As a refreshing alternative, Guy and Howard Lawrence created a track bound to an indestructible house beat and filled with the types of chord extensions more commonly featurfs in jazz or Steely Dan albums than standard chart fare, allowing for Sam Smith to unleash their jaw-dropping vocals. The Best Albums of the ra. The U. Listen: St. With her lover behind the wheel, Newsom addresses some regrets that haunt the romance, namely her own confusion. Rich Brian, Joji, Dumbfoundead, and the Higher Brothers, in particular, are leading the charge for Asian representation best rap features 2010s keyboard rap music as the decade draws to a close.

Atmospheric, vibey production characterized the work of artists like Future , XXXTentacion and Young Thug and nearly every rapper releasing music during the period. The decade flew by, but rappers were as prolific as ever, leaving behind a stockpile of great music to soundtrack the s. Drake was the nucleus, always attached to an emerging or trendy sound, whether it was emo, dancehall-inspired, trap or afrobeat. Travis Scott catapulted to superstardom in the decade's latter half, releasing inescapable classics like "Pick Up the Phone" and "Antidote.

Migos and Rae Sremmurd each dropped No. Cardi B did the same the following year, with "Bodak Yellow. With the decade coming to a close, XXL highlights the 63 songs that define the s.

Balvin worked with William to reinvent the source material, adding Spanish lyrics, chants, and ferocious Latin percussion. In a state of mourning, though, something that should be sweet can often turn sour. With this song, at least, Yorke makes it sound beautiful. The piano chords are simple and translucent; the beat ambles casually. Young M. Against a loose, snare-heavy beat, she raps breezily about sex with other women—a rarity in hip-hop that she plays off nonchalantly amid lines about getting drunk and cracking jokes with friends.

The coyote howl of the title is both a tease and a triumph, the sound of finally feeling at home in your own skin and inviting others to play along with you. Listen: Young M. It begins with a clip of the crew of the Challenger realizing the malfunction on their spaceship, giving the love story that follows an undercurrent of mortality.

Turns out she had a sinus infection during the recording. But carnivals themselves are a form of trickery: youthful joy on the surface, covering a shadowy underbelly. The Migos became mainstream stars. The song itself is a perfect distillation of everything that makes the Migos irresistible: a Gucci Mane-derived gift for quotables, a sizzling Metro Boomin beat, ad-libs for days, and an ear for perfectly placed guest stars—in this case, a before-he-was-huge Lil Uzi Vert, rapping about falling asleep in a jacuzzi.

Soon enough, the Migos were matching chart feats once set by the Beatles, cementing their status as generational titans. Lil Uzi Vert]. The U. Waka Flocka Flame]. Above all the roaring maximalism, Healy is tuned to the sound of his many, many desires: for attention, sex, intellectual validation, intimacy, and, quite possibly, immortality. With this, he embodies a very millennial mindset: as eager to promote himself as he is to air all of his insecurities.

A Tribe Called Quest have never been conscious or woke in the way that so many of the best-intentioned rappers are. Instead, they adopt the playful, nihilistic tone of high cultural gatekeepers, turning it back onto those same gatekeepers over kick snare and hi-hat.

We got it from Here When it came time for Sampha to write and record his debut album, the UK singer was in mourning. The instrument is likened to a childhood friend who helped him channel his despair into song. As Sampha narrates his coming of age, the hiss of room tone and the cooing of birds can be heard deep in the mix. The effect is one of intimacy, of being welcomed into a private moment of respite. Few moments in pop this decade have delivered this level of ecstatic catharsis; only big rooms and big crowds can do it justice.

But Drake steals the show, drowning in his double cup while taking shots at the throne , perfectly paired to a beat from fellow Canadians T-Minus, Nikhil S.

Drake, Rick Ross, and Lil Wayne]. Doom metal trio Sleep became legends by doing a few simple things very well. They played slow.

They played loud. They made smoking pot sound like an epic journey on par with Lord of the Rings. Close your eyes , they seem to say, There is a band playing in your head, and they are getting high. The lead single from the mega-selling breakup album 21 transformed her into a global star, and she has hardly made anything like it since.

