Fake For Real

This is a new trend with today's rappers: they want to be rock stars. Though their subject matters – sex, drug and money – remain pretty much the same, their nihilist attitudes and imageries are heavily influenced by hardcore punk. See Playboi Carti's Die Lit cover art, for example. And the same goes with Rico Nasty on her latest mixtape, the first since she joined a major label. Nasty, indeed, his full of angry songs, blended with abrasive voices and furious guitars, like "Trust Issues", "In the Air", and the one summarizing it all: the outstanding "Rage".

At first glance, this mixtape was some pure Los Angeles material. A few local rappers featured on it, like YG, Problem, and Joe Moses, and it was produced by the D.R.U.G.S. crew, later known through its association with Ty Dolla $ign. But its main player rapped with an accent and a style originated from the Dirty South. Iggy Azalea, though, was neither from California, nor from Georgia. She was even not an African-American, but a white, blonde and Australian lady. Fascinated by US rap music since she fell in love with 2Pac, Amethyst Kelly had flown before the age of 16 to the country of her idols. She had lived in Miami, Houston, and Atlanta, before relocating to the West Coast, per her label's recommendation.

The new fad with silly rappers; the weirdness of artsy hip-hop, mixed with the most extreme offenses of gangsta rap; the confessions, the vulnerability, the thugs with bleeding hearts; the confusion between mixtapes and regular albums; web marketing, and its role in the advent of new talents; and the atmospheric sounds tagged as cloud rap. These trends have defined rap music, in the 2010's. And one man, in the late 2000's, heralded all of them; or at least, he represented them. This man, was Brandon McCartney, a.k.a. the BasedGod, a.k.a. Lil B.

Jeezy's glory days happened by 2005, no doubt. During that year, indeed, he released his (classic) mixtape Trap or Die, a record from his band, Boyz n da Hood, and also his (classic, again) solo album, Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101. By then, he was just the most important rapper on Earth, period. But the following years have been good ones as well, especially when, from 2009 through 2012, from Trap or Die Part 2 to It's Tha World, he released some of his best mixtapes. Among those, the two editions of The Real Is Back, released respectively in May and September 2011, and produced essentially by Lil Lody, deserve to be mentioned. Originally aimed at heralding a new album, Hustlerz Ambition, the last of the Thug Motivation trilogy, they proved, over time, to be significantly better.

By the end of the naughties, almost two decades after the beginnings of his own Three 6 Mafia, and after the career apotheosis his Academy Award and the success of "Stay Fly" had been, Juicy J decided to focus on his solo career. He released a few albums, like Hustle Till I Die in 2009, and Stay Trippy in 2013, but also several mixtapes, including both editions of Rubba Band Business, two collaborative works with Lex Luger. By requiring the help of a producer sixteen years younger than he was, the guy behind Waka Flocka's and Rick Ross' latest bangers, the Memphis veteran surely wanted to demonstrate that he was aging well; and indeed, he was.

There was a time when, by the end of the naughties, rap music seemed to turn into the new international pop. It was mixing more and more, indeed, with other genres like rock, or electronica. A few notorious rappers were leading the trend, like Kanye West, Kid Cudi, and later on Drake; and of course we could talk about the hit machine Black Eyed Peas, originally a pure hip-hop band, had turned into. Another man went into that direction, though in a more hipster way. With his fashion victim looks, Theophilus London, a New-Yorker of Trinidadian descent who would be actively sponsored by Kanye West, actually looked like a hipster fantasy: as a matter of fact, the 2011 edition of the Cannes Film Festival would love him.

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.

Rap is no longer the light-hearted music it used to be, a while ago. Neither its conscious side – or what’s left with it – nor the materialistic and violent one, radiate joy and happiness. Even the most hedonistic kind of rap, the one tailored for clubs and dancefloor, is more about debauchery, drug addiction and mental disorders, than about passion for life. Even when it is all about power and success, it smells badly of revenge and competition. And so, when in 2015 Kamaiyah released "How Does it Feel", this single was welcome like some bowl of fresh air.