In the sound of circa-now rap, Polo has found a vehicle for sadness and exhilaration. For now, though, the depressive Chicago melodist Polo G navigates this desiccated landscape with a grace and pathos that nobody else can touch. Eventually, something will come along and shake up that status quo. The music, for the most part, is soothing and ephemeral, a softly thrumming soundtrack to the branding exercises and soap-opera storylines that have supplanted the music itself as the main attractions. Here’s what hit me hardest this year.ĭo you know how hard it is to make a truly great rap album in 2021? In its current iteration, mainstream rap exists as fodder for the algorithm, fuel for habit-forming streaming-service background-music playlists. They can be broad but personal pop statements, dystopian trap parties, or metallic industrial freakouts. I’m predictable like that.) But great rap records can take any form. (The Alchemist makes multiple appearances on this list, just as he did last year. This particular subjective year-end list is one old man’s opinion, and it’s weighted heavily toward the arty, expressionist old-man boom-bap LPs that continue to dominate a certain part of the music-critic internet. Rap music is a subjective thing, and no two fans will have the same year-end lists. As ever, the real action is in the corners, and rap music is practically all corners. Rap is too big, and too anarchic, to be tied to the big stars and to their precisely calibrated rollout machines. It’s defined by teenagers snarling at video cameras on YouTube, by chaotic Verzuz nostalgia-fests in which beloved old stars get into good-natured shit-talk competitions, by whatever happens to be banging out of the nearest car window on a sunny afternoon. Kendrick Lamar, once again, did not release an album.īut rap music is not defined by what the biggest stars happen to be doing at any particular moment. Cole album, which isn’t letting us down per se, but it’s not lighting anyone’s world on fire, either. Kanye West made a vast weeks-long spectacle of his album release, and the album itself was just OK. Drake made another commercial megalith, an album that dominated charts to an absurd degree, and it was just OK. In 2021, the grand and majestic rap stars all let us down.
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