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.
14. boldy james & the alchemist - m.1.c.s.: my 1st chemistry set
Boldy James’ got the Freddie Gibbs type of aura, where you wouldn’t doubt it if he told you that he jumped straight from firing gats into recording one of his songs. Alc’s the perfect person to provide background music for Boldy’s thugging exploits, really, even more so than Boldy himself. Every gangsta rapper could use some trademark Alchemist gloom and doom, yeah, but Alc has a knack for unsettling, bottomless beats that feel like they’re pulling the carpet out from under you. There are tons of buzz-words to fling around when talking about an artist as vividly outlined as Boldy –“genuine”, “candid”, “authentic” – but they’re all basically different ways of saying that Boldy’s possibly the most believable rapper in his subgenre. He’s assigning his fingers roles for pulling his gun’s trigger on “Bold”, and on “Moochie”, he’s rehauling Big L‘s “Ebonics” for his own Detroit slang purposes, he’s grilling you asking if you’d be ready to be put on the hot stove by a fed’s investigation. Gibbs is just a little too slick in his delivery, Roc Marciano’s narratives just a little too magnetic. Boldy is just rapping, letting his drawl drop off Alc’s drums for a sec before pulling it back, ceding the stage for his cohorts to grab the spotlight. It’s tough to even splice out lyrics for highlight purposes; it’s just a stream of endless quotables. There’s nothing really clever here, because half of the time it’s like a documentary. Alc’s vinyl scratch and frenzied vocal samples hidden behind snares and hi-hats just found their soulmate.
14. statik selektah - “bird’s eye view feat. joey bada$$, raekwon & black thought (prod. statik selektah)”
It’s sad that the best song on one of the year’s better albums dropped a few months before it hit stores, but when it’s the perfect microcosm for an entire project’s aesthetic and appeal, no complaints here. Statik’s really just doing what he does best, laying down a red carpet of trembling pitched-up choirs and speaker-shaking drum/snare flickers and an impeccably executed set of scratches at the end for some of the best East Coast rappers alive to do their thing on. Really, there’s no wrong step being taken here: the beat’s opulent, interlacing samples and drums and pianos and background synths and what sounds like a dozen different melodies across the song’s back (even the little pop to drop the beat, or the way the song zips to a silent close). And the verses? The verses. Raekwon and Joey Bada$$ both hand in excellent turns, but the real highlight is Black Thought, who cuts off Joey to spit one of his best verses ever and probably the year’s best. It’s a master class in memorable expressions (“my sonogram was an image of gun in the womb”), slick gloats (“reminiscing to when we was all out monsters, on/our Sierra Leone, reigning tyranny”), and follow-my-thoughts, shotgun rhyme strings (“the most notorious/Poet Laureate/Whole story is glorious/stoic warriors”). He might be a “triple OG” with a “worn-out conscience”, but the way he ripped off this 32 like he was twenty again sure doesn’t show it.