Her vocal control, the way she allows melisma to curl around the edges of her voice, is like a superpower that needed this song to reveal it. The sampled guitars might be from a Modern Baseball song, or maybe another Lil Peep song entirely, and the first voices on the track are a half-buried sample of the California pop-punk band Better Luck Next Time; the echoes run together the same way that incoming headlights smear into one beam when you squint.

It has the lifespan of a soap bubble, this fleeting burst of euphoria. You feel the urge to protect it. The chorus, meanwhile, zooms out into the cosmos, as she pays homage to fallen musical heroes like David Bowie and Prince. Listen: St. Produced by L. Dissolution has never sounded so delicious. Schoolboy Q]. Simple tools are almost always the most effective, as the Detroit DJ proves here. With its occasionally washed out vibe, it has the feel of being prewritten to play the way a great DJ would deploy it, teasing out its peaks.

Every line is uttered with both mesmerizing cockiness and vulnerability. In the back half of the s, Afropop exploded in popularity, with countless artists attempting to hop on the trend. I have more than there are states in America. Popcaan and Gaza Slim].

Katy is neither a belter nor a cooing soubrette but an everygirl, imbuing her vocals with relatable frankness and yearning. She moves back and forth between cool confidence and total surrender at the speed of a strobe light flicker, taking listeners along like a hand pulling them onto the dancefloor.

The point is that this is all happening, all at once. The vocal: a mangled Auto-Tune yelp about paternity paranoia, cheating, and child support that includes a comparison between serial infidelity and apartheid.

The song is about as ugly a piece of music as was made this decade, and yet it was leeringly ugly, purposefully so. The music Kanye was cooking up to feed his overheated imagination was so lurid and tactile that, for this blazing moment and others, it held everything together. She lets her imagination run wild as she outlines the course of a hypothetical relationship, jumping from the quiet intimacy of a shared toothbrush to impromptu marriage. Featuring a jangly guitar solo and propulsive backing vocals, the song is deliriously catchy—but with repeated listens, its upbeat surface begins to crack.

Is Zauner singing about a new relationship, or is she desperately trying to breathe life into one that has grown stale? Is the repeated title phrase a genuine celebration of attraction, or a mockery of romantic idolization? More rap careers end at age 30 than begin at age In , Danny Brown was acutely aware of this fact, as he said goodbye to his 20s and made his final push towards rap stardom Best Rap Walk Up Songs 2020 Uk after spending years trapped in the industry spin cycle.

What begins as absurdist punchline rap quickly devolves into a catalog of personal chaos. Even listening to the song now, in the wake of eight years of triumphs for the Detroit MC, it still devastates.

August 25, During her performance at the VMAs, Miley Cyrus mimes anilingus on another woman, pleasures herself with a foam finger, and twerks all over Robin Thicke. The song is one of their many continuing tributes to late bandmate Nathan Maddox, who was struck by lightning on a Chinatown rooftop in , and a door to the next phase of their career.

First comes a slow shift from spoken-word drift to full-on groove; then, synths that rain down with a classical sense of drama. In , Nicki Minaj was at the center of a burning debate about rap, pop, and credibility. Here was Nicki flipping bars over an alien beat as thrilling as the rapper herself, filled with synths and drums that buzz and bang and bubble. It felt quietly ironic, then, that her best song of the era would plug into an emotional well older than time: heartbreak.

Long after the summer breezes by, its anthems live on. Together, the trio turned out a track as catchy as it is charming, one that should go down as a memorable addition into the backyard barbecue canon. Brent Faiyaz and Shy Glizzy]. And then people heard it, and all those factors floated away, irrelevant.

If there is a sports analogy to be made, it is less Stockton and Malone , and more Stockton and Stockton : Gunna and Baby find each other in perfect position, then pass out of it, to an even more perfect position. Their dynamic has the same feel as Watch the Throne -era Kanye and Jay, not trying to make a mark by outdoing each other, just ruminating on the ever-evolving idea of hedonism, and emerging with no answers. Lil Baby]. These lines about unbelonging also double as a metaphor for the constrictions she faces as a major-label artist who is expected to churn out chart hits but prefers to tweak and deconstruct them instead.

