![]() ![]() On Wings, a spacious neo-soul slow burner punctuated by the occasional sigh of a violin, Miller’s sung hook – “These are my wings” – feels all the more vast in its understatement. Gentle orchestral arrangements occasionally forgo percussion, as on the swelling opener, Come Back to Earth, on which Miller elaborates on the album title: “I was drowning, now I’m swimming.” Those six words gesture towards an entire story, and Miller’s writing is at its best in this simple, suggestive mode. Swimming, as a whole, drifts by at the same leisurely pace – it is a patient record in sound and concept. ![]() “Plus I know it’s a beautiful feeling, in oblivion.” He pulls at the word “oblivion” like chewing gum. But halfway through, the beat switches to woozy space-funk, and light peeks through the clouds: “I got all the time in the world,” he proclaims. On the lead single, Self Care, co-written by Dev Hynes of Blood Orange, Miller’s loping sing-song sounds weary and unconvinced as he croaks, “Hell yeah, we gonna be all right” over watercolour synth washes. And, mostly, Miller seems fine with that. Instead, it embraces the possibility that he’ll never have it all figured out. His fifth official album is an ambling 13-song journey towards self-acceptance, one that does not end in triumph. Where The Divine Feminine probed the spaces between people, Swimming focuses on Miller. Swimming seems informed by a similar sentiment. He had never sounded more at ease with his place in the world – but, as he rapped a couple of years earlier, “the good times can be a trap”. He sang as much as he rapped on The Divine Feminine (2016), an intoxicating exploration of the ways we are transformed by love. His rhymes got tighter and the beats trippier, often under his production alias, Larry Fisherman. His marked creative improvement since then may have demonstrated an ability to learn from criticism, or maybe he just grew up regardless, over the past five years, Miller’s music has become exponentially better, not to mention weirder. Miller’s narratives didn’t venture far beyond the realm of dorm parties, and his fairly pejorative “frat rap” designation spoke not only to the demographics of his fanbase, but also to a much broader shift in hip-hop’s audience. Clearly, popularity wasn’t a problem for the Pittsburgh native, but acclaim was a different story. ![]() Before he had turned 20, his first album, Blue Slide Park (2011), became the first independently distributed debut to top the Billboard charts since 1995. It is not hard to imagine why Miller was in dire need of a reality check. To a fan coming up in the era of Cardi or Tyler or Polo G or Playboi Carti, the golden age is now.‘I got all the time in the world’ … Mac Miller One of the incredible things about hip-hop is that it evolves and expands faster than any other genre in music history. ![]() to Houston to Chicago, and beyond.Īs we dug and listened, we found ourselves a little less swayed by “golden age” mystique than we might’ve been had we done this list 10 or 15 years ago. and Rakim and others, through the gangsta era, the rise of the South, the ascendance of larger-than-life aughts superstars like Jay-Z and Kanye West and Nicki Minaj, and on and on into more recent moments like blog-rap, emo-rap, and drill, from New York to L.A. The result was a list that touches on every important moment in the genre’s evolution - from compilations that honor the music’s paleo old-school days, to its artistic flourishing in the late Eighties and early Nineties with Public Enemy, De La Soul, Eric B. When confronted with a choice between the third (or fourth or fifth) record by a classic artist (Outkast, for instance, or A Tribe Called Quest) and an album from an artist who would make the list more interesting (The Jacka or Saba or Camp Lo), we tended to go with the latter option. Relatedly, a list of hip-hop-adjacent albums from the worlds of dancehall or reggaeton or grime would be fun and fascinating, and something for us to revisit down the road. That’s one reason we limited our scope to English language hip-hop. But the history of rap LPs is so rich and varied, we were forced to make some painful choices - there are so many iconic artists with deep catalogs, so many constantly evolving sounds and regional scenes. Two hundred seems like an almost luxuriantly expansive number when you’re making an albums list, and in any other genre, maybe it would be. ![]()
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