Best rap songs full#
Best rap songs plus#
Best rap songs mac#

It’s a reminder that culture exists only from the bottom up. All it needs is Nef, his homies, some party supplies, and a certain purity of spirit. “Big Tymin’” doesn’t need a big budget, an expensive feature, or a super producer. This is hip-hop at its core, repurposing the stray parts of pop culture ephemera and reconfiguring them into something borrowed but still brand new.

It’s a gleeful celebration of balling like Baby and being Fresh like Mannie-a classic tribute to the Big Tymers and Cash Money, right down to the “Still Fly” interpolation, which itself riffs on the Gilligan’s Island theme song. Nef raps with livewire elasticity, a bouncing, flailing Gumby of limbs and fists. He and his crew throw up their set, sip dirty Sprite, and smoke in front of a rotting trap house, a cookie-cutter subdivision occasionally peeking out in the distance from a corner of the screen.

Best rap songs mac#

It is Bay Area regional down to the Mac Dre tee that Nef sports in the video. There is no formula to replicate the organic thrill of a kid, barely out of his teens, an amateur with big-league talent, creating something with a bunch of his friends from the neighborhood-with their immediate goal to make an anthem to be loudly bumped for a few seasons by everyone within 50 square miles in every direction. The beauty of rap is that a song like Nef the Pharaoh’s “Big Tymin’,” the 2015 breakout smash from E-40’s Vallejo protégé, could never be created in a laboratory. It might make money, but none of it matters. They have all the statistics and metrics that quantify a hit, the chord progressions that incite our lizard brains, and the factory-made melodies to electrify the algorithms.

Best rap songs full#

Right now, as you are reading this sentence, there are studios full of lavishly paid people-songwriters, producers, engineers, A&Rs, label vice presidents, the artists themselves-attempting to capture lightning by committee. The Ringer Music Show: The Best Rap Songs of the Decade Of course, by limiting 10 years of music to just 100 entries, there are a few omissions-no NBA YoungBoy or “Panda,” little from overseas acts-but the ranking covers the pivotal moments, indelible one-hit wonders, and influential stylists that made hip-hop what it was in the 2010s-and in some cases, hinted at what it would be like in the future. Below, you’ll find a lot of mainstay favorites-your Drakes, Kanyes, Kendricks, and Futures-plus a handful of acts you’ll either remember warmly (and sometimes barely remember at all).

Best rap songs plus#

To mark the release of Ringer Films’ new HBO documentary Juice WRLD: Into the Abyss on Thursday, we’ve collected a handful of staff members from across our website, podcast, and video networks, plus a few contributors and friends, to craft a list of best 100 rap songs of the last decade. While it may seem impossible to make a definitive statement on the 2010s, The Ringer is attempting to do just that. (In this sense, Drake is the perfect avatar for rap in the 2010s-only an artist as chameleonic as him could have the wits and business savvy to routinely produce hits throughout such a topsy-turvy era.) There are plenty of reasons for this rapid evolution-the death of blogs and rise of SoundCloud, streaming services replacing CDs and MP3s, all the good and evil that social media wrought-but the end result is a genre constantly in flux, producing thrilling moments that felt simultaneously disconnected from and in conversation with what came before and after. 1 rap song of the decade was Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” by the end, artists like Juice WRLD, Post Malone, and XXXTentacion were regularly pumping out chart-toppers with songs and marketing approaches that felt beamed in from a universe where Hov never existed.

Contrast that with the 2010s-the first no. No similar stretch in the genre’s history produced sea changes so rapidly: The ’90s may have started with Rakim’s lyrical fury and ended with Bad Boy’s glimmering chart dominance, but as disparate as those artists were, the terms of engagement ultimately remained the same. The wildly divergent threads that make up the cloth of 2010s rap only highlight why it’s so difficult to grapple with the decade, even nearly two years removed from it. When you think of hip-hop in the 2010s, what springs to mind? Is it the THX maximalism of Lex Luger? Atlanta assuming the mantle as the epicenter of the culture? The lyrical revelations of Kendrick Lamar and his TDE cohorts? The Thanos-level inevitability of Drake? The wounded-soul crooning of Juice WRLD?