Fake For Real

Queen Key is the embodiment of rap's specific take on feminism. Instead of desexualizing women, she talks about her lust, loudly and proudly. Her approach, however, is different from the one CupcaKke, her Chicago colleague, opted for. Ke'Asha McClure is not that frontal and pornographic, she goes the humorous way, with a raspy voice that sounds older than she is. To male rappers who like to say "suck my dick", she answers Eat my Pussy with her last EP, the very project aimed at accelerating her career, now that she joined Machine Entertainment Group.

By 2011, just when his regional musical style started buzzing outside of Chicago, BlockOnDaTrack, a drill music beatmaker, decided it was time to offer a feminine voice to this virile and aggressive hip-hop subgenre. He convinced his cousin Kiara Johnson - a student trying to make a living out of a waitress job at McDonalds, who had never thought she could be a rapper - to record a song with him. This would result into "I Need a Hitta", a success with the local Chicago youth, and it would lead to another one, "Ridin' Around and Drillin'", which caught the attention of King Louie. Subsequently, the drill music veteran asked the young woman to join his own Lawless Inc. imprint, and he participated to her most famous and defining banger : "Pop Out". Thus started the career of Katie Got Bandz, who released afterwards a series of mixtape, and became the undisputed queen of drill.

To complement its new book published in May 2017, Mixtapes (French only), Fake For Real is sharing its own selection of mixtapes. Focusing exclusively on Northern American hip-hop, and on projects released in the 2000's and 2010's (i.e. not in a time when mixtapes were, well, actual mix-tapes), these 100 records are not the same as those listed in the book. Quality prevailed here, over representativeness.

The history of rap cannot be told, without a strong focus on mixtapes. Originally compilations of existing songs, recorded and mixed by DJs on audiocassettes, they became over time real albums, distributed on the Internet, sometimes for free. A core component of the hip-hop culture since its very beginnings, they have been, sometimes, more impactful and higher quality than official albums. After relating the surprising journey of the rap mixtape, through its multiple changes, this book reviews a selection of 100 gems, released by well-established rappers like 50 Cent, Cam'Ron, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, or more recent ones like Future, Earl Sweatshirt, Danny Brown, Freddie Gibbs, Action Bronson, Young Thug or Migos.

A close look at the main rappers in the early 2010's, will show that all were not newcomers. The obvious example, of course, was 2 Chainz. Tauheed Epps had to pass his 30th birthday, indeed, to become a hip-hop figurehead. But prior to this, he had a career. He'd been part of Ludacris' label, Disturbing tha Peace, as one half of Playaz Circle, a duo with his friend Dolla Boy. These two even had some success around 2007, with the single "Duffle Bag Boy", featuring a Lil Wayne in his heyday. After two albums, however, their days came to an end, and 2 Chainz had to reinvent himself as a solo artist. And he did it smartly: he chose a new alias, the previous one, Tity Boi, being a bit embarrassing; he used his address book to collaborate with first-class rappers; and he became one of the ambassadors of trap music, displaying a rather generic kind of it, but in a pleasant and goofy way.

MikeWiLLBeenTrill was not the first mixtape from Mike Will Made It. In the two years before, he had released all three volumes of his Est. in 1989 series. But in 2013, the Atlanta producer was at the apex of his fame; he was now notorious much beyond the (t)rap universe he had originated from. Around a dozen of that year's hit singles, were produced by him. And a few weeks before this new release, he had executively produced Miley Cyrus' Bangerz album, and signed a large part of its music. While the Disney star collaborated with this beakmaker from Atlanta's trap music scene and turned into a nasty girl, Mike Will expanded his aura to a large audience. As a matter of fact, more than his previous releases, MikeWiLLBeenTrill demonstrated that his collaborators were getting more diverse.

On the west side of the US, is the West Coast. But further west, there is Hawaii. Laura Yang, a.k.a. Neila, is from there. Nevertheless, it is actually the Californian rap scene, she is associated with; or more precisely its underground subset the rapper, DJ, producer and activist Deeskee organized around his LA2theBay website. Neila made a first appearance in his entourage, when she contributed to the best song on his Blacklight Sessions album, the nice "The Dream". And since then, she never stopped releasing music, until her recent Analog Jewelery in 2017.

When people who experienced the beginnings of rap, in the late 70's and early 80's, are asked about them, many confess that they hadn't realized, at first, that this was a brand new kind of music. What they heard sounded like a declination of funk, or disco, not a musical genre per se. And nowadays, it seems that rap itself has reached the same point. Now that it is giving way to sing-song, especially in Atlanta, its current capital city, some wonder if rap should still be called the same. Listening to artists like ILoveMakonnen, indeed, this question sounds legitimate.

It's never been easy for a woman to find her way into the rap game. First, she had to fight hard to become an equal to the frequently sexist male rappers. And then, she had to deal with her rivals; the audience, or the industry, curiously, always wanted just one female star per generation. And then, once all of this is achieved, any female rapper needed to position herself against the many stereotypes about her kind. She had to decide if she was a tomboy, or a bad bitch, or an R&B sentimentalist. Despite these many obstacles, however, many made it. Females matter, in hip-hop, as demonstrated by our selection of outstanding projects.

By the mid 2010's, in Atlanta, the guys from Awful Records would make their best to push even further the borders of rap. They were the next step, or the arrival point, of this long path toward the bizarre, the experimental and the hallucinated, many artists from that city had engaged on. In reality, though, this collective of rappers and producers was not entirely based in Georgia. Father, their leader, had investigated further, when conducting his quest for like-minded non-conformists. He had explored as far as Vancouver, in Canada. Thanks to the Internet magic, he had got in touch with Tommy Genesis, who would become the sixteenth member of the Awful crew, and would release with their support an outstanding first album.