The New York Times has created a cool interactive feature playlist about the direction music is headed. Future, Lil Yachty, Migos and A Tribe Called Quest are among those named out of the list of 25 musicians and popular songs.
The interactive playlist comes coupled with essays attached to each artist and explores the idea of blended genres and the fact that everyone, no matter your background, listens to everything nowadays. The identity of each song doesn’t lie in the genre from where it comes, but within the artist and song itself.
Future
In a conversation with The Fader’s Amos Barshad in February, after a reported tango of trying to secure an interview with Future that saw him traveling from London to Toronto, the “Mask Off” superstar reveals something about himself without saying much.
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“Back then, I had no feelings,” he told Barshad of his 2011 hit single “Racks” with YC. “It wasn’t until I started doing music that I started to really have a conscience.”
This is clear as listeners can hear the tender emotion present in the music he’s released from last year’s Purple Reign to his #1 album HNDRXXin 2017.
Lil Yachty
How did Pop get here? It’s a question Jamie Lauren Keiles poises while trying to grasp the idea that 19-year-old Atlanta rapper Lil Yachty, self-professed king of teens, happens to be the kiddos’ favorite rapper. “Somewhere along the way we get busy with work, or prioritize movies, or decide to have kids and look up to find we’ve lost the thread,” Keiles pens, noting that the generation before who also started living life maybe wondered the same thing once upon a time.
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“I’m not a rapper,” Yachty often adamantly proclaims in interviews as he proudly owns his purposely branded image of beaded fire-engine red plaits and quirky style.
Migos
Migos signifies the Punk Rock direction Rap is going in within the mainstream realm. The Fader’s editor-in-chief Naomi Zeichner examines how their #1 Hot 100 Billboard hit (and Donald Glover’s favorite song) “Bad and Boujee” featuring Lil Uzi Vert provides solace and positivity when the song comes blaring through club speakers while moving the entire club’s populace in sync. It’s more than likely most club-goers favorite part of the night, for now, after merrily having one too many drinks.
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“If Migos has to pose in punk-rock outfits to be recognized as a voice for its generation, at least it’s an authentic pose: The punks I know love their music deeply,” Zeichner writes.
A Tribe Called Quest
Digging into 2017’s nutty Donald Trump’s America politics is A Tribe Called Quest’s “We the People ….,” encouraging the resistance. Harlem writer Greg Tate emphasizes the iconic rap group’s ability to comfortably find its way into today’s musical landscape where Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar are making similar political statements with both their music and performances.
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ATCQ made theirs this past February at the Grammys when they performed “We the People ….” and sparked cranky conversations among those opposed while giving the song to another audience that would have otherwise buried their heads in the sand.
And as Tate puts it, “Its lyrics name and gather together all the targeted — Mexicanfolk, Muslimfolk, gayfolk, womenfolk, #BlackLivesMatterfolk — under one force field.”
Kanye West
Kanye West brought Chicago music back to its roots with The Life of Pablo cut “Fade” featuring Post Malone and Ty Dolla $ign. No, not the sounds of Young Chop-produced Chief Keef lullabies that Chi-Town has been recently known for. No, not the Savemoney Rap alternative to the Chi’s reflective Southside music embedded in Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa’s hymns.
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House. A genre which fanatically enveloped the Windy City and Detroit during the mid-’80s among the metropolis’ Black population. Like so many genres founded by Black Americans such as Jazz, R&B, Rock and Country, House too was founded right there in the city currently immersed in violent turmoil.
“House music — much like West himself — is unabashedly black and Chicago-bred, but somewhere along the line, it grew cozy in Europe and came to be seen as catering to white people,” New York Times contributing writer Thomas Chatterton Williams pens in his essay.
“Fade” brings the genre’s importance full circle, allowing for those who didn’t know, to now know.
Missy Elliot
Missy Elliot has always been an innovator in Hip Hop from her fashion, production and style of rap. “I’m Better” is no exception and, as it’s pointed out within this 25-song playlist, she’s somehow able to take now and place it into tomorrow.
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“For Elliott to position herself within a style that’s popular and yet often derided, usually by Northerners and hip-hop fans over the age of 25 — for her to sprinkle her flavor on the 2017 iteration of music made for the subwoofers in your Jeep — does a real service to youth culture,” writes culture editor for Jezebel, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd. “More than most rappers, she seems to bend time to her will. And if she can’t stop it, she will swerve around it.”
Solange
Unapologetically Black is Solange‘s “F.U.B.U.” Catapulted from the door steps of the urban fashion brand with the same name, aimed at making clothing For Us, By Us, Solo’s song serves the same purpose.
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It’s an infectious bop that tempts those outside of the circle to sing along, but don’t dare utter the word “nigga.” Out of respect, this one is for us…let us have it, Solange situates within the number.
The Turner House author Angela Flournoy points out in her essay that, “Art finds who it finds, and the white gaze lands where it lands. The more you try to ignore it, the more it seems keen on dissecting you. Knowles is aware of this. The deliberate rejection of white scrutiny is part of a long tradition of black art-making.”
Young M.A
“Young M.A raps what she knows,” The Ringer’s Hannah Giorgis writes in her essay. “She’s not only a woman rapping but also a masculine-presenting queer woman in an industry that is dominated by heterosexual men.”
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That’s the embodiment of “OOOUUU” without being so in-your-face with it. Everyone was singing and dancing along to the song that practically dominated the summer of 2016. While queer Hip Hop artists are nothing new, Young M.A’s presence among other mainstream artists who took it upon themselves to remix the song like Nicki Minaj, French Montana and 50 Cent, it’s a start of gay-acceptance within the Hip Hop community, a place that has been largely regarded as anti-gay.
“What’s more significant than M.A’s queerness is the way she deftly weaves references to sex with women into her music without overstating or explaining them,” Giorgis continues. “If you know, you know. And if you don’t, you can still enjoy her music.”
Ka
Rap is a hobby for “Mourn at Night” rapper Ka. The song, lifted from his 2016 album Honor Killed the Samurai isn’t quite the boom-bap rap you’d expect from a Hip Hop artist who takes a sort-of old school route of selling his music out the trunk of his car (he does have a website as well).
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“Ka is the rare rapper who handles both rhymes and beats, writing his lyrics and producing the music that accompanies them,” NYT contributor Jody Rosen points out. “He has directed most of his videos, and he self-releases his music, on his own label.”
His sound is very much his own and riddled with storytelling. He’s a firefighter by day and rapper by night. The combination of the two created a conundrum in the minds of those who refuse to understand the origins of the genre so much so that the New York Post made a poor attempt at writing an exposé about him allegedly moonlighting as a cop-hater.
Check out the full list here.
