely thrilling, like on one of my favorite tracks of 2019, “RICKY” which marries Denzel’s knack for candid lyrics about coming up on the streets of Carol City with the catchiest hooks anywhere in the trap scene right now.
This record feels like a victory lap. The subject matter is rough, but Denzel always has his dark sense of humor within reach. Lines like “word around town you were licked like a stamp, huh” on “AUTOMATIC” and literally everything on club banger “SHAKE 88” reveal an MC whose fundamentals around breath, rhyme, and meter are so unassailable that he can sound like he’s just fucking around even when his technique is immaculate. That’s not to say Denzel Curry doesn’t get deadly serious at the drop of the hat. In particular, “SPEEDBOAT” and “CAROLMART” hit incredibly hard, especially on the former where Curry raps “My dawg didn’t make it til 21 / so I gotta make it past 24”. It’s a perspective that reframes the club-ready urgency of ZUU’s production as something close to desperation. Like the intro to “CAROLMART” says, “being from Miami Dade we do the fly shit naturally” — this is a record of how hip hop is survival. And it slaps.
3. Rapsody — Eve
North Carolina rapper/songwriter/producer Marlanna Evans, aka, Rapsody dropped her third full length LP in 2019 and it is close to a masterpiece. Eve is a record that knows exactly where it sits in relation to the history of black-produced popular music in America, and it builds on that geneaology at every turn. She kicks things off with “Nina”, built on a sample from Ms Simone’s cover of “Strange Fruit” and for the first time since 2013, washes the bad taste of Kanye’s crass appropriation in “Blood on the Leaves” out of my mouth. (Taking shots at dudes like Kanye is another delicious feature throughout the record.) This is what Eve’s production does for the entire length of the album. Her sampling is a literate series of recontextualizations that enrich and vivify not only Rapsody’s own tracks, but the histories from which she pulls them. The fact that the spoken word over mournful crooning of this opening song is followed up with a flex track built atop a Phil Collins loop is testament to the confident creativity that characterizes this record.
Confidence is key here. At 64 minutes long, Rapsody never lets up. She names each song after woman of color and writes bars that match her admiration for those figures. This never comes off like a gimmick because Rapsody never exposes a weakness in her songwriting. Each song feels fully realized on its own. Rapsody varies her delivery from track-to-track, from the sing-song hooks of “Aaliyah” to the machine-gun staccato of “Whoopi” to the spoken poetry of “Reyna’s Interlude”. This record is constantly inventing new ways to voice the polyphonous stories of these women. The effect is gorgeous and moving and signals how insanely mature Rapsody’s pen game is.
On a record this singular it’s easy to imagine the guest spots being a weak spot, but even there Rapsody has picked only winners. The spots from J. Cole on “Sojourner” and Queen Latifah on “Hatshepsut” both work seamlessly, but its D’Angelo & GZA who offer support on “Ibtihaj” that best exemplify Rapsody’s approach to guesting across the record. Everything is maximized, no one feels like a castoff or a wave to ride. And when you can make someone like D’Angelo feel like they were lucky to get a spot on this record, rather than the other way around, you know you’re listening to something special.
2. clipping. — There Existed an Addiction to Blood
Content warning on this record — it’s a bloody, gory, at times disturbing listen. If you do not have the stomach for unsettling horror in the slasher vein, this album might be a tough listen.
clipping. is the experimental hip hop group comprised of William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes making the beats and Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton and Blindspotting fame) on the mic. What they’ve produced here is both abrasive in content and sound, a hellish, claustrophobic dive into horrorcore with very few moments of respite across the album’s hour long length. The production is equally influenced by film soundtracks, noise music, and avant garde ambient recordings, creating a surreal soundscape for Diggs rapidfire spitting. And as surreal as the soundscape can be, it’s the moments where the production veers into the naturalistic that hit hardest, as on “Run for Your Life” which builds the sounds of barking dogs and bypassing cars out the window into the song’s beat. I’ve never heard anything like this before, and when La Chat comes on to ask “you ain’t scared is ya?” you definitely are.
Things get bloody on La Mala Ordina (with the Rita), where guest Benny the Butcher delivers an absolutely brutal verse atop a buzzed out bassline and dopplered synth hooks. And then, the centerpiece of the album, “The Show” sees Diggs delivering his catchiest bars with a sickening, sparse beat that offers no hiding place from his story of spectator funded torture — “Don’t know which body part should go / first / spin the wheel / vertigo / It’s okay to cry you live your best life / when you watch them die.” It’s a nauseating song that pushed me to my limit.
The album’s only genuine single, “Blood of the Fang” brings these messier moments into grim focus as an allegory for popular culture’s obsession with the suffering of black bodies, and yeah, that helps on one level to give something intellectually to hang onto in the middle of all this gore, but on another level, it’s a gut punch thesis that makes it clear horrorcore isn’t a fantasy, but a way to speak the unspeakable realities of white supremacy and systemic racism. The moral of the story is best summarized by the opening track title: Nothing is safe.
This record is rough, harsh, and brutal. It is also essential. The production, the bars, the content, the sampling, the interludes even, it all adds up to one of the year’s best records.
- Little Simz — GREY Area
“I don’t need that stress / that stress / I’m a boss in a fuckin’ dress.”
Little Simz put out 2019’s best hip hop record. There’s a lot of reasons for why this album kicks so much ass. The grimy beats are instantly catchy, Little Simz lyrics are at turns deadly serious and absolutely hilarious, the swagger from start to finish is heady in the best way — but the thing that seals the deal is how Little Simz herself walks this knife’s edge line between confessional honesty and pitched braggadocio. GREY Area is the daily struggle to remember your own worth, blown up huge and triumphant into ten perfectly crafted anthems.
I love Little Simz voice, both in its literal sound and in the ideas and tensions she gives life. The record feels like the fever dream of the shy, smart kid in class who finally stood up and told everyone exactly what she thinks, and then everyone clapped. It’s exciting, cathartic, and tender. The first tracks that grab your attention are the straight rippers. “Offence”, “Boss”, and “Venom” all impress with Little Simz viciously spitting, allowing her voice to bend and crack, showing she has nothing to prove to anyone. But then there’s the bouncing, Chinese flute sample married to a rasta flow on “101 FM” that conjures up images of saturday afternoons on your buddy’s PS1 with its references to Mortal Kombat and Crash Bandicoot. There’s the gorgeous album closer “Flowers” which borrows Michael Kiwanuka for a smooth, lush, soulful bookend. In ten tracks, Little Simz goes in more directions than any of the 15, 16, 17 track ordeals that American hip hop MCs have been releasing over the past year, and maintains a core identity that is never less than arresting the whole way. She is a boss in a fucking dress here to make sure other pretenders stay in line.
