The Best Rapper Alive, Every Year Since 1979
CREDENTIALS: Coloring Book, “Ultralight Beam,” live performances on Saturday Night Live and at the ESPYs, Magnificent Coloring Day Festival, staying independent
The good guys are supposed to be boring.
Chance the Rapper opens Coloring Book with a declaration: His life is good. He’s got a girl, and a child, and he’s happy. He bellows, almost embarrassingly earnest, about what he has to be thankful for. It’s triumphant and euphoric, over brass backing and the cooing of mentor Kanye West.
This shouldn’t work. Great art, we’re told, is rarely made by the good guys, the happy or the content. Ambition isn’t measured in what you have, it’s striving for what you want. Hip-hop is for the strivers, and braggadocio is rarely applied to things so pedestrian. Unless you’re Chance.
I’m not pointing this out to suggest something as anodyne as Chance’s potential importance as a role model, or the part joyous music can play while the world burns around us. Instead, Chance’s persona is impressive because Chance has created a world for himself, out of the unlikeliest of parts, and 2016 was the year we all began living in it with him. He went from outsider to the center of the rap universe. He had the best verse of the year (on “Ultralight Beam”), arguably the best full-length—I mean, “mixtape”—and seems committed to a level of artistry few can match time be performs. And he did it while remaining his own goofy, good-hearted, Christian self—an archetype we haven’t seen in hip-hop before, and an innovation in and of itself.
The sound of Coloring Book—and of Chance the Rapper, writ large—is one of openness. He’s excited about his life, and wants you to be excited about your life, too. But, more than that, he’s trying to bottle up that feeling. He’s trying to evoke exactly what his particular brand of happiness—one colored by empathy and nostalgia as much as pure moment-to-moment joy—feels like musically. And over the past few years, he’s come thrillingly close.
He’s carved a sound—major chords and warm keyboards and stuttering drums—that’s entirely and recognizably his own. Coloring Book didn’t arrive fully-formed; Chance has been shaping his unique brand of music since 2012’s 10 Day, refining what his artistry means and sounds like with his close-knit band the Social Experiment for years. This album, though, was where everything cohered. His rapping is instinctual, bounding from carefully measured measured bars and wordplay to rapturous and guttural expressionism. Not since Kanye West has a rapper so plainly attempted to put every feeling they had into their music.
In the process, he’s emerged as one of the savviest music industry players in an unstable environment. In 2016, several artists used the still-nascent streaming economy to their advantage, getting ahead of the sea change the music industry’s been struggling with. Drake signed up with Apple Music, getting millions of dollars and billions of streams in the process. Frank Ocean, with some deft maneuvering that’s remained largely under the table, slid his way out of his label contract and released Blonde independently, for which streaming accounted for most of its listens. Chance, too, is at the forefront of a new kind of music industry—but he was the only one to predict it first.
For likely close to half a decade, Chance has been fending off label offers, even when the career path seemed hazy and the potential for failure seemed, to everyone but him, great. Instead, he was the first to figure out how the artist succeeds with the internet, rather than in spite of it. His other releases were completely independent, and his latest came with a partnership—like Drake’s and Frank’s—with Apple Music, which in its ambitions to corner the streaming market has begun operating as a de facto Medici family for artists like Chance. If that deal were to dry up tomorrow, though, Chance has proved he is nimble and inventive enough to handle any changes, and has a rabid fanbase that will follow him anywhere he chooses to go. It’s not Jay Z-style moguldom; it’s something more modest than that. Something we haven’t seen before. —Brendan Klinkenberg
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Q-Tip, Kendrick Lamar, Young Thug
In Sept. 1991, Q-Tip rapped that “the job of resurrectors is to wake up the dead.” He delivered the line in the same verse, on “Jazz (We’ve Got),” that saw him explain “the aim is to succeed and achieve at 21,” which is how old he was at the time. Twenty-five years later, at 46, Q-Tip brought the members of A Tribe Called Quest together to record a new album. During that process, in March, founding member Phife Dawg passed away. But Tip and Jarobi and Ali Shaheed Muhammad didn’t forget their jobs, and in November they released We Got It From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service, the final Tribe album. They resurrected the dead.
The album is a miracle, in large part because of Tip’s rapping. In his post-Tribe solo work he explored the possibilities of a more jazz and scat-inflected style, and the results sounded less written and more like tossed off freestyles than the brilliant displays of rhyme found on those early Tribe albums. Not here, though. He obviously had things he needed to say—about his country, about music, about aging, about friends, present and lost—and his lyrics sounded more deliberate and calculated than they had in years. This focus resulted in finely crafted verses like his contribution to “Lost Somebody,” in which he memorializes Phife and tries to explain the sometimes coarse texture of their long relationship. “Malik, I would treat you like little brother, that would give you fits/Sometimes overbearing though I thought it was for your benefit,” he raps, nearly out of breath but still enunciating. As youth-driven as hip-hop is, Tip’s performance in 2016 showed that it’s possible to make adult rap, sober and frank, that’s just as urgent and vital as the energetic displays of the genre’s youngest innovators.
Kendrick Lamar didn’t release career-defining work in 2016, like he did in 2015 and 2012, with To Pimp a Butterfly and good kid, m.A.A.d city, respectively. Instead, Untitled Unmastered, a rough collection of apparent studio leftovers, felt of a piece with the storm of jazz and American turmoil that produced Butterfly. Many of the songs were studio-cemented versions of live late-night performances; many of those songs were brilliant. They left no doubt that Kendrick is one of the best rappers in the genre’s history, but they didn’t deepen his story or lead the listener down a new, surprising path.
Elsewhere, he contributed verses to songs from Beyoncé, Danny Brown, A Tribe Called Quest, the Weeknd, Travis Scott, Kanye West, DJ Khaled, Maroon 5, Sia, BJ the Chicago Kid, and Isaiah Rashad, among others. Of those, “Really Doe,” “Goosebumps,” “No More Parties in L.A.,” “Holy Key,” and “Wat’s Wrong” were most deserving of praise, but none felt essential. It’s hard to imagine that he’d perform any of them during a show of his own in five years, the way certain guest features of, say, Jay’s have penetrated his solo catalog. In some ways, Kendrick Lamar was in cruise control in 2016. But what was startling is that his cruise control output now matches other rappers’ career-making years.
Young Thug may never be the best rapper alive for as long as he raps, but that’s in keeping with his artistic mission. Unlike Kendrick Lamar, who raps at a scholarly level, armed with history and precedent, Thug raps to complicate the act itself. What he does under the banner of hip-hop—toying with song structure, exploding his voice—prompts critics and listeners to coin words and subgenres. Still, in 2016 he released some of his most streamlined projects to date. Slime Season 3 and Jeffery in particular are compact machines, with so many strange twists and turns jammed into eight or ten track releases, like the exposed motherboard of a pocket-sized device. Songs like “With Them,” “Drippin,” “Webbie,” “Kanye West,” and “Pick Up the Phone” are crammed with creative turns of phrases, off-the-wall flows, and brief moments that would be repeated hooks for less adventurous artists. There’s no telling if this year will go down as the first sign of Thug trending toward more steady, stabilized musical output, or if his focus and stability last year was itself an anomaly. That sort of unpredictability is very much keeping in the spirit of Young Thug. —Ross Scarano
