Top 11 Hip-Hop Releases of 2009

Features, The Decade in Music '00-'09 • Thursday November 26th, 2009 • 12:00 am

2009 was a momentous year for hip-hop heavyweights and newcomers alike. The comeback album dominated, as many veterans stepped back into the game with varying results. These giants’ influence loomed large, their shadows spawning new cohorts of talent in a kind of musical cytogenesis.

Sure, there was the usual gaggle of artists and critics grousing about the genre’s death, hastened by slick technologies like Auto Tune and beats more fit for club consumption than stereo blasting. They were obviously listening to the wrong records. Hip-hop is alive and well, its soul unshakably strong even as the technologies that surround it evolve, split, and recombine to form new constellations of sound.

2009’s best releases maintained the genre’s raw, lyric-driven core, but many traveled in new directions with innovative wordplay, interesting sonic explorations, and a sense of creative fearlessness defying narrow stylistic categories. Below is a countdown of the eleven strongest releases of the year: hip-hop eulogists, take note.

1. Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Part II (EMI, September 8, 2009)
Eleven years after releasing Cuban Linx I, Raekwon returns to show a younger generation how it’s done. The Wu-Tang veteran’s long anticipated sequel is crammed with noirish tableaus spit in a machine-gun blitz of sonic pictures and strange metaphors. Inimical to that braggadocio strain of hip-hop trumpeting the rewards of hustling, Raekwon offers a starkly real depiction of street life: one that is as violent, grimy, unrelenting, and merciless as his flow. Backed by eerie samples that loop around sinister beats, Cuban Linx II is a blistering reassertion of Raekwon’s relevance to modern hip-hop, and the best hip-hop album of the year.

2. Royce da 5’9”, Street Hop (One Records, October 6, 2009)
This vicious release reveals Royce’s roots in battle rap, as it begins with a savage attack on wanna-be hustlers and only escalates with relentless intensity. Vicious metaphors and brutally funny asides pile up over boom-bap beats, soulful funk samples, and cold club cuts. Royce wields his voice like a weapon, spitting sniper-precise lyrical bullets and breaking into scat-style onomatopoeia when words alone won’t do. His flow is a lightning rod, drawing energy from the beats surrounding it and crackling with electricity. The war-weathered rhymer is unmatched in sheer lyrical ferocity; his hunger and cunning ensure that Street Hop is a classic in the making.

3. DOOM, Born Like This (Lex, March 24, 2009)
After a four-year hiatus, DOOM (formerly MF DOOM) returns with his singular brand of intellectual-street-strange wordplay. His breathless stream of consciousness flow draws disparate associations from Bukowski to ball skin, stitching together strange objects into a world of fantasy scaffolded by intricate semantic structures. With scalpel-like precision, DOOM wields internal rhymes, double meanings, and odd metaphors over interesting beats that ultimately take a back seat to his astounding lyrical prowess. Unrivaled by anything else this year in terms of sheer linguistic complexity, Born Like This also deserves major props as the only album in the history of hip-hop that integrates the word electroencephalograph into a rhyme — without even missing a beat.

4. Brother Ali, Us (Rhymesayers, September 22, 2009)
Brother Ali’s fourth release condenses a lifetime’s worth of emotion into 16 tracks, not by way of sweet R&B hooks or sentimental melodies, but with raw feeling that crackles through the wordsmith’s soulful voice as he addresses intimately personal topics. This sense of psychic nakedness runs through pensive narratives of love and loss and street banger and battle rap tracks alike but never hinders Ali’s lyricism. His delivery is urgent, his rhymes savage, and his flow breakneck. The album draws heavily from gospel and blues, as Ali delivers keep-your-head-up-style sermons over twangy guitar licks and choral interjections with the zeal of a hip-hop preacher. For its passion, stylistic versatility, and unwavering consistency, Us deserves a place towards the top.

5. K’naan, Troubadour (A&M/Octone, February 24, 2009)
The Somalian-born MC’s sophomore release integrates a tangle of global influences from indie rock to Ethio-jazz. Each song is a microcosm of myriad styles artfully blended and thickly textured with lush layers of accompaniment. The result is a sound that’s hard to classify within the existing rubric of musical genres. Like he melds styles, K’naan seamlessly integrates broad pop culture references with mentions of Kalishnikovs, refugees, pirates, and warlords, blithely moving between worlds. Despite the sometimes-crowded production, K’naan never allows his message to be obscured: his nasal cadence escalates into hoarse howls and ebbs into soft laments as he recounts the troubles of his childhood and country. This delicate balance of sonic interest and lyrical impact make Troubadour a frontrunner in this year’s pack of hip-hop releases.

