Over the last twenty days of December (and obviously 2013), I’ll be writing about my favorite twenty albums and songs of the year, one a day. Not best. Not most influential. Not most likely to land on a Complex slideshow. Just my favorite, ranked in order.
12. roc marciano – the pimpire strikes back
In an industry that’s increasingly leaning towards style over talent and “indelible” over “solid”, there’s something to be said for an artist like Roc Marciano who clearly cares a lot more about how many compound rhymes he can jam into a rhyme than how many radio plays he gets. It’s like “fuck you, pay me” without the money. His rhyming is dense, cerebral material, polishing his gangster narratives into a slick sheen. Longevity in hip-hop seems more and more like it rotates around instant recognition, but Roc’s taken an entirely different path from some of his peers to equal impact. He’s stretching lyricism to its very edges by chopping bars up into four or five rapid-fire non sequitor rhymes rather than trying to jam in meanings. What does that mean for his music? It means that he’s creating some of the most powerful images in hip-hop without ever directly telling you anything. The subtlety of that approach alone is applaudable in a time when the route to impact increasingly seems to be leading artists to brute force, but it’s even more impressive given that Roc’s verbal images are often so unforgettable. On “Doesn’t Last”: “Used to book niggas for chains and leathers/Cook ‘caine, now I grab the wood-grain in the seven.” If Marci Beaucoup was his production album, Pimpire is the project where he’s really flexing his chops lyrically. Rest assured, it shows.
12. mac miller – “the star room (prod. randomblackdude)”
Clearly Mac Miller didn’t pay attention in high school English class, because he stuck the thesis of his album right at the top, murmuring, “Can’t decide if you like all the fame/Three years ago to now, it’s just not the same/I’m looking my window ashing on the pane/Shit, wonder if I lost my way.” The tumbling, meandering psychedelics of “The Star Room” couldn’t be a more perfect encapsulation of Mac Miller’s reinvention as a rapper. The type of fame Mac’s enjoyed up until this point has to be an uncomfortable one, where you know you’re divisive by your very nature and you slide right into a racial and generational demographic split. So to see him bust out of the gates of his album with a song like this, where he’s baring himself (racial problems, parental splits, major label futures, his hometown, selling out, and drugs) to a listener base that’s primarily composed of white teenage girls – that’s ballsy. But not only is it ballsy from the Pittsburgh boy, it’s just a simply excellent rap song. It’s hardly efficient in gunning down Mac’s demons, but his newfound ability (seriously, what has he been doing the last few years) to draw drugged-out snapshots and scenarios is what’s suddenly made him such a compelling artist to listen to. Listening to Mac’s music has been a tedious exercise since 2010, but it’s hard now not to get dragged along by the current here.