2009: Best Rap Albums

One of the last fucking things I was expecting was for the third Felt album to be notable, let alone excellent, let alone the best rap album of the year. There is not a "What the fuck??" big enough for this. But oh what a happy whatthefuck it is. There's simply no shortage of shocks here. Murs fan though I am, I was ready to count him out as of last year, but here he is back on his game. Even Slug had lost some of my confidence in 08', but welp? Do I need to say it? But man, man oh man, the biggest star here is the producer, and he's no one you're expecting. It's Aesop fucking Rock, on production, his first time. And he is goddamned good at this stuff. I mean shit dude, he's maybe better then his own producer bud Blockhead. It's funny but I think it was a bad idea marketing wise to make this "Felt 3", that associates it with the past, while decent, mostly mediocre outings. To things that felt like the side projects they were. This isn't like that, it feels like a major album for all three men's careers. Two emcees who almost went pop, back to the bap. And a longtime emcee joining the ranks of exciting new producers. If I were Rosie Perez then I would engage in a helluva threesome.

Rating: 4.5
Highlights: Bass For Your Truck, Ghost Dance Deluxe, Revisiting the Styleetron, Glory Burning

So is this a mixtape or what? It hasn't exactly been clear, but after actually listening to it I've decided I don't give a shit what it's meant to be. It's too great to not be included on the year's list. So great that it's the second best album of the year in fact. First off, the reason it comes as mixtapey is a bunch of remixed tracks and a live track that dot the course of the thing, the sort of material that generally makes up a mixtape. But ignoring those there's a short albums worth of brand new full quality material on hand and it's all glorious stuff. It's like at this point the Cunninlynguists can do no wrong, they've reached some plateau where the possibilities just stretch out all the way into the horizon. All the same dope southern soul sounds that made Pieces of Strange and Dirty Acres modern classics are in play here and up to snuff. If this is what they're calling a mixtape? Then goddamn is that next actual album going to be a monster. If they aren't the saviors of hip-hop then at the very least they might singlehandedly be able to resuscitate the reputation of the south after the last four damaging years of crunk.

Rating: 4
Highlights: Move, Spark My Soul, Don't Leave (When Winter Comes), Distance

This album had me rolling my eyes when I started seeing it near the top of everyones 09' lists. Come on, how can a new batch of Dilla material be that good, yall are just buying hook line and sinker into his death hype, and turn around and wonder what people who still pay for crappy Tupac post-death albums are thinking. Plebes. Then I listened to it. And what the fuck it IS that good. Not only the instrumental tracks, but the ones where they chose rappers to rap over. It's all quite good and fresh. And it all shows just how amazing this guy really was. I was in particular happy to see some more of the stilted electro sound he played around with on Fantastic Vol.2, I thought that was dope there and was sad he seemed to never touch it again. But here, he does. And I have to give credit to Pete Rock, who took the careful time and effort in being the guy behind this compilation. He may have completely fallen off as a producer but he did a fantastic job here proving he definitely still has the sixth sense somewhere in him. This is no Suge Knight cash grab, this is the real deal. A smashing post-death (three years now after the fact!) album that would do Dilla proud.

Rating: 4
Highlights: Blood Sport, Expensive Whip, Reality Check, On Stilts

The starving, the hunger, the famine, even if we were dead middle in a new golden age, even better then the one from before, an era spewing out classics left and right, I STILL think people would be writhing on the ground like deprived crack addicts for new classic sounding Wu Tang, that's how crazy hard the grip the 93-97 Wu output is on people. It's almost ridiculous, and so it's going to take a long time to sift through the hype factor and fallout of this one, negative or positive, for people to get a clear picture of what sort of album this is. Or of course, there's actually listening to it for yourself. What I found was that this was definitely far above the dismal past decade par for the group, having significantly better performances from people I had almost given up on, and ditto for the producers (excepting some real duds on Dr. Dre's part). This is straight up, a good album. It's got the goods. Satisfactory, plentiful, and impressively consistent all things considered. Is it classic? No way. This is like No Said Date, more a grand reminder then it is a grand forward looking album like Fishscale. So no it's not Godfather Part II, but hey, it isn't Godfather Part III either. I'll take it.

