Danny Brown, “uknowhatimsaying?” – Danny ditches the party drugs and party beats to team up with Q-Tip for some Grown Man Rap.YBN Cordae, “The Lost Boy” – This Maryland rapper offers frank, soulful raps.Patrick’s Top Ten of 2019 (in order of how much I listened to them) Sankofa, “$5,000 Flashlights/102 Magnets” Now on to my favorite albums of rap and rap-adjacent albums of 2019. I don’t know the path forward, but I do know that the current situation isn’t working. The artists, on the other hand, are sometimes making single digit paychecks, and very few are able to make money in the digital age. My Spotify subscriptions helps make a bunch of tech workers six figure paychecks and their investors seven or eight figure paychecks. When I bought a CD, the artist would at least get a couple dollars. The downside of all this is that artists have been mostly left out of the monetization of streaming. I’m even considering getting rid of 80% of my CD collection to make space, since I just stream everything anyways. That gradually transitioned to zip files with MP3s, and now it is almost 100% streaming. One final decade-end thought: in 2010, I still got packages with promo CDs and press releases. I think this site has done and continues to do an excellent job of championing hip-hop music with the passion and sincerity that only comes from being true heads. To be clear, I am only commenting on my own writing and approach. I’m not apologizing for being a hip-hop fan or for writing about music I love, but I do wish I had gone about doing so with a little more humility and awareness at times. I am more aware now about how I hold and take up space in communities, and I hope that is reflected in my more recent writing. I didn’t always appreciate that incredibly vital, important music doesn’t always have vital, important subject matter. I wasted too much virtual ink criticizing artists for being materialistic and rapping about having fun vs.
There were times when my attitude towards the people making and consuming the art was patronizing and paternalistic. I came to hip-hop through punk rock, and for a long time I felt rappers should be rapping about the stuff I thought was important, not what was meaningful to them.
While for the most part my reviews hold up, there is stuff in there that doesn’t reflect how I currently engage with hip-hop.
I’ve been rereading some of the reviews I wrote in the last decade, and it has been a learning experience. One of the many benefits of RR’s new look is that it is easy to look at reviews by author.
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