![]() Its artwork out-icks the Garbage Pail Kids while its narratives navigate the space between a fucked-up LSD trip and true crime horrors. “Tuesday,” the second song on Aesop Rock and Tobacco’s collaborative debut as Malibu Ken, opens with fungus growing inside a car, and features graphic depictions of pimples, warts, boils and other skin growths. Observing how Hip-Hop from the late ’90s to the early oughts went from expanding minds to brainwashing them-luke warm producers names being shouted over tracks instead of lyrics-the trio brandished a wiry and quick-moving release, better for the administering wisdom that bites. Posdnuos relays the personal math on “Rock Co.Kane Flow” with: “ They say the good die young, so I added some/ Bad-ass to my flavor to prolong my life over the drum/ Everyone cools off from being hot/ It’s about if you can handle being cold or not.“ But it’s still De La serving the hard lesson and sharp quotables. With producers, J Dilla, Madlib, 9th Wonder, Supa Dave West and Jake One contributing far above average tracks, guest emcees Common and more importantly MF Doom and Ghostface deliver animated yet surgical verses generally reserved for solo projects. With no skits in sight, inferring stakes got much higher, the message, not a comeback one just a continuation, needed to be crystal. Like Basquiat defaulting to the spray can just to show folks he could still do it, De La Soul-the incendiary trio of Emcees from Long Island-went back to seething lyrical pressure as the priority for their seventh studio album The Grind Date, and let a crop of 2004 new dudes handle the beats. We got it from here thank you for your service. This list goes from Dirty South to the trap, LSD trips to ego trips, internal struggles to enemies lists. And when we started discussing our favorite hip-hop albums of the past two decades, the most significant trend was that they were all over the map. And it’s easy to understand why-despite Dave Grohl’s cheerleading, there’s still a lot of stagnant creativity in rock (not totally of course but it’s naive to ignore it), whereas hip-hop keeps evolving, keeps growing, keeps producing more relevant recordings that sound nothing like the ones before them. It’s been just in the last few years that we’ve seen a significant sea change: Hip-Hop is now more popular than rock for the first time ever. And similarly, we’ve come to another genre-specific survey of the millennium: The best hip-hop albums of the 21st century. In 2017, we got something of a headstart by assembling a list of the best metal albums of the previous two decades, a list that’s proven significant for how much a fringe genre has come to define trends in guitar-based music. And as we get closer to the turning of that calendar page, we’ve begun to look back at the decade-and millennium-that was. ![]() ![]() The close of the decade is just over the horizon.
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