Rating: 4
Highlights: Cold Outside, Gihad, 10 Bricks, We Will Rob You

Oh man, it feels like much longer then three years, maybe because his last album was such a no-count piece of shit? Maybe so. So it's more like six years! He's back though and boy have I missed listening to a Mos Def that gives a damn. The album is filled with good beats and an interesting approach or two. He's abandoned for the most part any genre hopping or singing stuff, this is no New Danger. Instead he seems to have gotten ever so slightly weirder. Not much, but still, just a bit. Madvillainy apparently has had his ear for awhile so maybe that slightly strange air surrounding his delivery and musical choices comes from that? Especially the shortness of a number of tracks? Madlib produced a few of these, and they're pretty good. I wonder if he plans to team up with him in the future and actually make a Madvillainy of his own (Moslib?). It's a great album though, really downright satisfying and I'm really glad it is at that. My only issue is the inferior mix of "Life in Marvelous Times" which has all sorts of flaws (including him singing off key for a few seconds!).

Rating: 4
Highlights: Supermagic, Audiotorium, Life In Marvelous Times (original mix), Pretty Danger

Brother Ali is not only white, but albino, so funny then that the only rapper who has sounded more full of soul is Cee-Lo. SOUL SOUL SOUL. I usually call stuff soul rap that picks it's production sound from the style world of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, stuff like what Dilla and ?uestlove make. But on the flipside here's Brother Ali making soul rap through his delivery and lyrics! Imagine that. Again, only Goodie Mob has touched on this before. More then any of his past work this really was soul rap. But..... it's not on the level of The Undisputed Truth sad to say. A bunch of good tracks, but it has some real yawn time as well. And Ant is starting to lose his production shine if you ask me... When Ali gets around to his next release, best buds or no, he should maybe start getting beats from someone else. Just a suggestion. Not a great album? But a good one. Nothing lost. Ali can still chug onward.

Rating: 3.5
Highlights: The Preacher, Breakin' Dawn, The Travelers, Us

DOOM roared like a lion in the mid-00's. The lord of the underground. Putting out a flurry of albums between 03 and 06. Then just like that he pretty much vanished, his projects halted almost entirely and his live appearances began to become both sporadic and worse...imposters sent by DOOM wearing his mask. He retreated into some sort of shell or something and so his legend went the way of the dodo roughly at the same time as 50 Cents. Now he re-emerges in a world that's pretty different from the mid-00's. Has he changed? No, not really at all. This is all the same ol' DOOM we knew and loved. Great hazy beats and likewise stream of conscious pop culture lyrics. One thing that isn't up to par is his voice quality, evidently he's been hitting the pipe even more judging on how ragged it sounds. It's the one real weakness on an otherwise satisfying record.

Rating: 3.5
Highlights: Gazillion Ear, Absolutely, Angelz, That's That

The first half is overproduced melodrama that squeezes the songs basically good lyrical/vocal content into a cartoon, including at it's worst a pointless remake of the great "If Rap Get's Jealous" from the previous LP. The music leaves nothing to the imagination and just comes off way too poppy. Thankfully the second half is superior and more of the same good stuff he was making on the debut album. Overall though? A real let down. The only change here from his previous is the poppier sound, so all in all it's stagnation. And it's bad because there's no one else in the game like him. If Knaan starts being subpar there's no one else to look to for his type of stuff. Damn it.

Rating: 3
Highlights: T.I.A., Somalia, Fatima, Take a Minute

To illustrate what the Slaughterhouse hype meant to me this was my reaction to hearing the name thrown around until about two months ago. "Is Masta Ace reissuing that? People sure are excited...". And guess what, that's still the better "Slaughtahouse", even if it was just a good album. Because this is, while pretty nice, very...forgettable and entirely not going to change the game at all in anyway. And frankly I don't get why anyone thought it would. There's nothing interesting about this except that it was a "supergroup", a supergroup of B to C List modern emcees. All of which I could care less about. It's pretty nice as I said though, I guess..man so what. This album? So what.

Rating: 3
Highlights: Sound Off, Lyrical Murderer, Microphone, Raindrops

Well I guess this is it, the point where you can write Em off forever, not that it's bad? But it's boring and completely filled with annoying choices on his part and signs he's forgotten what made him great back in the day. First off on almost every single track he adopts this stupid "funny" accent, it hurts plenty of tracks of their natural potential, and there's all sorts of bad choruses on every track almost. Nearly the whole thing is him trying to hard to be goofy, and missing out on the heavy shit that defined his second and third albums. There's not a memorable song on the thing either. Huge shame.

Rating: 2.5
Highlights: Bagpipes From Baghdad, Same Song & Dance, Beautiful, Underground