Christine and the Queens]. Earned wisdom is a part of getting older; rarely does it sound this accomplished. You know those old monster movies, the ones where an almighty beast lumbers through a terrified city, toppling buildings and swatting planes out of the sky as bullets bounce off his torso?

At some point, Rick Ross must have leaned forward in his leather chair and thought to himself, What would it sound like if that monster were rapping right now?

For four minutes, the rapper takes the form of an all-powerful, coke-fueled leviathan laughing with maniacal disdain as he demolishes any obstacle standing between him and his bottom line.

All you can do is build a statue in his honor and marvel at the merciless efficiency of his wrath. Styles P]. It should feel normal, but it was thrilling to witness a woman governed only by her own rules, acting like a man.

And why bother? Put to music with radio heavy-hitters DJ Mustard, Frank Dukes, and Starrah, the song is sexy and savage, a way for Rihanna to flex her unique ability to inhabit the tastes and feelings of both Gen Z and Gen X. It resonated massively but quietly, becoming her longest-charting hit without ever hitting the Top 5.

Gil Scott-Heron had a love-hate relationship with the city he called home for most of his life. The music is busy yet austere, prodding and cajoling Scott-Heron with jump-rope rhythms, disruptive clatter, and a bassline that pulsates like the jarring rumble of a subway car.

The past tense hurt when the song was released in , and it only stung more when he died a year later. The two baby-faced brothers had a club anthem Best Rap Songs 1999 Movies on their hands, though many were skeptical about their ability as rappers and wrote them off. As the Danish band kicked up a rockabilly storm, they showed that they have more to offer than clenched-fist angst. Her breakthrough single is clear in that affection; she roves over narcotic synths and trap drums with icy vocal tones, her gently libertine words delivered in an unhurried rap cadence.

Sending nudes of such high quality that the recipient uses up all their data. Comparing a dick to the Statue of Liberty. The track also shows that she can spit better than anyone in the room, and is able to lace her verses with the wit, puns, and vivid imagery of an elite songwriter. CupcakKe delivers it all over an instrumental ready for an overstuffed, sweaty club—the perfect place to experience her brilliance. The song flows slowly, picking up rattling hi-hats and strobing synthesizer as it oozes along the dancefloor.

Each syllable is drawn out like taffy, and her voice hovers just above a whisper, as if she wants you to lean in a little closer. Kamasi Washington is an artist who needs room to meditate, sculpt, engineer. You know, king shit. The strategy should be nearly impossible to pull off, and yet the Atlanta star is one of the most gifted stylists in contemporary rap.

But still he rises to the occasion by plumbing the depths of drug abuse. Martin Luther King, Jr. Working with his band the Violators, producer John Agnello, and an expanded cast, Vile replaced the bleary atmosphere of his earliest releases with crystalline finger-picking, and the mumbled aphorisms with odes to his loved one. It sounds full while barely rising above a whisper. Under the anxiety and damage are the same elemental urges, where every momentary escape holds the promise of nothing, now and forever.

In the video, he mugged with diamond teeth and coiled-up charisma—shirtless, venomous. At the start of the decade, pop music taught teenagers what their desires were, not the other way around. According to the radio, teen dreams were filled with earth-shattering parties and unconscionable excess tracked to wall-of-sound synth production best suited for football stadiums. In the years since, the genre has grown bleaker, replacing maximalist odes to excess with bummed-out songs stressing isolation and anxiety.

In , Young Thug descended from an unknown planet equipped with a language that everyone was dying to learn and a melody that reshaped what we thought we knew about rappers who sing. More important was what he did with those vocals: chopping, re-pitching, and layering them with his own processed voice, creating a strange, hybrid call-and-response that floated, web-like, over synths as spongy as marshland.

It was the sound of a new world coming into focus, and it would guide his music for years to come. She also straddles a mechanical bull while wearing a drenched undershirt.

A trance-y bridge with digital strings seals the deal on this masterclass in contemporary pop. The lead single of her debut album, Immunity , reintroduced her with new vigor and undeniable shine.

Hailing from the most anarchic corners of the social internet but also Atlanta , Carti is someone whose promise will always outpace his official output, and that is by design.