6. Kid Cudi, Man on the Moon: The End of Day (Motown, September 15, 2009)
Concept albums are rare in hip-hop, but the genre-blurring Kid Cudi manages to pull off the task with aplomb on his first full-length release. Man on the Moon draws the listener deep into Cudi’s thoughts, tracing the journey of his consciousness from sundown to sunrise. In a soft monotone that slides easily from speaking to song, Cudi articulates a sense of alienation vis-à-vis hip-hop, mass culture, and life in general over languorous, Sudafed-soaked melodies and bleak beats punctuated with distorted guitar riffs and melancholy orchestral hums. He imagines space as a literal and figurative locus of artistic production free from judgment, but realizes that this freedom ultimately results in loneliness. It’s the classic paradox of the artist misunderstood, told from a fresh point of view. Cudi’s combination of poignant vulnerability and chilly, spaced-out beats make the release a standout.
7. Mos Def, The Ecstatic (Downtown, June 9, 2009)
The Ecstatic reasserts Mos Def as a lyricist, chameleon-like in his ability to adapt his flow to any mood and artfully stitch together an eccentric collection of tracks from a variety of talented producers. Styling himself as a hip-hop prophet come to rebuke a younger generation of MCs, Mos Def delivers his unique brand of street poetics over a relentless procession of innovative beats, from electro hand-claps to Middle Eastern-flavored acid rock. This dense 16 track collection is lyrically and musically one of the most interesting and multi-textured releases of the year.

8. J Dilla, Jay Stay Paid (Nature Sounds, June 2, 2009)
Posthumous albums are often shaky territory, limited by the finite amount of available material. However, the cohesiveness of Jay Stay Paid, released three years after the death of superproducer J Dilla, defies these characterizations. Produced by J’s mother, Maureen “Ma Dukes” Yancey, the album is an artful sonic exploration of Dilla’s catalogue led by the legendary Pete Rock. Bits of Detroit house, old-school boom-bap beats, sultry Motown-inflected samples, bombastic horn interludes, and spidery synthesizer melodies are adroitly manipulated into a singular sound.

9. Q-Tip, Kamaal the Abstract (Battery, September 15, 2009)
Abstract is certainly an appropriate adjective for this second solo album from former Tribe Called Quest member Q-Tip. Tracks are unfettered experiments as slow fragments of rhyme joust with lush jazz instrumentals and sharp guitar riffs. Vocals weave around and through instruments rather than laying on top of them. Former Miles Davis sidemen Gary Thomas and Kenny Garrett provide accompaniment ranging from brash saxophone and electric piano blasts to wandering flute solos. Originally recorded in 2001 and set for a 2002 release date, the album still manages to come off as utterly futuristic eight years later.

10. Mr. Lif, I Heard It Today (Bloodbot Tactical Enterprises, April 21, 2009)
I Heard It Today is a loosely-drawn concept album that takes aim at the American government/media/law enforcement machine, using songs as episodic forums to react to unfolding societal problems. Mr. Lif mixes social consciousness with interesting production, as ethereal space beats, bubbling percussion, and soulful funk trills mingle with laments about war, police brutality, health care, and the mortgage crisis. One track even uses newsreel interview excerpts of citizens distressing over their lost homes in lieu of samples. The result is one of immediacy, both in style and lyrical content, a document that uniquely reflects the social and musical conditions of the past year.

11. Jay-Z, The Blueprint 3 (Roc Nation, September 8, 2009)
The long-awaited Blueprint 3 is calculated and adroit, manipulating sounds into head-nodding hooks that bury deep in the listener’s brain. Jay-Z continues to be one of the smoothest, most nonchalantly stylish MCs in the game and he’s backed by smart, sweeping production that ranges from the sentimentally orchestral to the coolly electronic. Jay’s topic matter may be somewhat limited, spanning his love of New York, his trend-setting lifestyle, and little else. Still, the way in which he rhymes about these topics – and above, below, and around them — ensures a spot for this album in the top.

Tagged as: 2009 Year End

By Alex Wigglesworth

blog comments powered by Disqus

“2009’s best releases maintained the genre’s raw, lyric-driven core, but many traveled in new directions with innovative wordplay, interesting sonic explorations, and a sense of creative fearlessness defying narrow stylistic categories.”