Looking back on 2013 I’ve realized that it was a weaker year for Hip-hop than 2012. Good Kid M.A.A.D. City, Skelethon, Blue Chips, The money store, Cancer for cure, and R.A.P. Music were all released last year. Perhaps that just points to 2012 being exceptionally strong but as for 2013 I can only really name around four or five full releases that truly rose above for me. Still, it doesn’t mean that 2013 didn’t have a load of great songs, a mixed-bag sort of year leads to some very strange and intriguing singles if not fully fleshed out records. This trend is actually exemplified by the number one song on my list. If I wanted to cheat I would simply put Pusha’s “King Push” “Numbers on the board” and “Nostalgia” all tied at number one. My name is my name had hip-hop’s three best singles but the rest of the album couldn’t hold up to that incredibly high standard.
Remixes flourished this year, Rustie making Pusha T’s “Trouble on my mind” a stomping funk monster, Eprom turned Kendrick’s city into a mad house made of video game enemies, and the absurdly named youtuber xX420QuickScopeXx mashed Death Grip’s most brutal song with Suicideyear’s most tranquil beats. One of instrumental hip-hop’s up and coming groups quit this year, but not before delivering “ACRYLICS” at the beginning of the year and signaling a wave of strange instrumentals that ranged from the bottle clanking bounce of “Infinite Daps” to Cocaine Richard’s Hunter S. Thompson fantasies. In the end the songs that truly stuck out to me this year were the darkest. “TV on ten” had the verse of the year with Aesop describing, in terrifying detail, an airplane crash with no survivors, GDP’s “Placeholder” was so deeply personal it became stepped in sadness, and Mick Jenkins’ biblically righteous rage against gang violence and rappers that promote it rode Billy Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” into fantastically dark waters. Here’s hoping 2014 has just as many eccentric singles but stronger albums.
20. ACRYLICS-TNGHT
19. Whatever I want (Fuck who’s watching)- Death Grips
18. Trouble on my mind remix- Rustie
17. Cocaine Richards – Lotusball
16. M.A.A.D. city remix- Eprom
15. Juice- Chance the rapper
14. Killer Tofu - OverDoz.
13. CCCXXV + Takyon Suicideyear + Death Grips- xX420QuickScopeXx
12. Get it- Run the jewels
11. 3005- Childish Gambino
10. Infinite daps- Baauer & RL Grime
9. Set the Scene ft. Skyzoo & Substantial- P.R
8. Black Skinhead remix- Flying Lotus & Thundercat
7. Like water- PRO ERA
6. Placeholder- GDP
5. TV on ten- The uncluded
4. Knights- Earl Sweatshirt
3. Keep it coochie!- Cakes Da Killah
2. Martyrs- Mick Jenkins
1. Numbers on the board - Pusha T
"How could you relate when you ain’t never been great?"
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