18. statik selektah - extended play
See, this is the type of project you call flawless. It’s hard to grab any truly great album and call it flawless, because there’s always just one verse that’s missing or one punchline too much or one dramatic instrumental interlude that should have been trashed. But Extended Play, the most recent and most accomplished studio album from Bostonian producer Statik Selektah, doesn’t have such artistic concerns. Statik puts together the ‘90s East Coast boom-bap homages, and turns it over to some of the underground’s most accomplished rappers. You’ve got Pain in da Ass reprising his Goodfellas-interpolation for the intro to the album, Statik crafting a wailing, crashing scape for Hit-Boy to kick a career-making verse in front of the mic, and Prodigy topping his entire album with one song. Mac Miller trading bars more than capably with Sean Price, Mike Posner lending his scratchy soul for the hook between Action Bronson and Joey Bada$$, and Reks snagging and recontextualizing Common’s famous lines for “The Light” as the hook for “My Hoe”. It’s hard to say that stacking rappers this talented is really taking away from anything - would this album really benefit from less guest appearances, when it’s a “fuck it all” maximalist celebration of the East Coast circa 1995? It’s infectious and impossible not to be engaged in. How can you not love listening to an eighteen-track barrage of impeccable scratch hooks (Statik might be the producer most poised to take up Premo’s art if he ever hangs up his MPC) and slick verses? Not a falter.
18. flatbush zombies - “bliss (prod. erick arc elliott)”
I won’t present myself as a huge fan of the Flatbush Zombies – I’m of the opinion that they’re a flawed group that relies too much on hating things as opposed to digging a little deeper into that emotion, and that attitude gets grating over nineteen-track projects. But in one song doses, like the detached, spacy, unnerving “Bliss”, it’s capable of hitting all the right notes. What other group would be able to just devolve into a chant of “fuck"s mid-song without it being a gimmick? Maybe it’s not totally genuine, but the one hundred and thirty-three fucks that Juice, Meechy, and Erick Arc Elliott give us don’t read as weak. When it’s not in the context of eighteen other tracks devoted to essentially identical topics of hatred, it’s dulled. But as a standalone mantra, it’s just a collection of furious flip-offs at various aspects of the system – a generic phrase, but it’s hard to group the things in this song together any other way. It’s just one massive "fuck you”, and it’s a better musical expression of fury than any other song in hip-hop this year.