Playlist - That's a Rap, Vol. 1

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There's been an ever expanding list of rappers over the past few years that have brought rap back to the forefront of music for me. Sometimes I wax poetic and think of the good ol' days when A Tribe Called Quest and Biggie (amongst so many others) were making the best rap music imaginable. But now there are rappers influenced by them, their sounds, the culture, and everything in between, spitting out their own rhymes. This is the best rap has been since those golden days in the 90s - just listen to Kendrick, Drake, A$AP Rocky, and Kanye. 

I finished Volume 3 of this playlist series today, but I thought it might make more sense to start from the beginning!

I made this playlist back in 2012 as I was discovering a number of my favorite rappers today, such as Childish Gambino, Kendrick, A$AP, Schoolboy Q, and Joey Bada$$. These were primarily my favorite songs by these guys at the time, and I'm hoping for those not as well versed in rap (or those who might have given up on rap for a bit) that this playlist will be a primer for the next two volumes I'll put up in the next few weeks or so!

Notes on the Hip-Hop Messiah

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"Like Nas – a one-time messiah himself – Lamar, a scrawny 25-year-old from Compton, was a visual poet. You can see Compton — the burger stands, the lights of the police cruisers, the 405 freeway — in every track of “good kid, m.A.A.d. city,” just as you can see the dice games, project hallways and parks of Queensbridge in Nas’s “Illmatic.”

- Jay Caspian Kang, Notes on the Hip-Hop Messiah, NY Times, March 24, 2015

Kang just wrote a great article on Kendrick Lamar, his last two albums, the classic good kid, m.A.A.d. city, and his recent album, To Pimp a Butterfly, and the meaning of "hip-hop messiah," which Kang defines as:

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