And no one has ever wielded that energy as fluidly as DJ Rashad. Spinn and Taso]. By grafting a fashionably clipped pop melody over a retro, Shabba Ranks-inspired Caribbean fusion beat, producers Skrillex and BloodPop created one of the best tropical house hits of the decade. Here is an anthem for anyone who has felt adrift, abandoned, unsure of their purpose in the world. By any conventional wisdom, a five-minute, three-part suite of a song should have never become a phenomenon in a climate where dwindling attention spans are leading to shorter and shorter hits.

Once the funky second beat hits, you forget about Drake as Travis takes center stage with some of the best rapping of his career. But by , he was reduced to guesting on anonymous Max Martin and will. But instead of conveying intense feelings with a chilly shrug, Usher is clearly pained as he eulogizes a failing relationship in a lonely falsetto.

Agonizingly, Burial never gave us a proper follow-up to his classic album Untrue this decade, instead resorting to intermittent singles and EPs. When the full song finally arrived, the instrumentation was pretty much just those four bars over and over, and it was still engrossing.

Daft Punk take the right parts of this song either incredibly seriously or not seriously at all. Really, the record was a deeply accomplished inquiry into the possibility of a feminine sound that gravitated towards the grotesque. Williams has never sounded more monumental or self-possessed. They may have made their name on rollercoaster hooks fit for Warped Tour—influencing the likes of Snail Mail, Princess Nokia, and Lil Uzi Vert in the process—but here they grew into themselves, anticipating the influence of blown-up Hot Topic emo in the unlikeliest of places.

Brooklyn synth-pop aesthetes Chairlift were a sneakily influential act right up until their split in What comes through is the giddy sensation of falling so deeply in love that nothing quite makes sense except a warm embrace. Giving so much of yourself to someone else is always a risky proposition, but for three and a half minutes, Chairlift make the act of devotion sound worth it.

Its delicate notes are pierced by a prickly guitar before Tividad and Tucker launch in, singing in tandem. Together, they reminisce about how easy life felt when they were childhood friends, when reality confined itself to the surrounding neighborhood and the complexities of life had not yet made themselves known.

Together, they stand on the precipice of adulthood and eulogize a time when the future was just another question waiting to be answered. But like Roger Troutman of Zapp and other funk pioneers of the past, Fetty used effects not to sanitize or correct his voice, but to inject even more emotion into it. And when the synths in the verses lurch like warm blood rushes of adrenaline, or arousal, Chris conveys a real-time sense of being overcome by acceptance for the first time.

In this way, Kendrick Lamar is an anomaly: As dense as his lyrics can be, he zooms out onto big ideas that are resonant and impactful to the masses. In the face of a growing, grinning wave of genocidal hate-speech delivered with the presidential seal of approval, Lamar shouts forth the steely confidence of a people ready to bark and bite back, standing on roots that run centuries deep.

Those big West Coast waves that Dora surfed half a century ago are rendered endless in the mesmerizing rhythm of the song. She coos sweet salutations into the receiver, he untangles verses about the terrors of opening up—be it the digital fear of unlocking your phone for a snoopy lover or the analog fear of sitting by, waiting, and having to bear your soul when the phone is finally answered. It feels like two people figuring things out. No pyrotechnic breasts , psychedelic candy landscapes , or glow-in-the-dark alien abductions : just Katy, her ripped beau, and some similarly photogenic pals on a sepia-toned drive along the beach.

At the time Perry recorded it, she was attempting to become more than a pop novelty. Meanwhile, she was midway through her 20s, about to get married, and entering a decade where her propensity for unsubtle gestures of positivity would fall in and out of fashion. The popularity of the track led its makers to recoil from the spotlight and quietly switch off the TNGHT signal, which is fair enough.

Who knew the shy producer from whispery indie rock trio the xx could also throw a great party? Young Thug and Popcaan]. A heartfelt tribute to a notoriously terrible brand of cigarettes became a career-making moment for Mac DeMarco. With his inaugural solo mini-album Rock and Roll Night Club , the Canadian singer established himself as a weirdo skeez with a shit-eating grin—a guy whose songs showed tons of promise if you pierced through the thick coats of deep-voiced, slow-motion gimmickry.

