Stuffed with cameos by sundry luminaries of the hip-hop underground, this is an ideologically messy gem, made coherent by beats chock full of odd samples, produced by Quelle and others and his crusty, sharply self-aware performance. "Feels like my birthday today, and those are the worst days / If it's a race for the end, then why come in first place?" he raps on "Birthdaze." Some of the best songs on Being You Is Great, I Should Be You More Often - the illustrated cover depicts him as mirror images, one frowning and the other with a toothy grin - find Quelle sifting through his thoughts. On "I'm That Nigga," he brags about sporting the baddest ladies, "each city, each town." The Detroit-bred nomad, who has briefly claimed residence in cities from Oakland to Brooklyn, doesn't try to resolve his inner contradictions. But he hungers for the spoils of lyrical warfare, too. He calls rival rappers "clones" on "The Prestige" (which also boasts an incredible soliloquy from Jean Grae). Quelle Chris is no shrinking violet in fact, the stereotype of indie-backpackers-as-schoolmarms hasn't held true since the Dillatroit/Madvillain/Okayplayer wave of the mid-aughts. Quelle Chris, Being You Is Great, I Should Be You More Often Among 2017's best LPs, these are some that challenged or complicated America's record on race, detailed a strong sense of place while critiquing widespread cultural erasure, or broke conventions of genre, gender and identity within the space of rap itself. In the same spirit, NPR Music's roundup of the year's 21 best hip-hop albums is themed around the politics of race, space and place. He chose to look at this "defining aspect of the sound" in a "larger, deeper sense," he says, "not just as a hip-hop thing, but a thing about racial identities and the way places get attributed to certain people in society." "The music I was listening to was always articulating place-based identities - whether it's Hollis, Queens or Brooklyn South Bronx," Forman recently told me, recalling his original inspiration for the book. It's as true today as it was 15 years ago, when academic Murray Forman published his book The Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip Hop. Where you're at, so to speak, and how you choose to cultivate and represent that space – whether real or imagined - matters. In hip-hop, as elsewhere, the personal is always political. It's sonic uprising happened amid a national backdrop of political upheaval, racial discord, violent demonstrations and revelatory reckoning around the systemic abuses of power and gender inequality that hits so close to home in this genre. But hip-hop did not ascend to new heights in a vacuum. Indeed, the Internet is chock full of them. In a year this robust, it would be easy to make an exhaustive list of the best releases. And Rapsody reigned supreme over nearly everybody. Kendrick Lamar exposed his prophetic struggle on an altar of self-sacrifice.
and Cyhi The Prynce transcended the traps and clichés of Southern rap. Lil Uzi Vert and Future went hyper-emo over loves lost and loathed.
GoldLink and Open Mike Eagle erected memorials to the erased cultures, and cribs, of their upbringing. Jay-Z and Tyler, the Creator averted respective midlife and quarter-life crises with their most mature confessionals to date. And artists got pretty ( DAMN.) creative within those confines. While the power of playlists (and the ability to juke streaming stats with song loops) set new standards, the long-play album remained the definitive format for artists intent on making timeless creative statements. Industry hype aside, rap reflected our collective conscience, and national crisis, like never before. It's impossible to overstate how golden hip-hop shone in 2017 - the shattered Billboard records, the most-streamed genre recognition from Nielsen.
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