The unlikely love song ends with the sound of him lighting up, inhaling, and collapsing into a fit of echoing coughs. It sounds off at first, but as the strings quiver and the unquantized drums tick along, every instance of the word becomes a knowing wink, a flash of intimacy. The song includes a spoken word intro in Spanish, along with violin, viola, contrabass, sitar, multiple guitars, horns, synths—even a Curtis Mayfield sample.

With these words, Jordan builds a scarecrow outline of her relationship just to torch it all to the ground. For a virtuoso whose music explores the outer reaches of funk, yacht rock, and astral jazz, Thundercat has always shown a sensitive undercurrent. In his first two solo albums, he slowed down a George Duke love anthem, sang adoringly about his cat, and composed a heart-wrenching tribute to a late friend. Then, in an interlude, his trusty bass falls away and he sings some ethereal oooohs , pinpointing a sweet spot between boldness and fragility.

This was the music video that launched a thousand pearl-clutching critiques, along with about as many think pieces about its radical significance. In it, Rihanna nonchalantly threatens her accountant with a phrase often wielded by men. In the process, she kidnaps and tortures his wife, before taking a chainsaw to his neck.

There are umteen ways to read into the politics of this video: What kind of violence are we sensitized to, and what makes us squirm? What does it look like for a woman to be powerful and angry while also being feminine? How are white women complicit in and benefitting from the bad behavior of white men?

But ultimately, determining whether this video is Good and Feminist or Bad and Cancelled is futile; what freedom looks like for any woman cannot be simplified into one set of rules. Since the storm hit, Segarra continuously tried to find her way back to her ravaged ancestral homeland in a way that would allow her to give without taking. She finally made it in December But Yorke never abandoned the studio version, eventually forgoing the experimental synthesizers and Rhodes piano he kept trying to make work in favor of soft piano chords.

May the gods protect the DJ who cut away from the weepy grand pianos before the beat change—that switch-up is the point, the gas pedal. Then, for extra horror-core effect, he adds a blood-curdling scream every few bars. The three-part, minute hyperspace cruise through time, styles, and cool-eyed character observations offered monumental proof that he was capable of miracles.

Egyptian pharaohs, Las Vegas sex workers, uncredited John Mayer guitar solos—somehow, he made all of it sound like it belonged. When Japandroids frontman Brian King graduated college, he watched his friends from small town British Columbia, Canada quickly settle into normalcy—weddings, mortgages, babies—and thought, Well, fuck that.

So he started a band with drummer Dave Prowse and dreamed up a song about teenage abandon, blooming lust, and jumping out of bed to grab a beer with your best friend.

But the alliance that had seemed to foreshadow many more seasons of Cash Money primacy instead dissolved rather quickly, and all three artists have feuded with each other on and off ever since. Charli XCX is sonic science fiction. At her best, which she is here, Charli XCX cracks a key pop music code: doing as much with as little language as possible. Kelela was an easy sell as an underground icon: Her vocals flexed with all the acrobatic skill her generation had learned from Janet, Brandy, and Mariah, while her style whet the palates of the ultramodern Opening Ceremony devotees who run the fashion world.

The beats Best Rap Walkout Songs 98 did the rest: The handclaps that drive the track forward are a call-to-action for hips and tongues across genres, from Miami bass to baile-funk to house, drenched in a synth-bed that sounds like a sunrise let-out from a Bed-Stuy afterhours club. On the other end are pencil-sharp female rappers dragging the genre to new edges from behind cat-eye makeup.

They aren't concerned with celebrating femininity, or anything else for that matter—they simply grab for your throat, no matter how you identify. Carefree nights have been poisoned by the constant threat of nuclear warfare; her beloved Malibu is ravaged by monstrous wildfires; nothing feels like it used to, and holding onto hope no longer seems plausible.

The end of the world has never felt so assured. For four heavenly minutes, the song suspends gravity, accompanying Jeremih with production as weightless as his voice: plinking pianos, gentle swooshes, and helium-infused trap drums that float toward blue sky like a bouquet of heart-shaped balloons.

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